'And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills?"
Jerusalem-William Blake
That's quite a mosaic of madness there, comprising a tapestry of transcendent terror, from the deathly pall of a blossoming mushroom cloud through Rubens beefy original sin, by way of Jattault's lord of the flies, to the gnarled toes of Grunewald's Corpus Christi and the feeding trough in Jonestown. It's all there, a visual totem that could redouble as a mood board for the nations psyche, but actually depicts all my artistic preoccupations for a year that has been creatively fulfilling and parochially foreboding.
Welcome relief then, as I prepare myself to return to Old Blighty for the holidays.
Of the many gifts my life has been blessed with this year, the greatest of them all will be meeting my beautiful grandson -Atticus for the first time. Because any legacy I could hope to leave, shrinks in the great shadow of that one.
As it should.
Which just leaves me with the wish that your Solstice be filled to the brim with love and libation, and the hope that along with prosperity and health, the coming year brings lucidity and accord.
“One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness
without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it
the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels
such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely
satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
―
Émile Durkheim,
Suicide: A Study in Sociology
It
looks like I'm staring off into the abyss, pondering the muddy expanse
of the soiled nothing, but it's actually that first contemplative pause
before something happens, in a space fertile with possibility. It allows
the chance as the song by Depeche Mode said, to enjoy the silence.
As the year comes to a close, it's no accident that the piece I'm planning is about the heralding of a new dawn.
In the other spaces in between, I've been reading Chris Hedges new book-"America the farewell tour."
Distressing raw meat for a series that is peppered with ill omens
hurtling us towards the end times. Take me at my sarcastic best, when I
say that if his previous tome-"American Fascism" is a side splitter,
this one will put you on the floor.
At
any rate, the irony isn't lost, given that it arrived during a four day
power outage, while a place called Paradise burned itself out of
existence. Lest we forget the horticulture tips in response,procured
from the odious shitgibbon in chief.
The whole thing left a somber cloud that hasn't loomed as bleakly since Cormac McCarthys the Road.
In
the face of what Hedges propounds as Durkeim's anomie in real time,
it's hard to see a way forward, to not sense that all of our tomorrows
shall be a continued assault of cyclical traumas, imposed by the will of
a small dogmatic proportion of the populous, intent on nihilism,
subjugation and extinction. If my previous series-Purgatorium-was
partially informed by Artaud's essay -"Van Gogh, the man suicided by
society", then this one ascribes to a society, in essence suiciding itself.
Whatever hope then, can only come with the vast expanse of ideas, from the reflective silences pregnant with possibility.
Otherwise, the only sound left to hear will be humanities final death rattle.
.
