DAVIDGOUGHART

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Mood Board




 '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. 






Sunday, December 2, 2018

Enjoy the silence.


 “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.