Mantas Likas – Featured Artist
As much as I’d like to rant and further service the surface tension of American Life and Human Life and enliven the depressed megalomaniacal raves bolstering every common corner, I’m going to stand beside and observe the collective subconscious or unconscious or what have you. For all else, it’s terrifically uninspiring or overly inspiring, depending how you take it. Either way, it lacks a particular attribute of beauty. There is no pertaining truth, more a rampant untruth. No creative impulse. It’s a series of blurbs and blips, a static lovesickness, the reprimand of Cephissus and the pool image before his son, dominated by a greater sequence of plutocratic referentials. We are not the reserve of a few simple-minded blockheads and their supposition to the lowest common denominator, but the summation of each and every. The truth is we could never exist without one another. If you pollute the pool in which we swim, we all suffer. There is no you beside itself. No me. There is only that which reflects its counterpart.
What then could be desired… the aspiration to invent! Beautifully and mad, with the fervency of human spirit and heart of the great lost soul. What is it I want, besides the pouring of my cinders over the heart of the firmament? I want to scream at the people, and kiss them, and watch them burn in the night. I want to be of service. I want to fight by not fighting. I want peace. I want equality. I want to love and feel the love. I want to feel as if feeling were important again… I want a world that values community, not individuality. One where intellect is favored and understood, not belittled. One deliberating to serve the people, not catered to the demands enamored by severance. I want to live in a world where people value each other rather than feel threatened by them; where people strive to gain more by giving more to their stranger, extended circles, as opposed to only widening the expanse of their smaller, more immediate ones. I want a world where people understand and feel, “We are family and we are in this together.” I want a world that values humanity more than religion, love more than finance, equality more than hate, nature more than resource. A world that values raising children to be decent, kind, and giving, not egocentric and uncharitable. A world that has respect for animals more than the driving force of the abattoir that confines us to our cancer… perhaps… maybe… I speak of another world.
Fuck, I did it anyway! I can’t help but mumble this trash! In these moments the nihilist incentive seems plausible. Though between you and me (and the rest of the world I suppose), I’m not hopeless. But all hands on every dial, significant change is, absolutely, matter-of-factly, insanely, out of our hands. I’m speaking to a cataclysm no one truly wants, but deeply, everyone knows is an impending eventuality. Life cannot continue this way. If there’s anything we’ve learned in foresight of invariable simplicity, it’s cause and effect. This is an event we’ve secretly been pursuing in our metaphysicalities; in our thoughts. It’s a collective scar tissue we’ve draped over the pulsing heart of humanity, as well as everything subjugated in consequence. We are the new dinosaurs, strapped with missiles on each shoulder, awaiting further command. Lo and behold, the greater adversary is the incessant dialog belaboring within, the echoing voice in the temple of the dog, silently driving the world into thunder. And if you have chosen to allow this voice to carry you into the allergic consultation of hate, know, there is nothing you could possibly hate more than yourself.
Ok, please, no more! I’m done… I mean it! … I approach the banister… I’m standing at the edge of the freakshow watching the creatures grow more absurd, believing more and more it is them bestowing this hidden jewel, alleviating pressures beset upon humanity and humanity’s constant will to extend its survival (and not of its intent for which). Or perhaps the more relevant delegate—the vehicle of the present-day mathematic and its perpetuating, impenetrable force, growing new arms and furthering the branched crack in an already fractured ship.
Ok, now that I have said it, what does it mean? To me, it’s simple (though infinitely difficult), the answer is… love. Beautifully and mad, like a thousand horses racing under the fire of the sky to meet the hand of God. In times of need, love. In times of desperation, love. When you feel disconnected from everything… love. Love your friend and your enemy the same. Fall in love with yourself and with someone you’ve never met. I’ve been told, the truth of love holds no boundary, and though in this ideological landscape I myself am only left to words on a page and one simple feeling swimming from the window of my own personal universe, I hope one day it may transcend to an even more remarkable collective. And if this wonderful place exists only in a dream, it is in that dream I shall live out my days.
E t e r n a l S u m m e r
I am the cage.
I am the man in the cage.
I am the dust outside of the cage.
I am the bird that laughs across the yard.
I am the entire yard — grass, trees, air, more birds
… even worms.
I smile because so.
I laugh because so.
I feel nothing.
Connected.
Uncharting wind is a bucket of pigpen molasses.
The first moon is not just an evil face in the sky. It is the face
of a pigeon that understands its place in time.
Oh, how lovely the spirit may be, for when it is reborn, it shall retain its uniqueness
from the asylum of heaven.
I am the man.
I am the thought inside the man.
I am the invisible action that may occur.
I am the air, much as the thought in the space that was created before it.
I am the energy, before space, before the atom
clustering tetrahedron.
To think we must, to think we must be.
The empty widow shakes hands with the king,
then waddles off into darkness.
She converges with the blackness ahead,
and eventually, the night will swallow her
… just as she reaches her star.
Over the same sky that broke the man’s
heart, it is there he remains
trapped in eternity behind the moment of
eternal summer.
I am a fish.
I am a fish that lives in a well.
I am the well.
I am the machine that drains the well.
I am the empty space on the canvas waiting to be replenished.
I am the final gaze before enlightenment.
The moon is nowhere to be seen.
The widow has finally been swallowed by night.
The bird has buried its laughter and is now at rest.
The man has climbed from the well.
Everything is at peace.
by LORIN DREXLER
What is Gen Society?
Gen Society is an art space blog for visual art and creative writing collaborations, and other randomizations. Hosted by writer and musician, Lorin Drexler, this online venue is an expressive experience for those interested in the world of the arts. It is a literary journey through the hearts and minds of contemporary artists in practice and a reflection of those that have long passed.
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