Leonardo Da Vinci – Featured Artist
I’m hoping for something big. I’ve always felt something great were going to happen. A hidden suspicion perhaps, subsequently to some sort of global withdrawal—though I can’t tell the difference between my sense of fantasy and reality most times. And in the context of being human, I’m not sure where I stand. I suppose it doesn’t matter either way. Though the thought sends me back to San Diego in 2013, on University Avenue in the North Park District. I don’t know why I was there. Probably tired of producing terribly bland, uninteresting music in my shared Hillcrest apartment, and wanting to be in the sun. I love to walk, whatever city I’m in. It’s such joyous expedition. All the faces and goings and little interludes happening, all on their way to the great adventure. I somehow made my way into this metaphysical bookstore called Controversial. As I entered, I noticed smells of the typical spiritual bouquet, like candles or sage or incense, rising from the surrounding pillars. As a matter of fact, I think I was there buying sage myself. I can’t really recall. Though what I do remember was my fidgeting as I stood in line for my purchase: Tinkering on my phone, checking what’s in my pockets, gazing at the surrounding items, pretending to be patient as the store clerk transacted the person ahead of me. Waiting in line for anything has always struck a strange chord. I’m unsure what to do in those awkward in-between moments. It’s intermediary limbo—stupid little thoughts rattling around in such weird affliction.
The shopper completed his transaction and was well on his way to god knows where. I took a step forward and as I approached, the clerk was finishing up the remaining chores from his previous exchange. After closing the register, he looked up at me, paused for a moment, then sat back. He stood there, staring at my eyes in a quizzical trade, for more than an uncomfortable length. After some moments waiting for him to speak, he finally blurted out, “You’re the One,” as if he’d been waiting. I didn’t know to laugh or fart. I thought about the other shopper and if he were such, too. Maybe he was coming on to me. It didn’t feel that way though. So I just stood there. I didn’t say anything. How do you respond to something like that. He continued emphatically on his assumption, though I can’t be sure what was said after that.
I guess for a small gray moment, to be completely honest, in all my bewildering and fiction, I wished his accusations had some merit. We both knew what he meant: Humanities grace. A relic of truth. A spiritual leader. A neophyte prophet or savior—as skewed as one could be in a century as this. Someone to realign global parameters, what has almost reached complete diameter in suffering. For a moment, a sterling gay moment, I felt like Neo in pre-Matrix vacuity. What a terribly wonderful fantasy! I might as well be a leprechaun or a marshmallow, or a blade of grass for that matter. Yeah, if only he were right…
But he was not. What a dopey thing to say. Even the Matrix was just a hologram of organized, sophisticated animals… simply the imagination of less sophisticated animals. To think even Jesus or Muhammad or the Elephant Man—for that much blood and that much light. There is no relevant story, to any of this. My relevant story died with my nativity, and that’s my imagination of what relevancy means, and God, and all that horseplay. We are purely evaporative and must tend to that which forms our own light. Simplicity is means to new life, and new life is eternal, constantly in reformation of what was. And what was, as regarding what is, so long as it’s understood was is an overlapping layer from the principle is, can be reconciled in the affinity of belief. A belief that goes beyond the mind in the chaos before us, and the rejuvenation after, as once again, understood within the same principle is, as therefore now or you, or existing within no expansion of time. That which misplaces our ephemeral nature, opposing conceptions of dependency and likeness to the surrounding source, is the entity among us that portrays dialect of dual realities, assuming said source exists in the motive thought of time and autonomy—and thereout.
I am the One(?) For anyone to think such of incarnation, in my dearest opinion, is the throttle why we incline such preliminary idiocy to full fruition and fall madly into the substrata of literality in fiction. The true evolution of being is not in thinking as such (of this So-Called) or that there is such a Thing, cause we all might as well be. It’s in believing and knowing you… Are Not.
Should we go against the stream to unmask vanities reprieve… we shall then rejoice—for that of character disillusionment and devolution in the status quo zeitgeist shall find its radical counterpart, withered in the remark of its own effigy. Ideas as that (So-Called, Thing) are created with intentions of rejoice, but divulge the inherencies of prolonging separation. Anyone, I think, with a substantive heart, desires various pedals of rostrum to exhibit their self-proclaim within humanity. Whether in light or turned dark, it’s spoken by nature.
We’ve warred with billions of swimming insolents to set foot and populate… and we won! We were given the opportunity to experience human life. And in this clerk’s parable of secular Oneness, One could uncover Earth’s wormhole and impregnate the universe. Perhaps, I’m painting a black and white picture, but even still, there was a significant leap over the line of reality into fiction. I think that stranded stretch of vacancy one could call boredom or exhausted spirituality or verbatim religion or what have you.
This, of our recurring vat; a sector of predetermination; a nucleus of extraction… this of Ours: To be loved and praised, or abominably hated in immaculate sociopathic purity, for the entire span of the human race, as short or long as it persists, for no partaking of egotism but reciprocation of devout love for the omnipresent being as one. The True Thing, withstanding. And the incarnate, as assumed, the one of name, placard beyond the vastness in the horizon, throughout the adverse life unto the misery of collective abasement, then, throughout the ages, lay corpse in petrified wax. And the sudden charisma of which, reborn into divinity as a symbol of… the great lover of the human spirit and the great friend of the human being. To know it was not only about spirit, or self-preservation, or enlightenment—for that which led us to pureness and joy, led us to incompleteness of being—for the path of each is the path of every. But One was never in humility to the remainder, for the relationship of host-self is purely temporary and deducted in common reasoning throughout the span of infinite life, given that infinite life, in its individualism, does not become wholly connected upon passing between lives, then dissemble, once again, into a veil of dissimilar spiritual attribute, not retaining its unique identity pertaining to this said lineage of life. All of such, only relevant to separations of existence based solely on experiential value of nowness… the prophets are decided, therefore exist, as do other inventions of Man.
Enlightenment has no bearing or name, in its bruised ankles and dehydrated postures and starved mouths, to the grace of family and adolescence. And those of which, separating the two, know not of multiplicit joy or recreation in practice. It has been decided—we need one another, as not the fall to One individual or Name or Symbol, to find meaning within ourselves, but in the framed context of inseparation and the recumbency of a many fallen sear… and vice versa, gliding between moments at turn. We need each other, we always have. We always will. And in the great spiritual dynasty, there is none forsaken or divided amongst us. There is only rejoice. That which tends no practice needs no practice; for practice must maintain balance in the preservation of corporeal hierarchy.
This instance with the bookstore clerk happened five years ago. And the world now— unless you’ve joined the ticket—has proven its foresight and nucleation. And if I were being honest, in all my predispositions, I would give a sliver of my true faith to say I’ve anticipated something great in my life. Something big. But let’s just imagine for a moment. Let us imagine a life of no prior dependencies or lechery, no digression of intoxication or inconsequential genocides, and in the pristine life, One or I or You made it out clean and honest, in all our greatest incorruptions. Let us pretend what is happening around us is the truth, and we are both—in the apartheid of our mind—the greatest and worst selves of ultimately, the same experience. Then what(?)
I’ve parted astride, equal behalves, on devil and light. Perhaps, in such an upside-down world, I am the drunk and drugged prophet. But no, in my fantasy or his, I have more in common with the neighborhood bum. I’m no prophet, no savior. Nothing even remotely close. One could argue I’m an artist trying to save myself, and barely doing that at best. That’s as much as one could say, I suppose. Beyond that, nothing. I am just here. And yes, something great has already happened in my life. Something big. And that something was you.
by LORIN DREXLER
L e o n a r d o d a V i n c i
(15 April, 1452 — 2 May, 1519)
was an Italian Renaissance polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter, and tank, he epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.
Many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the “Universal Genius” or “Renaissance Man”, an individual of “unquenchable curiosity” and “feverishly inventive imagination”, and he is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and “his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote”. Marco Rosci notes that while there is much speculation regarding his life and personality, his view of the world was logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unorthodox for his time.
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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