°
The scapegoat is chosen, but often, out of convenience. It is the shock of pinning the tail that becomes the story, which is what allows the tragedy to continue.
The story is what is needed, not the pricking and the marking, but the gross action sates (and creates) the sordid desire.
°
“Wouldn’t you rather die on your feet, than serve on your knees?” This statement employs a type of vain morality that drives people into courageous self-sacrifice: killing themself for how others will see them. This is devoid of survival strategy and therefore (individually) quite stupid.
And yet the idea (or image) of who we are is how we want to be seen, and it so profoundly affects our species that we can override survival.
On one hand, we have the natural impulse to save our child, or any child, as the propagation of the species.
On the other, you have a system that promotes brutal heroism and prods the shivering, shamed lonely into community sacrifice. This is not the loving mother, but a hijacked urge for approval from a missing father.
°
The problem is not coming up with new ideas: there are already millions of ideas (since the dawn of time) from practical to insane that we don’t use or use horribly.
The issue for mankind is not being creative or novel, though it feels great, but rather parsing through these old ideas and staying the course.
To simplify: discipline is more valuable than creativity today.
°
We constantly seek novelty, but we hate the new.
We will claim to want new things, but only if they are slightly new, marginally better, and often with little impact on our lives.
Anything genuinely new is disruptive. We must rethink our lives and how we deal with the world.
Thus, even if it is an excellent change, such as Jesus coming to earth or marvelous life-and-labor-saving machines freeing us from work, we will hate those changes because they are too new, require too much identity, and relinquish too much agency.
Newness must come about slowly.
°
Commonly we hear: The amateur creates out of love. The professional creates for money.
This, however, is a false distinction. If the amateur loved what they did even more, they would do it for money.
If anything, the amateur overidentifies with what they create, declaring their identity as an artist, poet, or actor, while the professional considers it their job, and realize while it is what they do it is not how they identify who they are.
This is what allows the professional to continue to create, while the amateur is overly anxious and sensitive to any feedback or criticism, to the extent that they will not produce or release their productions. It is as if the amateur will lose “who they are” if this hobbyist love was taken from them, while the professional has no such illusions.
From Steven Pressfield, the war of art
°
Digital reality (if it is to thrive) requires a knot, a point of chaos, at the center, which cannot be made to make sense: it is not cartesian and, therefore, can give birth to chaos and dreams that can save a world from the mathematical impulse of control.
This allows not for linear time (once again cartesian) but circular time with variation, Aeonic or Aion time.
In this cycle we find infinity, and this singular point (the knot of chaos) reminds us of The Aleph, where we can see and comprehend everything in the universe.
However, seeing worlds within worlds, such as digital reality, reminds us of the unimaginable excesses that the brain cannot fathom or grasp, an abundance we do not have language for, and thus cannot remember. Our recall is to only see glimpses recalled hazily (dreams), and from this chaos, we begin to create.
–
–
–
°
As media and outlets multiply, there is a natural competition for attention—more bids for eyes on more content in more formats.
Art, beauty, or insight will not win, but rather the more addictive traits, such as sugar, fat, sex, death, and revenge will.
This is human (biological) nature. Bids for betterment are culturally instilled, and socially (propagandistically?) corrupted. As society devolves towards animalistic urges media frames as “living my best life” there is no applause or policing of delayed gratification… unless you surround yourself with an perversely twisted group: those who enjoy the torment of betterment and control their attention.
°
The artist comes from a mindset of plenty, while a fundamentalist sees society as a fallen place where the only path back to "the good" is through restriction.
These two viewpoints are fundamentally opposed: you cannot have fundamentalist art.
This is not to say that fundamentalists cannot be creative, but their creation is inverted into negation.
from "the war of art" by Steven Pressfield
°
You will never accomplish something big, it is too daunting Your mind will trick you out of starting.
Instead, start small. Pick up a pen and jot/scribble/doodle for 2 minutes.
This will loosen up the open self who wants to create. By feeding this creative self, and getting addicted to the good feeling. You will gradually build up to an accomplishment, note by 2-minute note, until the mass self-organizes.
Subsequently, bigger things are less daunting: they simply come out of lots of small things.
°
One similarity between the techno-libertarian manifest destiny of futurism and the populist backlash of Trump or Brexit is a bluntness about the bottom line of “utility.”
Art and its complex, tangled, and soft messaging -its layered density, subtlety, and non-productive pursuits- is a threat. The effort to unpack or ascertain its message is inverse to its bottom-line value: the more baffling, the less quickly capitalized or commodified.
Good art looks to reject easy commodification, or quick absorption, containing its incompatible antinomies within itself. Its greatness can only be realized over broad swaths of time.
The knee-jerk reaction points to the high sales value of good art: good art has been successfully commodified, and the price inflated through investment portfolios. However, that is the art of economics glomming onto something alien to it’s nature.
Art commodified is a malformed conflation: a disfigurement warping art into a shape recognized as the discourse of dollars. It is not that the art does not still carry its message, but cloaked and hunchbacked with economic weight, it has been Quasimodo-ed and requires a genuine heart to see past its ugly silhouette.
