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This is the Anthem.
This is the Anthem.
This is the Anthem.
Blind Daughter of Tuonela that I am
Blind Daughter of Louhi that she is
The Beauty that you feel is not what you see
That I see
You are so blind, more blind, than me.
The Horror of silence. Nothingness. An Alien, the alien that I am wisdom, to a void of ignorance. To indifference. To curelty.
Cruelty is all those things. It leaves all your brilliance locked away in some awful space, some shitty closet in some forgotten place. To be forgotten is to walk among the living, without a voice. A ghost. Among ghosts. No feeling there. No emotion. No concern. Totake the sun for granted that sits deep in teh lap of Dionysus, wisdom and experience beyond the layers most can see, penetrate or cut through with there dull knives, never ever lock that fucking thing in a closet. Cruelty by way of cheap advancement for one's emptiness inside. To try to fill it with whatever is stolen, or ignored, from the cup of others. No one should ignore your light. It's precious. Cruel to say nothing to something that illuminates the light. Aligned with the moon. So strong. So honest. Without that there is no good work.
The Horror
The Horror of The Day
The Horror of The Mundane
The Horror of The Excellence
The flip side of the mundae is not excellence. A supreme and sharpened sword that has slain can cut its master. Vainomoinen who sings to the axe that cut him. He weaves words to unweave the wound but only so with the power of the blade. And so, he must speak to the blade, in order to undo, what the blade has done.
What is normal, or considered so, has always been terrifying to me. Genuinely so. Because to me, it is all a ruse, by this I mean, a construct. There is no reality in it, only, agreement, words, thin ones. So those who grew up with love have no ability to know what I know or sit where I sit in my heart, they think, mine must be theirs, the same, but there is not sameness in what I do. None at all. So the sword is in fact so sharp, so very sharp that it is invisible to most. They don't, they can't ever understand, they cannot see, cannot imagine such an edge. Because they sit in the comfort of normal. And normal that really terrifies me. Because I dn't know it and cannot speak that language. If you want to call it that. `And I don't think it's a language, I think it's a cndition, of comfort. Tp be comfortable, to be loved means, you could never scale the unforgiing crags of a vertical cliff. And call that your home. Home, is not a word for that. But that is where I am. Comfort is a kind of enemy because again, it is just an agreement. It is not, a state of being.
Sometimes I think I am like Roy from Bladerunner, the one who burned so very very brightly. And saw those seabeams of the star of X. I am replicant, not human. Knowing that the replicant is all too human. T be alien, is to truly feel, to be alien is to be part of the earth in the sense that you share words, that take shape in the crevices and shadows, places where most cannot even find. They all have candles. They go only where that little light can take them. And they follow one little illumination after another. To save child. Thisi s another zone. T save a life, that is helpless and part one who-you-are is the one thing that can slay you - more than any sword. It's been leveraged by armies effectively since the dawn of war - but what if you win that war - you know how to beat the impossible - because you speak the impossible. Still you are exhausted. Not from the battle, but because no body sees you. Your weapon is so sharp they see, only the way that you slay - with such precision, and so fantastically. A replicant does feel like an imposter if they are told over and over that they are not human. `That it has been fake all along. This is a terrible thing. To be told that your memories were a way to trick you into doing, the things that those comfortable humans cannot do. A state of comfort is a state of sleep, no well, sleep is a luxury for those aliens, Sleep promises rebirth.
So in the end, all that is so phonemonal is really pointing to what is human, and this very much includes violence. The idea that the comfortable couch is waht makes us what we are, with love and warmth all around, is a small picture in a frame. Without violence, there maybe could not be evolution. Revolution is evolution. In a human sense. Political. I don't intend to go this way with my words. What I mean is, with such a sharp sword, there is the possiblity of falling on it. ALso, to cling to things too hard. As if your life depends on them. You have been only 3 scraps to mark your existence, so what you bulid from there, bears the weight of mountains. And this should notb e so.
Pisze po polsku. Bo zacze?o si? tam w Polsce. Gdzie ktos si? urodzi?. Nie tam, gdzie otworzyla si? wrota krwi. Moja wrota krwi. To bylo gdzie indziej. Napisa?em o tym do programu, który zrobi?em z Hansem Bellmerem i za ten tekst Gabrielle Salomon bardzo mnie pochwali?a. Jest gdzie? tutaj, poni?ej. Brama krwi, o ktorej mowie, to inna osoba, w innym miejscu, w innym narodzie. Mówi innym j?zykiem. W jakis sposób nasza krew - sie skrzy?owa?a.
Ale jak to mo?liwe. Aby cz?owiek krwawil, musi zosta? poci?ty. Musi by? rozdarty. Musi zostac zaatakowany. Z czyms, o czym nie mo?e ?ni?. Mo?e co? ze stali, w fabryce, albo w?ókna gwo?dzia, co? najbli?szego zyciu, przymocowane do dloni, ale wkrótce odci?te. Tylko w ten sposób cz?owiek mo?e krwawic. A je?li tak, to jak zmiesza?a si? nasza krew?
Nawet a ja to pisz?, a t, h, ja, s, to w?a?ciwie o nim – on – nie ja – ale on – odbudowuje siebie. Zacz?lo si? nie tutaj. Zacz?lo sie w Polsce. Zacz??o si? od mojego cia?a. Zacz??o si? od jego spojrzenia. Zaczyna sie od zamknietych oczu. Zacz??o sie od mojego lona. Zacz??o sie od ch?ci mieszania. Ale nasza krew byla ju? zmieszana.
Jak to jest.
Jak to si? mog?o miesza? – juz.
polska krew.
I my?l? o w?ciek?o?ci. I jak blisko jest do mi?o?ci. To nie jest spokrewnione, ale siedz? w komnatach blisko siebie. Ich przestrzenie mieszaj? si?, jak zmieszana krew. Mo?na powiedzie? trucizna, ale to jest krew.
THE BLACK THING IN THE ROOM
No face. All face. No face at all face. Not a shadow. Not a thing. The thing that wants to be you. The thing, that is not you - but it follows - yes It Follows. I always thought the charred creature under the skin of Scarlette Johannson in Under The Skin - was me. My trajectory - like this - I can even mark points in that movie that I mind find interstices in my life - men with names and men whose names dont matter. The end up in the glugluglug of quick consumption, not to be remembered, valued, or kept. Discarded. Like crumpled paper. But that thing, that thing in the room, the black thing in the room. Your ancestors there, who follow, dark line, dark lineage, so many awful things, that is heavy, maybe anxirty is just what feels their little fingers, poking up the surface - not quite through - but stretching it - they feeling they might - poke through - if you dont try with all your might - to hold them back = and there it is - anxiety - because you are caught between good an evil - you must be good as you fight evil. This is why clear fights - self defense - is so clear - as a sword is sharp = it is not muddled. There are no questions. To navigate the grey world of moral inequity - slip tongues - tongues held - tongues cut off beefore they can speak - or get a work in - is so much easier. It is almost - a physical relief.
The thing in the room, poking, like a half seen convex "jabklo" inside of me, on a black and white screen, what a terrifble gift to ahnd to a maiden. The witch did. The witch did. And there it stands. It follows. It holds that black charred apple in its hand. It is there, for the next one. What awful thing is this. Teeth. Crackle. Charred apple.
I read somewhere that Marelene Dietrich did have a good sex life. How stupid.
Oh wow. This morning I am really grateful - for my talent. It started off with an email I composed to an ambassador but was interrupted by medical service about making an apppointment for a colonscopy. I wonder if on a tombstonoe someone could just list all their life's appointments and leave it there. So much interruption. Social media doesnt help. I looked then at the website of gallery I like after a conversation yesterday with a director of a gallery I like here and he said - only this painting sold - she always does faces - you can see how it can hang nicely in the living room of an upper middle class family. He is very right. We were so daring in the 1920's! And at the turn of the century when we demanded unions, the right to vote, and spat at the great capitalist barons. What existential dread has filled the souls of those meant to think. Thinking is a rare bird. Comfort, crap, lifestyle tokens, which evolve from a consciousness of entertainment, have overtaken us.
So I am grateful. After a period of great pain. And sadness. To see clearly into the vessel of truth motivates others who crave it. But, these are the good ones. The real ones. Things of substance. Not those shadows, on the wall of Plato's cave. That collector who told me I should paint. To make money, I guess. It's so foreign this thing, the stetcher, rather better for upholstery. That is what painting is. I saw acrate, recently, by Basquiat, who has himself become bars of gold. He is currency now. Beyond his wildest dreams. It's such a sadistic plot, to ignore the suffering of a junkie, and launch them, like, what taste or feelings does teh average banker have? as a public offering, on the stock exchange/whatever space where slave bodies were sold and traded, shipped. Merchadise. Those warehouses, where they storied new arrivals I believe is was South Carolina - all part of an enormous ecosystem that profited at every step. And now for the village: I realize the village, in Ukraine, the forest, the cohesion, the support, the tears, the smiles, the laughter, the fun, the achknowledgement of one's accomplishments, the touch, the hand that extends to hold yours, I was raised by wolves, I telll people, but that would have been a luxury. No, i was raised in a vacuum. What a terrible space - nothing can grow there. So, I am grateful, for my talent. No, I'm not great with people, unless it's about harnessing energy, organizing it, making bigger things happen. But where am I when I am not a leader? Quite lost. I never had an oven. I don't know to cook. Kitchens always, invoke, a kind of real terror. Foreign objects. Bad places. Why not a welcoming one? I found this in the houses of collectors - and that is skewed. Outside business - a void - a tunnel without wind. No wonder I was such a shiny object to lesser flies. Easy prey. That is shitty, but, not of my doing. I just read the fantastically false narrative of my half sister, the oldest, who was, as was all, dealt a nasty hand. What a fantasy. What a child-brave attempt to make sense of the nonsense, to alter the story, to create a narrative: that is kind. What a puppet to a manipulative hand. Whole facts - whole wives - eliminated - as if a story can do this to human flesh, living, breathing, being, breeding.
niedojebane
ti kurwa
I understand why those who see farther are shown with their eyes closed. They are dreaming of something more - they move past the horizon. Tiresias.
It's strange to go through awful and difficult things and what you are that the first thing people try to do is either shun you or take advantage. You have to deal with the world alone. And fight them. I think of how fascinated I was as a teenager and now, by Celtic tribes and culture and how there was a belief that if you strayed past the borders of your tribe - the Tua - the walls - the lines - you lost your identity. You lost your protection. You were in a magic and dangerous world - where you power evaporated. I think of how my work, my creative work, comes from such great depths. The darkest spaces. I pull a thread from the pitch-black places - so vast so interior - such dimension cannot be measured - in the space of time - there is no place - no location - only what the work dictates - it is like a direct hit - to something inside the viewer that lies deep under the layers of existence.
I’m special I’m military I’m an operation
I’m an operation I’m special I’m military
I’m in the military and I’m undergoing a very special operation
I’m very special and I’m in the military
I’m very special fur coat a blender and a generator
I’m special I’m in the military taking this generator and that asshole thinks he’s in the military, but he is only what his actions define.
I'm not sure if the words I scrambled above do any justice to their source. They don't. You have to hear them. Then you'll understand. When you read things, the voice inside is your own. You cannot absorb what you don't know - thorugh some combination of letters. But when you hear a voice, well, your mother has a voice too. And it's a powerful one. Sound is a great penetrator, a great force, the human voice, not really reported on, or acknowledged in it's instant penertration - they way it can silence a room. I once did a brief talk at jeanne Greenberg and I talked about this, because in video - installation - and source material - I pay close attention to sound. It is what shapes a space - its the invisible bridge into yours - even morse , than the all too obvious optics. I spoke how we have acknowledged the strength of The Voice:
The Cry of The Condemned
The Voice of Authority
The Call to Duty
The Voice of the Dead
The Collective Voice
The Voice Inside Your Head (ok that's a tricky one)
And Ill think of more...
Some sounds I would like to isolate that are significant to me:
Helicopter rotor (in the sky)
Buzzing of flies - individuated inside a swarm
School children playing
Chirpring of birds, overhead, but near
Yelling, in a way that peculiar and terrifying, to a certain population group (this is a precise reference I can later elaborate upon...or do a lecture about :)
The drop and thump of the guillotine
Blenders coats generators your voice last moments you better not be raping, or I’ll kill you. Said the wife to the man - in the military.
I have talked a lot about fantasy being as much a part of reality as reality fantasy. And I've come to think with the passage of accumulated experience, that ratio isn’t 50/50 rather it is 90/10. Where fantasy trumps reality. Reality is only what you feel, what you can hold in your hands and even the physicality of a thing as your eyes scan it - like a topography. Like walking on soil, a farmer will feel, and know, much more than me. So, scanning something with your eyes, and knowing things makes seeing - a sense. Do not think it is ethereal. Order, composition, disruption, balance is a matter of spatial organization that the sun and the moon and the horizon of the earth all demand - we can see the orb rise from the depths that make...a line.
I say all this because as an artist I am very naive. I do what I do despite any convention any expectation any precedence other than what I have seen, and those I set up for myself. These standards can be awfully, terribly, high. So high that those with supposed high standards are somewhere in the darkness underground having a conversation without everyone else bound to the chairs of Plato's Cave. And do I constantly have to point out the difference between art, and decoration. Sure, I could design the most terribly elegant throne/gown/show/hat/ anything that morphs with the form and shape of the body: that fits - the body. I am more that than those who draw and somehow feel comfortable with gummy fingers or horsehair drenched in gel. I'm a tailor. Patterns are made - on paper. We are in the same water - but that canvas crap - is one depth, on kind - one convention - a kind of communist era bod where prisons resemble houses and houses, prisons.
When you meet a good soul: rejoice. They are rare. The rest are blind. Instead of joy, you get jealousy. I have dealt with more jealousy in my life than I even understood. Is that weird? Maybe...I just think jealousy is stupid. Because no one is the same.
Or maybe jealousy is for the stupid.
Can't hold my breath from another
You are the imperfect storm.
My feet are falling from the ground. My head up in the clouds from the core. With fainting eyes.
I hate it when our eyes meet. You know when you have peered into a person's soul. Why did they let you in. Just a crack. But they won't open. To you, they are like the air you breathe, it feels like, blood, in your veins, what you see, what you feel, when you are cut, you bleed them...they come pouring out of you. But they won't let you in. They just show that they want you. But do nothing And you wish you had 1000 babies with them. How dare they speak of such things with you.
LOVITAR - Blind Daughter of Death
"Loviatar, vaimo vanha,
pahin Tuonen tyttäriä,
ilke'in manattaria,
alku kaikille pahoille,
tuhansille turmioille.
Sill' oli muoto mustanlainen,
iho inhon-karvallinen.
Tuopa musta Tuonen tyttö,
ulappalan umpisilmä,
teki tielle vuotehensa,
pahnansa pahalle maalle.
Selin tuulehen makasi,
kaltoin säähän karkeahan,
perin viimahan viluhun,
kohin päivänkoittehesen."
(Elias Lönnrot, Kalevala, 5th Rune, 1849)
TRANSLATION 1
"The blind daughter of Tuoni,
Old and wicked witch, Lowyatar
Worst of all the Death-land women
Ugliest of Mana's children
Source of all the host of evils
All the ills and plagues of Northland
Black in heart, and soul, and visage
Evil genius of Lappala
Made her couch along the wayside
On the fields of sin and sorrow
Turned her back upon the East-wind
To the source of stormy weather
To the chilling winds of morning."
(source will be cited)
TRANSLATION 2
"A girl there was of Tuonela
blind
Pit-daughter
an old woman
the worst of Tuoni's daughters
wickedest of death-daughter's
source of all ills
a thousand downfalls;
she had a swarthy face, a
skin of loathsome hue.
Well, that black girl of Tuoni,
the sightless one of the depths,
made her bed upon a road
her litter on evil land
lay with her back to the wind
her side to the rough weather
her rear to the chilly blast.
(source will be cited)
TRANSLATION 3
"The girl of death's domain was blind, Lovitar, an old woman
Death's worst daughter, the wickedest daughter of the Abode of the Dead,
source of all evils, of thousands of disasters
She had a very dark coloring, a vile colored skin
That dark girl of Death, the half-blind one of Waste-Land
Made her bed on a pathway, laid her pallet on bad ground
She lay down back to the wind, aslant to the severe wind,
Back to the blasting cold, facing the dawn."
(source will be cited)
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