Blake Viola 7/12/17
What disturbs me so much these days is that we are living beyond ruins. Ruins aren't ruins anymore. They don’t simply signify the past, they are time twice removed, times before the times when we looked among ruins for inspiration, when we lived amongst them and kept them alive. Some of us still live there, but for most we have made the world a museum, and the ruins are gone. And the younger generations know nothing of this, nor do they care much. They see nothing in the past or the future, they just laugh at everything. Which can be helpful, but you have to stop laughing at some point. And what have they been given anyway, what else is there for them to do in a life so utterly devoid of meaning? And so nothing that is done is real, everything has to have a tinge of that type of laughter of vacant entertainment, none of the laughter of the wisdom of the trickster or sacred fool. Just the laughter of nothing, the all-consuming laughter of a corrupted void, a void that isn't even a void, but an impure hole that leads to nowhere. And so the ruins have to become worse than a museum of ruins, they have to become a disneyland of ruins. People gawk, they laugh, they scream in triumph over the fall of ruins, they stomp themselves silly to keep the fall alive forever, they beat of the same drum over and over with the same crooked voice with the twisted tongue. The ancestors, the dead, the sky, the air, the earth, art, music, creation, all is taken. People don't exist to live anymore, they don't dream, they don't see, they exist simply to have a good time, nothing more nothing less, a life without those luminous sparks of being. And so to even exist in a real way, to think, to really see, to live with a sense of genuine purpose, sincerity, truth, beauty, has been relegated to the ruins of our collective bodies of lives and deaths, and piled as corpses for our people to walk over. Not knowing they actually tread upon their own corpses, their father's corpse, their mother's, their unborn children, the corpse of their families and before their families, they just walk forward desecrating themselves to the very end. But the dead are not dead, it is our duty to keep these bodies alive, to keep the winds blowing and the skies shining, to fight against this voice of lies and psychosis, to live again and breathe, to bring tears to the void, to see where the void and the soul take us. It is our duty to create. In the age of images maybe it is time this creation was aimed at the dead instead of the living, the unseen instead of our own eyes, the spirits instead of our human minds. To reinvigorate the void so that it breathes its fire again in our bones, so that through its breath it violates its own voidness, the uncreate, and spills forth a new form of living and dying that we all knew but hadn’t yet remembered.
