The Fall of Ruins

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. 

Another Dark Age

Blake Viola 2/1/14

Our society, what it clings to and aspires to, is the super-ordinary, the utterly painfully hyper-human.  By this I do not mean super-human or a state transcending what is human, I mean utterly basely ordinarily human.  The funny thing is with all of our physical advancements and our technologies and our spectacles, especially within popular culture and in the performance realm of the arts, all has the illusion of pushing the senses to the point of something that is beyond what is ordinary and what we are.  People have even argued that celebrity culture is the new hero cult.  But I would argue what makes it so shocking and so spectacular to the viewers is that it is hyper-ordinary, almost impossibly ordinary, so ordinary it is grotesque, and purely mere entertainment.  As though the ideal forms of Neoplatonism were stretched to the degree of only comprising the absolute ordinary pleasures and experiences of human entertainment and mundane unessential qualities of daily life.  The Middle Ages, despite its cruelty and barbarity and mass ignorance, at least had an aspiration throughout its societies towards these essential states and experiences of beyond, to the Absolute.   All throughout history human beings have had these aspirations in all societies, all the way until the modern age.  Despite our perceived “humaneness” and our sensitivities and our “civility” and our belief that we have “repaired” our old ways by severing our violent roots and our ignorance and have become “enlightened”, we have robbed ourselves of our essential qualities of living, of our true humanity, to go beyond what we are, to live in what we are made of and born of.  We have turned our backs on ourselves and on the world and have aspired to an impotence of living purely for entertainment and material gain and pleasure.  I say we are not so wise, we are diseased and fickle, powerless and utterly cowardly, aspiring only to the life of decadent physical enjoyment turning away from that which is our essential raison d'être, that true quality which makes us human.  This crisis has lead many fringe groups of people in the west to attempt in filling this void, in bringing back this aspiration for the beyond.  There have been a few successes, though mostly individuals, but generally what this has lead to is mass lies, confusion, corruption, pacification, filtration, desecration and disempowerment of the Absolute.  What is needed is a mass disciplined revolution on a grand inner scale.  Human beings have shown they are incapable of living in freedom (such a thing as true freedom cannot and will not exist), so we must succeed in delivering a spiritual blow so painful and powerful, that its shockwaves will last generations to come.  The means of the delivery must be in the realm of the arts.  By art I refuse to include the present day filth of what we today would attribute as artistic expression within the realms of the art world, especially in America (there are a few exceptions as always, but not nearly enough to conclude that in general the present day art world in America should not be completely and utterly wiped off the face of the earth).  By the realm of art I mean to say any expression which traditionally has been used throughout the world as a means to access the divine, the Absolute, be it sound, visual imagery, poetry, performance, dance, even slaughter.  And as art that is not separated as it is in our western modern world, but as an essential component of our lives, as essential as breath, created not for the sake of exhibitions but for the sake of living, and NOT in a way we would call “utilitarian”, but in an inner way that deals with essential inner states, states of warfare or of becoming and death, exorcisms and catharsis, or works made specifically for the dead or the invisible world rather than the living, etc (as it has been with many of the traditions of so-called “primitive” cultures today).  We are living in another Dark Age, it is time for renewal. 

A Theater of Cruelty

Lot and His Daughters, Lucas van Leyden

According to Antonin Artaud, what is accomplished in this painting is what theater should be.  It has nothing to do with the literary aspect of the tale, Artaud is not interested in literature or dialogue or plot as we would know it when it comes to the theater. He does admit that Lot is pictured here as almost living off his daughters as a kind of pimp, which he seems to delight in for its profound sexuality and for its position as almost the only social element in the entire painting. All of the other elements are metaphysical, he describes them as a kind of visual poetic language whose function is the manifestation of certain inner states such as becoming and fatality, chaos, equilibrium and the miraculous, "impotences of speech", etc.  (See the chapter "Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène" in "The Theater and its Double" by Antonin Artaud.)

It is less about attempting a complete understanding, because complete known understandings are dead frozen subject matter for the theater and for poetry and art, we need something more volatile. But that is not to say excluding completeness that is the result of a sign or sound that encompasses a universe, such as a man’s voice with a burning quality that produces tears or shivers or the experience of the sun just before dusk clawed by streaks of clouds. 

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucas_van_Leyden_-_Lot_and_his_Daughters_-_WGA12932.jpg

Red Deer Antler Headdress

 

Early Mesolithic, about 9,500 years old

From Star Carr, Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, England.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/r/red_deer_antler_head-dress.aspx

Bocio, "Empowered Cadaver", "Cadaver that Possesses Divine Breath", from the Fon people

"When asked the underlying meaning of the term bocio, Sagbaju noted that "this art form is like a man who does not open his mouth because he is dead." In other words, like a cadaver, bocio address at once the world of the living and the dead. Each such work can be said to represent "death living a human life" (Kojève, in Bataille 1990:10)." 

 - Suzanne Preston Blier, "African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power", University of Chicago Press 1996

 
"When we say that someone is "speechless" we do not mean that they have nothing to say. On the contrary, such speechlessness is really a kind of speech. In German the word Stumm (mute) is connected with the word stammeln (to stutter or stammer). Surely the distress of the stutterer does not lie in the fact that he has nothing to say. Rather, he wants to say too much and is unable to find the words to express the pressing wealth of things he has on his mind. Similarly, when we say that someone is struck dumb or speechless (verstummt), we do not simply mean that he has ceased to speak. When we are at a loss for words in this way, what we want to say is actually brought especially close to us as something for which we have to seek new words." 

- Suzanne Preston Blier, "African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power", University of Chicago Press 1996

This is the foundation of all true poetry.

 

 

The Sacrifice of Polyxena

Kali, "Black Earth Mother"