It’s easy to burn candles at both ends. And the applause is lovely for sure. But can you forget that you are a candle and just glow? Can you turn into a circular candle and not even want to be alight ever? Just a fat ring of wax, holding on to a flammable inside. Of course you will break one day. Of course you will be discarded. But for a few years you might actually be an unusual something and just for yourself. Useless. But in that aspect incredibly useful.
“Why did you turn to art?” Oh, because I wanted to do something that I can continue to make until only my head is awake and I can perhaps utter simple sounds and photo words. Or until all I can do is wield a stick from bed. “A bit like Matisse.” Perhaps not as well as him, but definitely along those lines. Or among those shapes?
For this to work, I can’t throw myself into skillporn. AI will deal with that so much better and faster than I ever could. My work needs to be a dilettante stumble into the sunset. Shapes that sort of make sense but then somehow do not, until they do again.
And the thoughts surrounding the work should be a tiny bit as if I had rubbed a balloon and held it against my head. Under water.
Spring will arrive again soon. Just a few thousand years ago I would have been able to probably get some time off in the woods for uttering such thoughts. Crazy future thinking. But also pattern recognition perhaps?
Everything that happens now is somehow pushing along the ball of time towards the future. It might be there waiting for us and we are just dancing in a way to complete a puzzle or just perform a dance that’s all decided.
Or it is not all clear at all. In no way. then perhaps the now is also a fog. Or a frog. Or a bog. A dog. A god. All of the above.
We could learn and understand so much when we traveled the world under giant sails. The wind pushing us across crazy giant waters. Not everyone had a horrible cargo then, I guess. It was so insanely clear that we are part of something that is huge and so much bigger than us. Almost everything had the potential to be bigger than us.
Almost everything was.
Now we are just coming out the other end of the dirty love affair with combustion engines. Digging stuff out of the ground to then using it to move around for no reason, or to head to the supermarket in order to get some sparkling water. Or salt.
Pinnacle of … what?
And this will not change with electric cars, my lovely friend. They also need stuff that comes out of the ground. Perhaps different amounts and in different ways. And they also have tires which release slowly a very fine dark dust which all of us inhale and a few of us convert into crazy wild growth we lovingly call cancer. Hello there, little friend. Such a sweet name for such a powerful force of nature.
I will keep making art. I have always made art. Those before me have made it. It has made them too. Every picture or sculpture or object transforms us as much as we make it or use it. That’s probably not fair to say. Some objects might not have that power. But boy do others do.
Candles, for instance. We can burn them at both ends now. And it is an exciting thing to talk about and to do.
Where would I be now without the lamp burning behind this little screen. And even the keys on my keyboard have little lights in them. The lights in the house obviously are called that for a reason.
I should sleep now. And somehow manage to turn off the worries about everything that exists and doesn’t.
Future art. Likely to be like stuff someone made twenty thousand years ago. But that’s another circle I do love to come close to.
And dance.
Head and stick ahead.
Burning at both ends.
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