Spree

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Howard Beale, Network

Has not everybody at some point in their lives thought of spitting on their hands, hoisting the black flag and begin slitting throats?

H.L. Mencken

I'd always thought this kind of stencilling that I am doing on Bell's Bridge as some kind of 'spree'. In America, people who have had enough tend to go on another kind of spree, one which is a lot more bloody and deadly. My spree however is with words and images, not guns and bullets, but it amounts to much the same. I've had enough of the horseshit hidden in plain sight as I've had enough of all the people feeding on it from the trough of ignorance. Society is profoundly sick, and those who have made a success of this are profoundly sick too. Indeed, most success (if not all) is formed out of a sickness that grows in the head of the young child. Yet, success is not about this broken individual 'making it' but about the inter-dependent origination of all things. Success in other words, in Nature, is all about collaboration and community, not about isolated individuals and 'rankings'. At any rate, it pleased me to see that the word spree derives from the French 'esprit' meaning spirit. This is what is at work here: the 'holy spirit' as the whole and healthy unbroken individual who has woken up to the bullshit hidden in plain sight and who, with the strength of this nouveau esprit, sets to work about sharing the wisdom he has gained from this insight. The shooting spree-er 'wakes people up' by killing them, the stencil spree-er wakes people up similarly, but the killing done by art does not kill the body but only the false consciousness that has been implanted and solidified within that body. It is spirit, as essence and attention and tending the essential, that is at work in both cases. In the shooter's case, it is an unholy spirit, in the artist's the holy and wholly spirit. In both cases, the receiver of the spirit is 'awoken', yet if you cannot share that awakeness there's not much use. Hence my spree of the stencil sort.... the spray can being its own form of gun.