Art as Refusal

Fuck you I  won't do what you tell me.

Rage Against the Machine

 

As the ultimate refusal to do what they want me to, art is all about the not doing more than it is about the doing. It is this 'not doing' that de-fuses and re-fuses the Self back into its original matrix of Being. And that allows Being itself to art.

 







Memos from the End Zone: Dawn of the Dead

The dawn of the dead is the beginning of that period where people 'forget' ab origine as in allow their selves to be violated by an inorganic technology and a mechanical view of the cosmos that weakens and eventually kills their response-ability and their connection to the origin. As a species, homo sapiens is the only forgetful one, the only one that does not re-member its Self through a natural aboriginal conviviality and a deep root system. This is because we have been upturned and uprooted from who and what (and how) we actually are, and our own Technology. The individual (as opposed to its true undividedness) has, through the dividing methodologies of science and progress, become split. In so doing, we have been hijacked by a technology that is not Nature acting spontaneously but which is a 'split being' acting unspontaneously. This false technology has now created a dead zone where human beings now mete out their lives. The dead in other words have dawned, and though we may stumble about gazing into our hands giving off the appearance of aliveness, we are, in our post-human posthmuous unresponsive states, as good as dead. 

 




 

The House That Jack Built

The economy is fucked. It's official. At next week's budget, whatsisface will probably use a different choice of words, something more gentle perhaps, but he really should fess up in plain old English. After a year of Covid, which in financial terms has been the biggest drain on the economy since WWII, Britain's gross national debt is in the trillions. Which kind of begs the question: what on Earth are people working for? What have they been working for this past century? So they can live in  poverty, so they can be locked down physically and financially, so they can be treated like plague-carriers? Apparently so, which is why the economy is a disease. 








Never Raining Everywhere


As i looked around I could see the whole strath, an area of maybe some 100 square miles in one fell swoop. And I was only a couple of hundred metres above sea level. At any rate, i could see where I was going to go this morning, over there on the other side of the Clyde, near Bridge of Weir and Kilbarchan. It was pishing down, but where I was some five miles to the north it was bone dry. As I scanned the valley I could see that I had chosen wisely this morning in trying to avoid the incessant rain we have been having this early February. My internal barometer was working perfectly. I had found the lull and the eye of the storm again. It's a shamanic skill I have developed over the years of wild cycling, the ability to feel the weather coming. And this morning was a great example. As I have always maintained to those who complain that Scotland is a rainy country, it never rains in Glasgow, or at least as I try to explain after their jaw drops, it never rains everywhere at the same time.

 





Ecstasy in the Snow

 It doesn't take long to get up into the beyond. About half an hour from where I live in Cessnock with bike and train (to Kilpatrick). And that train is simply wonderful for its emptiness, its comfort, and its rapidity. This morning it was the 11.19 Helensburgh Express which deposited me at Dalmuir some ten minutes later having bulleted through the suburbs without me even noticing them. Ten minutes on a train is just enough to get the flask out and enjoy some of that hot lava java. Passing Clydebank I see a couple of rooftop pigeons flying and fluttering, and I realise (as I do every time I see wild animals) that ecstasy is your natural aboriginal condition. Man, having closetted his consciousness, has relieved his self of that natural ecstasy and has to go in search for it instead. The pigeons by contrast have never sold their selves out therefore they inhabit ecstasy. Man no longer moves but is carried (by machines and ideologies) and is thus de-ecstasized. His consciouness becomes removed from its natural condition, that of ecstasy, because he himself (his body and mind) has been re-moved. The pigeons on the other hand have not been removed from anything least of all their own aboriginal operating system. And so they inhabit ecstasy. And it was this fleeting ecstasy that I saw when I saw these two pigeons at Clydebank. Moreover, about half an hour later, having braved the 'hard to kill hill', I myself became a pigeon.