I was looking for a book, I have 5000 books scattered over
two closets and two bookcases in the living room…
and in looking in the hallway closet, I found an old notebook of mine…
not that unusual, as I have probably 100 notebooks of old writings
around here somewhere…as I knocked the notebook unto the ground
and in picking it up, I began to read its pages……. the notebook isn’t dated
and I almost never date them… I began to read and I found I recognized the
words intellectually as being concerns of mine at one point in time, but
I didn’t feel any emotional connection to the words… they were empty words
on a page… a slice in time of who I was at that time… and quite often
that is ART… a slice in time of where the author/painter/sculptors do their
work… ART is just a moment in time in the artists life…
I can intellectually tell you about that time in my life but I can’t
emotionally tell you…I have changed, evolved into someone else…
I am old now and I hold thoughts of an old person…just as I cannot
connect to the Plays or philosophy of the Greeks or Romans…
their ART is an instant in time, a moment taken…….
and my, to loosely use the term, my ART is also a moment in time,
a slice of who I am at the moment of creation… try reading
Dickens… Charles Dickens was the most popular writer of
the 19th century… He captured a moment in time for the Victorians
and he understood what their inner quest was… We don’t have
an artist working in any medium today who speaks to our 21st century
sensibilities and needs like Dickens spoke to the Victorian age……
we are much more fractured in our understanding, our sensibilities,
in our needs of the world then the 19 century was…….
once again, we are faced with the issue of reuniting our fractured souls…
how do we begin to cure our alienation, our disconnect from ourselves, from
our society, from the ism’s and ideologies that once so formed who we were in
our childhood indoctrinations……
How do we begin the process of becoming Catholic, which of course means
universal… how do we become universal? how am I suppose to connect to
you and to society and those ism’s and childhood indoctrinations?
first of all, we must escape our romantic past that still holds
America hostage… the romance of rugged individualism, of
rages to riches stories, IQ45 is still held hostage by phony romantic
notions that prevent him from growing as a human being and as he is
held hostage, millions of Americas are also held hostage by the
demonstrably wrong ism’s and ideologies of the right wing…
wrong as they are leftovers beliefs from the Romantic era that existed
in Europe from the French revolution to World War One…read the
manifestos and writings from after the French revolution and you will
see how conservatives have based their entire prejudice on the old
romantic era…read the conservatives and the Romantics side by side
and you will see how the conservative movement is the romantic
movement carried to today…we cannot overcome 21st century
issues and problems with 19 century solutions derived from the Romantics
writers…
one question asked is, is Marx writing also based on Romantic notions?
why yes, that is why his solutions are in dire need of being corrected
and modernized…which leads us to where we understand that
the questions and answers we have in the 21st century are not questions
or answers from the 21st century, the questions and answers we do have
are from the Romantic era, from the 19th century and that is we have
floundered in our times because we are not asking or understanding
21st century questions and answers with 21st century answers or questions…
we are grappling in the 21st century with 19 century questions and answers…
we must update our questions and answers with 21st century questions
and answers…
In one month, exactly, I shall turn 60… I cannot ask the right questions or find
the right answers if I find myself with questions and answers based on when I was 25 or 40…
I must ask and answer with an age appropriate questions and answers… my
25 year old self and my 60 year old self has nothing in common outside of
a body that has been battered and beaten over the years…
I must question and answer myself with questions and answers needed of a 60 year
old… and we must question and answer ourselves with 21st century questions and
answers…
Kropotkin