What is it?

There are so many ways to approach answering the question of “what is art” that it can paralyze you in freedom.

I think the reality is we don’t have a unified answer. We know it when we see it. We know what is trying to be art, what looks like it was intended to be art. But defining it seems impossible. This is a fortunate thing.

Some claim art is the stuff we make that can exist for no purpose other than its own existence. Others believe art is work that is made to be shown in a gallery or museum—this differentiates it from work that may use all the same mediums and methods but intends to be shown in the NYT to get readers to notice and article.

My tinnitus is so fucking loud right now I can’t even continue thinking about this.

My Favorite Illustrators

My taste revolves around a balance of looseness and preciousness. The first illustrator who struck me with awe and jealousy was Bill Watterson followed quickly by Mike Mignola. I love that so much depth and character is captured with as few lines as possible.

The impressionism found in cartooning intensified by rigidity and austerity is what I seek for my own work. With that, I can tell any story in a style that can communicate all manners of emotion.

Quentin Blake

Mike Mignola

Serena Ci

Tom Hunter

Kyle Ferrin

Armand Bodnar

Bill Waterson

Squabbling Children of Anarchy

American media has officially defined Anarchism as grim disarray, absolute chaos, and lawless abandon.

The history of Anarchism, which I barely know and care little for, is much more sophisticated. Libertarian-Socialism, the classic form of Anarchism was an ideal bridging of characteristics from both schools of political thought. The devotion to civil liberty and the structure and priority of the social sphere as the solitary roles of the state.

When individuals are serious about contributing to any political discourse, this is the Anarchism they are providing.

Antifa, ELF, John Zerzan, black-clad LARPers of revolution—these groups veil themselves in “Anarchism” as a power emblem, enforcing the extreme, hardcore aura that elevates their esteem.

Media is to blame not only for the currently accepted definition of Anarchism but for spawning those people whose actions have contributed to the definition.

See The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)

Attractive people doing revolution.

For those at a loss for identity, who wish to be part of something larger than themselves, who have all the misplaced hubris of the youth, Anarchism in this manner checks all the boxes.

But true Anarchism it’s much less sexy, much more boring, and much harder work.

Anarchism is the tendency to scrutinize authority and dismantle authority if it’s found to be invalid.

There is truly nothing more.

The Beauty of Iconoclasm

Provisionalism, like Wabi Sabi, values imperfection. It resists the seduction of torturing a vision into reality. Instead, it seeks to allow the millions of beautiful moments that arrive unintentionally and accidentally—moments completely outside our control—their own sacred space.

Theoretically, there is a double bind in provisional painting. Attempting to complete something that appears in progress would be fraudulent. A genuine approach would have the discipline to abstain from the correction one’s mind is conditioned to make. To put the brush down when you notice a beautiful moment in the interim of your preconceived notion of finality. I believe Rei Kawakubo claimed that to make a mistake on purpose is no longer a mistake.

Similarly, the ethos of vandalism is unconcerned with realizing some grand aesthetic vision. Vandalism is interested in destruction and its means are chosen as a path to most resistance. It exists squarely on the line between art and life. It is art as a means to affect life. It frequently claims no interest in being art. But paint is often used.

The word vandal has an interesting history. It was a group of people who “ravaged” Rome, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. A Vandal is someone who destroys what is seen as beautiful by others. Though many cultures have ravaged others, the Vandals’ name was coopted into an act that would carry into all future acts of destruction.

What is the word for someone who finds vandalism beautiful?

In both practices, fate and liminality are accepted as the natural order. One devotes itself to the destruction of finality, the other gracefully allows the destruction of finality to emerge and grow.

My Favorite Paintings

What I seek in a painting in terms of content is something my brain cannot expect to see. An aspect of Futurism surely. Always pushing the medium forward.

Formaly, however, I am unwaveringly attracted to Neo-Expressionism and its contemporary iterations. I am a fan of nostalgia, bright color, devolution, iconoclasm, irreverence, anti-preciousness, meticulous disregard for tradition and a desire to degrade the Institution, all while making a conscious effort to provide the pigs with highly collectible works that are instantly recognizable as the artists signature style.

Devon Troy Strother

Damien Hirst

Sterling Ruby

Robert Nava

Helen Frankenthaler

Misaki Kawai

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Nils Jendri

Vincent Langaard

Haruo Takino

Artist Statements

Each series is made with at least an ethos. Some are born from specific interests.

My return to serious painting began with the “Casa” series. A small batch of acrylic and oil pastel works that depicted my home with a new-found celebratory edge. Bright colors, molcajetes, chili peppers, serape motifs, and the occasional cucuy in the closet. My partner and I are both half-Latin. Together we began to connect with our roots—something we often didn’t think much of until we expressed our similar memories. Being half-Latin and white often leads to a lack of belonging. You have so many specifically Mexican memories, but don’t speak the language. Or you speak the language but never knew your ancestors. Regardless, we found power as well as joy, peace and spiritual guidance. The series is a testament to that time and place.

“Susto” was next and is currently ongoing. The series uses the modes established in “Casa” like serape motifs and bright colors but expresses anxiety and anguish. Many misfortunes have occurred since the Casa series was made. Susto aims to show them. Halloween iconography, such as bats, mummies, boogeymen, and ghosts appear and darker but highly saturated colors show the fear in each piece. As anxiety and anguish are frequent states for me, the series will not conclude anytime soon.

“Exotico” is the most recent and ongoing series to date. It blends my lifelong interests in exoticism and cultural heritage through an initial process of unconscious spilling called Ancestral Recall. The pieces are both provisional and refined and feature many motifs that stem from Mayan and Aztec mythology, Spanish conquest, treasure, gold, oceans, jungles, jaguars, skeletons, curses, snakes, and brujas. I am acutely interested in my own conflicting interests in respecting sacred culture and the Western depiction of the exotic. Films like “Aguirre Wrath of God” and “Apocalypto” as well as the history of looting and iconoclasm of cultural heritage are the roots of my current exploration of the “Exotico” series.

Meta-Aesthetic Entelechism

What is beauty?

Beauty is a force of nature that disciplines beings with the capacity to express it toward its own actualization. It is present in the arts, but it is also found in engineering, science, finance, and violence.

Beauty is objective. The pleasure or displeasure of witnessing beauty is irrelevant. These qualifiers do not negate the condition that there is a right and a wrong way for the piece to more itself in form. Or, for a graph to be organized, a stock portfolio to be hedged, or a left hook to be torqued.

The experience of beauty, like the experience of odor, is indicative of reality’s noumenonic amness; these experiences act as canaries in a coal mine to those things in and of themselves. Therefore, expressing beauty, and its wisdom of reality, is not merely worth our while, it is an empyrean act.

The meta-purpose of art is not to gain personal pleasure or communal good from engaging in meta-aesthetics but to allow beauty to be actualized and expand its scope and its insights. In other words, the meta-purpose of art is to be a vessel for the entelechy of beauty.

How can beauty be more than eyes and beholders? Because things emerge and things persist regardless of voyeurs. For example, “Sandbars in a river and the stream itself collaborate in persisting as themselves” (Marilynne Robinson Grace & Beauty).

However, even in the exquisitely designed machinery of torture, beauty is at work. The aesthetic archetype should not always gravitate toward actualization.

Ironically enough, beauty is blind. Its disposition is purely to perfect its insistence. Ethics are how we decide whether or not to be disciplined by beauty or let beauty’s daemons die in our minds without manifestation.

Mourning Implication

Living life with loss is worse than losing life.

Why Memes Are Funny

“Me when”

The meme of a movie character acting unaffected while juxtaposed with a title or backdrop of a workplace catastrophe, a car accident, a hangover, a breakup, or any other stress-inducing event, exposes our desire for heroism. It’s funny because it’s true—true that we want to have the power to endure stress without feeling stressed.

Why Music Is Everlasting

We’re stuck in mood’s merry-go-round. Music’s mood is immortally frozen, eternally ready to be imbibed.

Anarchy of Purpose

I often don’t hunger to learn, and I frequently have no interest in mastery. I no longer want to build a legacy through my work. Yet these elements used to drive my productivity. Something fell away in my late 20s and the extremism I had relied on to produce work fell with it. It’s left me wondering, what is Purpose in the arts if not securing preferable labor?

In considering why we work, and why we dream, I’ll admit, I used to just want to be a cool person in a cool place surrounded by cool people. From 16-22 the photographs from Jules de Ballincourt’s interview in Art News formed my vision of a successful future; a big-windowed studio with days talking and making art while being well paid. In my teenage identity crisis, art spoke for me whether I wardrobed myself in other people’s art or my own.

Side note: competition is a purpose by proxy. You get so wrapped up in winning that you forget the whole thing is vaporous. I always work better when my name is on the line, whether I like it or not. There’s no time to scrutinize the competition. It’s very convincing.

There’s little left of that need to be associated with success. I don’t have any identity crises beyond wondering if I should be more concerned that art isn’t as important to me as it once was. The desperation has been worn down by time’s wind alone. Rejection is not to blame. Rejection, historically the kill leader in any pursuit of art, has only driven me further. And what’s been revealed by my years of eroding interest is a very simple desire. The desire for time unencumbered.

Isn’t that the platonic archetype that gravitates all of us? My righteousness would say even those stuck chasing the artist’s life (like Ballincourt’s) are truly just seeking time unencumbered. That’s exactly what’s overlooked in our vision of success: you expect that upon arrival, you don’t have to spend time doing things you don’t want to do.

There’s a lot of pop-actualization wisdom out there to aid the artists’ pursuit. “Believe in yourself, work hard, never give up. Never up, never in.” None of it challenges the premise, which is success. Challenging the idea of success, especially in capitalism, is a separate essay. Let’s just call success here a general improvement of one’s place in life garnered by doing what one loves.

I don’t love any of my mediums. Without exception, what satisfaction I gain by sitting at the word processor, canvas, or production software, is likewise smothered by a feeling of disgust. I get wired easily, ancy, hungry, tired, screen-blind, and paint-sick.

To achieve the perfect space for making work, both physical and mental, I’d have to be rich and msot of my time would need to be dedicated to health and fitness. Only then would there be adequate space for art to be made without detriment to employment, which currently enables what little space I have for art.

Regardless, it seems art is pinned, for those inclined to make it, as a path of less resistance in a labor system. It seems like a simple resolve: if you have to work, make sure you like it. But turning the practice you perform when your time is unencumbered into something that is expected to eventually unencumber your time raises more problems than it’s expected to solve. Muse abuse, despoiling the sacred, losing love for your work… It also has terrible odds of making you rich enough to unencumber your time in the first place.

So should our art remain hobbies instead of golden tickets?

I have no idea what a hobby is. Stamp collectors experience Passion I assume or the giddy joy of arrival. Model makers spend hours on end at their craft, so time spent can’t be a criterion. What qualifier ascends a hobby to a purpose? Grand expectations? Some accolade?

There’s a boundary assumed here in the talk of legacy. People are creatures. We are not—in our lived lives—icons, legends, heroes, or historical figures. For years, assuring my name in history and making myself, my mind, and my work accessible to future humans was a prime mover in my productivity. I didn’t want to be a name on a headstone, I wanted to be a name in future artists’ textbooks.

But I’ve eroded that because the boundary is frail. Those on the other side of immortality, artists who are made into icons, have their creaturehood washed away by becoming an idea. But it is the satisfaction of my creaturehood that I long for now. To be pleased, to feel healthy, to watch a storm roll in with a lover, laughter with family, laughter with friends, knowing a peaceful night of sleep will bookend the day with a cup of tea.

The satisfaction of creaturehood is definitively for me. It serves me here and now. Becoming an icon does not satisfy the artist beyond granting a bit of excitement, which must be one-upped by bigger achievements.

As an icon, I would not be seen but made into a spectacle, an entity of associations, for others in their most unidentified times to use me to identify themselves, my name reduced to a signal for others to show off a sense of style, a sense of taste, or shorthand for academics to peacock their intellect. My whole life, full of habits and fears and pleasures and perversions and acts of kindness would be evaporated into a few choice products that show my slight iteration on a theme as old as time. Grand Inconsequential. Why not have both? The satisfaction of your creaturehood and the becoming of an icon? They are mutually exclusive pursuits. Besides, the world chooses icons. Not the artist.

All of this to say, I genuinely do not see the point in encumbering our time with arts in any professional way unless it’s to make money with more desirable labor. And yet, this cannot be the definition of artistic Purpose.

Martial Entelechy

Martial, meaning, of or in reference to war, and their arts are the entelechy of weaponizing the human body, a dolorimetric discovery of the archetypes in slumber awaiting our fists, elbows, knees, and skulls to find their exact path to actualization. There is an ideal way to strike another person. And there has been since our contemporary form was settled hundreds of thousands of years ago. We’ve had the brain to discover it for at least 200 thousand years. There was no other path but brutal research to finalize the art.

I used to feel appropriative bowing to the mat, now I do it to pay respect to the people who wrote it all down so I could walk into a gym and learn what hundreds of years of bloodshed yielded.

Muscle & Hate

The first interest I had in fitness was as a supplement to alley cat racing in Denver. They were bike races in the city, often in traffic, on brakeless track bikes. The fastest among riders rode every day, so I rode every day. There was no math. There was no routine. I wasn’t interested in exercise. I was interested in adrenaline and speed and how to get more of it.

Four years later, I was about as good as you can get on a track bike in traffic unless it’s your day job. But I had a near miss in Chicago that ended it; this Oldsmobile ran a red and we veered alongside each other up on a sidewalk. A year later, a fellow classmate was pulled under the wheels of a semi. She was killed instantly. I didn’t hear this quote till much later but it sums up why I hung up the bike: “Luck runs out all at once, never by degrees” - Mark Twight. It doesn’t matter how good you are on the bike, chaos is omnipresent.

Lifting was next. I started after college because I’d dropped weight from 155 to 137. How people maintained weight while going to school in the Loop 12 hours a day, working part-time, and bearing the weight of art world expectations is beyond me. After getting back some aesthetic weight, I lifted just to lift. The gains could have continued or not. The point was depletion. I wanted to feel struck by a vehicle. I wanted to be in pain when I slept. As long as my injuries didn’t keep me from lifting, they were welcome.

I’m reminded of a writer friend in high school. She said she bruised her rib during a spat with pneumonia. I asked if it sucked. She said it was painful, but she adored the visualization enabled by the pain. Bones in her skeleton often forgotten or taken for granted shimmered all day like a heat map.

Then the mountains called. They are the supreme church of suffering. The ratio from the simplicity of the end goal to the input required is as extreme as it gets: summit the peak and wage total war on your mind and body to do so. The bar to entry is tricky with mountains. As long as you can get to them, you can try them. But you realize immediately how much they will take from you. Running became the main boot camp to increase my odds. After breaking my legs in, running shifted from supplement to drug of choice. Running was right outside my door, while mountains were hours away and demanded strategy and tactics.

Freedom is the first pleasure in running. Something ancient in that. Triggers to primal flight—but also the joy of exploration fused with the speed at which you can discover. Houses, groves, creeks, towers, bird sounds and quiet air—all neglected in a car—hit you with blunt force on a run. Then there’s the 1st-mile burn, your legs, chest, and back are aching and pinched. After the 5th-mile hump, the body is oiled, the burn is gone, and everything is liquid. You feel like you can live the rest of your life while running. At mile 10 the lungs adjust and they reckon this is the new normal. An entity of momentum. The heart isn’t pounding now, it’s sitting at 120 bpm. Then, at mile 15, the bones begin to show their fragility, and little fissures in the tibias begin throbbing. Every footfall is an aggravated assault. I’d stomp a little harder on the downhills to abuse them. Lactic acid turns to concrete in your thighs. Calves in a perma-charlie horse. You sweat ammonia if you lacked carbs the days prior. I could feel my tissue being eaten while sprinting up the steepest paved street in America. At Zone 5 uphill, the idea of a heart attack is a serious question. It doesn’t beat; it vibrates.

Endorphins can’t take full responsibility for the serenity. Running, the pace, the meditation, the breath, the impact, all of it concerts to the Anarchist spirit. You can run away from anything you can name. You can suffer consensually.

Self-harm had never been an MO for me. Roundabout, sure, via drugs and alcohol. But I never considered self-harm as an end in and of itself, just a tool for proliferating fine art, music, and writing. Exercise showed me how intricate and keen self-harm could be exacted on the body like a lunatic with a scalpel and how splendid the treasure could be. If I ever stretched before a run it was to feel the white thresh of tendons aching to be released.

So much was pent up in me that to deliver pain felt transgressive in a heroic way. The mind tortures the body and the body revolts against the mind. Gains are nothing but time-release confidence with a two-month half-life. Engaging in the torture of exercise breaks the mind that develops concepts like confidence or defeat. The part of your brain that assess your worth transfers all energy to the parts of your brain dedicated to physical maintenance. It can’t possibly give a fuck what you think of yourself. There are no beliefs, there are no inner children, and when there’s nothing left to burn but brain matter, there is no more You.

High on my sweat’s ammonia, my brain vomited this sentiment: When you consider the persistence of muscle, its very existence insinuates terra impersona. The proportionate response to this condition is hate.

Like those victims of trauma in the BDSM community who gain agency in the practice of domination, fitness is a reclamation of pain and suffering. The very spirit of Anarchism is to recognize the authority of pain, and steal the torturer’s devices for yourself, to commit seppuku on your time, with your autonomy.

When The Hero Dies In The Beginning

In Alien Resurrection, we’re introduced to Frank Elgyn, a space smuggler. He is smooth-talking, black-clad, level-headed, hard-drinking, and is the leader of a band of criminals who all respect his seedy smarts. He calls the shots from the beginning but is the first of the main cast to die at the hands of the Aliens.

I believe the writer, Joss Weden, intended to shock both audiences and the main characters by removing the metaphoric ship’s mast at the start of the chaos, thus forcing the group of survivors to have to trust Ripley whose allegiance in the 4th installment is dubious at best.

When I saw Resurrection at the age of 8 by myself, I was cinematically traumatized by the death of this character. I rooted for him to be one of the ending survivors because I liked him, but I was certain he wasn’t going to be the first to die because of everything that made him cool. I didn’t have any notion that such a story device could be possible. It changed the way I percieve character set-up and expectation. It also changed how I view group dynamics and what happens when you remove specific pieces. The dramatic potential is infinite.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how different the film would have been if he had survived longer or been on the ship at the end along with Ron Perlman’s character and Sigorney herself. Below are a list of scenarios:

1. Elgyn and Ripley hesitantly form an alliance as the most capable of the group in terms of route finding and charisma and strength. But Elgyn maintains his distrust of her allegiance and makes a fatal misstep to remove her from the group before making it to the evacuation.

2. Elgyn and Ripley initially strife with differences in approach to their planned escape and this causes the group tension as half of them want to trust their captain, but the other half feels like Ripley is better equipped to handle this very unique situation. This scenario likely ends with a full-fledged bond by the end or a sacrifice on part of Elgyn to save her and thus his crew.

I have since been so inspired and hurt by this type of death that I have tried to emulate it in my own writing. In my script, Darkspeed, which centers around a crew of astronauts attempting to use a faster-than-light engine to warp to a nearby solar system, the leader, Jim Vikandless, has all the right answers and soothes all anxieties, but is the first to die when they encounter and inter-dimensional entity named Color.

It almost seems cheap, but necessary to emphasize the tension, to kill off the most well-adapted character when the shit hits the fan. Now we are battered by the circumstance and the lesser of us must grow relationships and force from themselves the solutions when the God/Father figure is eliminated.

I’ll never forgive nor forget what Joss did.

The Academic Painting Critique

I once had a highly successful Chicago painter as a senior painting professor lead his critiques by making us guess what he was going to say next. I think he imagined himself a zen master or so above the adjunct role that he was validated in wasting the 400 dollars of tuition we paid per class. He stated simply, “there will be no painting in this class. Painting is done elsewhere and here we will discuss.” These classes were seven hours long.

I packed my canvas and bars and left dramatically. But even in the classes where we painted with a professor’s attention and knowledge and skill being bestowed upon us as we worked, which is what I wanted, the critiques at the end of the week were no more valuable.

Take the foundations of the critique: who is there to give criticism? A professor who is most likely successful, which is at least something. And a group of 20-year-olds who grew up in Dubai, Macau, with trust funds that would leave you slack-jawed, and whose parents didn’t scrounge, save, and cripple themselves with loans, but who sent their offspring to art school to get them out of the house for 4 years. These dummies could eventually become darlings, sure. Your art world constituency. Most likely not. Their thoughts and words were often useless.

The most common audience for an emerging artist to expect to have is the local art sympathizer, an enjoyer, maybe even a dilettante who goes to as many shows as they can, has no artistic profession, or who may even have money and surveys the scene for a decoration for them or their boss. These are the first audience, the most important audience, for any breakout artist. But their sensibilities are nowhere to be found in the academic critique.

What is found are word salad regurgitations of the recent post-structuralist PDFs handed out in elective classes that week. Deleuze, Foucault. “Knowledge” shat out 50 years ago and worshipped as if it was the latest philosophical contribution. There is also brain-dead, Vyvanse-induced, or hungover silence. Silence you can hear the laminate floor shifting in. No one has anything to say. No one cares about your art. They only care about theirs. Remember, they are the next hero. Not you.

You’re staring at a realism painting of a life jacket. A finger-painted mess of shit brown. A painting on cardboard of numbers. With excuses that end in “isms” that justify the work. Once a gal passed off her last-minute butcher paper painting claiming it was “post-colonial”. This goes on for seven hours straight.

Once a kid made a painting that looked exactly like the wall it hung on. Another threaded shoe laces through a loaf of bread, titled it “loafers”. One had a grocery bag tied to the wall with a fan on to make it dance. There were either one-liners or our best attempts at copying what we thought was contemporarily expected by the fine art world. This spurred my coining of the genre, “Looks Conceptual”. You know the stuff, a cinderblock in the corner, a metal pipe leaned against the wall, chain link fence blocking in a bucket with an iPhone playing some sound. Stretcher bars with no canvas, canvas with no stretcher bars.

The most spine-liquifying aspect of the academic critique is how precious we all act with our art. Treating it as highly-considered and delicate. When we answer criticism with, “I think I like that about the piece.” “In terms of.” “Fair enough.” School was supposed to be a workshop, not a reliquary. But I don’t blame students entirely. I blame the unspoken expectations. I suspect everyone felt it too: you should have a show before you graduate. It poisoned every possible constructive step in the process. Because there was no room for growth. We were pretending to be finished.

Terror, The Sculptor

Suffering is not a shaded moment in life; for creatures, it is what life is. There is not also pleasure, as some foundational contrast, but the reprieve from the innate, as is an uptake from waterboarding. Nature’s cell is built with exquisite machinery of torture.

Take the inherent parameters of creatureliness: gravity, digestion, combustion, climate, the razor-thin margin of atmosphere—a concoction as delicate as it is rare. One would not say these elements are horrifying because they are what we first learn to tolerate. The whaling infant hardens to the furious child. It is only new pain—which careens unpredictably through our paths from fate’s toy box—that we surmise as suffering because we haven’t developed their specific calluses. Novel pain is nothing more than added weight to the overloaded. We are literally sculpted by trauma, body, mind, and spirit, and tempered by calluses.

The biomechanical jihad for creatures, especially the psychic, is to adapt to ailment and loss. Not to curse it for happening. That presumes undue grace of the Universe. Our very nucleic acid is caustic. The tinnitus of our lives is a primordial bellow etching the world with every twitch of our muscles. Especially those that claw for anesthesia, hypnotics, or a way out. Yet there is no escape. Only eternal return.

But we are born heroes. Not for the delicacies we invent and on which we imbibe despite our torture. When we fight the crushing pull of the Earth we call it “standing”.

Truth's Medusa

The Answers to Humanity’s Eternal Questions are not deep but simple, shallow, and pitch black.

It’s a decoupling event that occurs constantly without notice. When out of nothing comes something and that something assumes more of its circumstance. Every empty gridiron is Tohuvabohu, every clanking kitchen is a War in Heaven. And we feel at our core that both the clamor and applause are equally annihilated in time.

The acceptance that there is no purpose or meaning other than what you can convince yourself to combust in the metaphysical engine of your life leaves you naked. When you feel it, not just “know” it, you can’t bounce reason off of the immateriality, can’t gather epiphany, can’t gain power; there is nothing to construct. That all the splendor is bookended by emptiness, that all you hold sacred is fated for iconoclasm. All you can do is grab your ball from the ditch and commence the game.

You don’t—and can’t—feel the Absurd in a creaturely way for very long. You take it back to the intellectual—let absurdity remain as word games and logic processing without the spiritual dredge—and get back to chasing dopamine, preferably in ways that don’t drain others of their own.

If there’s one useful thing absurdity marks upon you it is confidence in Anarchism. Where there is power there is also the wild delusion of its sanctioned permanence in those wielding it. Knowing illegitimate authority will always die no matter how zealous its acolytes may bring an anarchist peace where there could be undue suffering.

Dissent From Entropy

Homo-Sapien, Homo-Mortalis, Homo-Fabula.

Writing is the hard drive of our memory. Primal medicine, qualia abacus, and resistance to early erasure.

Even stones hammered with our minds will be atomized. So the least we can say is, if we write it all down, it won’t go too early. It gives us another inch, maybe a mile, to be known.

I told a friend once why I keep a diary. I said, even if jotting down my days doesn’t slow down time, I’ll never be able to say they got away from me. They said they were going to miss me. I’ve never seen them again.

Scrimmage of Death: The Desire to Be Known

It’s a tragedy when the people who share memories you adore forget them.

The pain from being forgotten by someone is an insinuation of death. That’s why it hurts so mysteriously. When they don’t value the fact that they knew the most intimate, most deep-set aspects of you as a being, and don’t reminisce in those memories, it’s a failure to preserve sacred art. A reminder of our cosmic guilt, Humanity’s double bind: that there is so much splendor in our experience and yet we are fragile creatures who die on impact.

So what to do with that? The first inclination is to go cynical. Harden and assume death everywhere. Assume death in every lover. Assume it in every moment. And commune only with oneself. Even if the most important experiences are those that are shared. Chris McCandless’s last words, written in the throes of death, were, “Happiness is only real when it is shared.”

Our experiences feel more immortal when they’re communal, don’t they? When you laugh alone it’s damp. When you laugh with friends it feels captured somehow. It feels like it makes an impression on life. But it doesn’t. We know that feeling of the last day of high school. Those people we saw every day, who were a part of a community, who built with their voices and bodies a world that had total character and life and identity. Yet that aggregate life is dead.

I don’t want to be a hermit. I don’t want to learn to laugh alone and force it to impress life. I don’t want to be the sole preserver of my sanctity. I don’t want to be the only witness of the deepest, most intimate qualia. I want to be witnessed by someone I know just as well. Even if the outcome is always death. 

The desire to avoid the pain is the only reason we lose sleep over lost time, lost loves, lost moments. But the pain is inevitable given the Sisyphus in our machinery. We will always want to be known and valued by people. But people always go away. There is no metaphysical chisel and hammer. Everything said and done feels like ichor but is written in vapor. You can only let it happen to you. Doomed to be raped by death.

Dogs

In the search for extraterrestrial life, at least two desires are hoped to be satisfied. One, the satisfaction of confirming that life can and has occurred elsewhere. And two, the satisfaction of being acknowledged by an intelligent life form to confirm that we are both experiencing reality. I suspect that the second also confirms the noumenon, but that’s a separate essay.

Look no further than dogs to satisfy both. I’ll explain.

Cats are close to us. Herpes is probably closer. But dogs have had the greatest spiritual and culturally symbiotic relationship to us for the longest time.

For one, life happening on another planet is arbitrary. Especially because we’re damn near certain it’s possible. Life is here, already, and we can have emotional and spiritual connections with other lifeforms right now. For two, dogs may not be as intelligent as we are but the same oxytocin courses through their brains that gives us the satisfaction we desire when searching for acknowledgment anyway. They see us, they feel us, and they evidently love us for us and not just because they know we have food.

It’s banal, the relationship between dogs and humans. That’s the greatest sin. That we let such a bond that transcends taxonomy become ordinary. Another human can articulate that we are not alone because we have each other. But dogs provide a simple version of that witnessing from a completely different branch of the tree of life. We know it’s possible to share love with a different species. That’s it. We aren’t alone, not even as a human beings because we have—and have needed—dogs.