2003-04-14 - 5:41 p.m.

What is beauty? Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us a joy and afterward a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one's sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment a timelessness, a repose - which is why we speak of beauty as being eternal?

This is the artists job: to create beauty. Beauty may take many forms. One might speak of a terrible beauty, for example. But creating this poetry for the canvas is what separates the artist from the illustrator or the propagandist. One can take a picture of a sunset, but it isn't the sunset. One doesn't view painting with the eyes any more than one hears music with the ears. It is done with the heart. After all, any animal is able to view what we view, we alone respond aesthetically. Viewing art with the heart is just nystagmus. The artist both forms and reflects the world they live in. Many times that world is a beautiful, horrible place. A place of loneliness, despair, and pain. A place where sewer rats eat the aborted fetuses of the predoomed. A place where the great unwashed masses compete with the sick and numbing depressions of the wealthy. A place where violence and death is a growth industry; where dying and killing takes many forms: genocide, homicide, parenticide, patricide, matricide, regicide, tyrannicide, vaticide, giganticide, infanticide, aborticide, feticide, pesticide, rodenticide, vermicide, filaricide, insecticide, microbicide, germicide, fungicide, herbicide, and that old favorite of the artist, suicide. Man's ceaseless creativity has produced the scaffold, block, guillotine, ax, iron maiden, stake, cross, gallows, gibbet, electric chair (ever cook a hot dog with electricity?), gas chamber, stocks, trebuchet, cucking stool, whipping post, wooden horse, treadmill, crank, cat-o-nine-tails, garrote, burning at the stake, shooting, defenestration, poisoning, stoning, bastinado, truncheoning, cudgeling, spanking, rap on the knuckles, box on the ears, slap in the face, jailing, imprisonment, keelhauling, tar-and-feathering, railriding, picketing, the rack, impalement, dismemberment, strappado, estrapade, grill, wheel, thumbscrew, iron heal, scarpines, the bed of Procrustes, decorticate . . .

The gallery finds admiring young jock girls wild eyed innocents observadly observing with hope in watertight jeans and leotard, hair in bob or pigtail sitting in xeroxed groups budding sexual and imaginations and desires racing through their own imaginary heads. Honied sarcasm rolls off his tongue, his own social retardedness disabling him from anything but the most clumsy advances. Coving an almost paralyzing shyness with extravagant, boisterous, infantile behavior. Covering up with the paper facade of athletic prowess to fool everyone with the prayer and hope that if he could only fool himself, then perhaps he could fool himself into believing in himself. Instead of being a fool. Hatred of mankind and self free floating, expanding and contracting bio-rythmatically, lunarly, numerologically, karmicly, parentally, hormonally. Too much sugar, starches, caffeine, cocaine, alcohol, stress . . . headache, heartache, heartburn, heartsick, and heartbroken; constipation, sexual naivete, and worn out frustration. The strange disorienting world filled with with strange kids with thick lips, dumpy figures with oversized heads, and prominent teeth; infantile slobs, deranged adults, receding hairlines, and almond eyes. Tented housewives bottled blond in sandals and beer bellied rednecks with bulbous and pimple scared noses with crewcut and NRA baseball behatted birdlegged and assless in Levi's. Sad doll faced unmarried women in late twenty's or early thirties on the latest diet lamenting that life has never given them a break. Indigenous homilies with red eyes and scabbed chankers jangling silver in their pockets. Beefy blonds with skinny mousy boyfriends. Young hepcats in leather, multiple piercings and dye haired moused and spiked. And generic and incontinent and steel wheelchairs and salmon tongues darting out reptile like out of dank catfood smelling toothless mouths and ripe maggot filled cunts of blue and black and and grey scabbed and oozing creamy yellow butterlike pus from picked and cracked scabs, scabs picked and eaten autocanabilistically with black and bloodstained fingers with nails cracked and broken and torn to the quick. The virginal and moviestar beautiful seventeen-year-old Doestoevsky reading doe eyed sparkled eyed brunette with a quick smile and herpes and and the string of miscarriages and abortions. Fat Mex chicks in tight black pants, tight sleeveless shirt with white brastraps showing with kids: one on her, one in her, one in hand. Tall blond brakeman types, all types, looking for a hero or a cause or god or self realization or a leader or a meaning; the isolation and madness. The open belly of the skeleton that holds the revolving dogs, black belts, winds howling over clay pipes and black cigars of the pacific membrane, stretched, stretching the open festering sore, the baby nailed to the door, open to the icy frozen sunlight, drool down the director's chin below yellow and black film covered crooked broken rotting teeth, the stench of the pest houses and catacombs with hundreds of freshly rotting corpses. The simmering coolness now played against the riddled impotent marquee as it scratched out my name in bloody lettering with spastic hands. The cool intensity and absolute indifference which everyone paid me hounded me like fame and clung to me like stink on shit. Don't look, don't look away. Don't acknowledge, don't ignore. But always smile. The smile one give to the hangman. Think and smile one gives to death. Smile plastic with beads on forehead and maybe it will go away . . .

The splitting and cracking interiors, dazzling, noxious purples and greens, abortion pink and vomit yellow. The walls in my skull echoing and reflecting the urban landscape. A landscape of factories, electric saws, industrial noise, empty buildings, barbed wire, churning industrial slavery. A landscape of tortures, cults, vaginectomys, wars, unusual murders (especially by children and psychopaths), diseases, amputations, horrible revolting metasomatism, mutant animals made out of bits of chickens and rabbits sewn together. Like a strange spiderweb my mind suddenly becomes pure and clear and the humor becomes sidesplitting. I dash off a letter of congratulations to the editors of the Color Atlas of Forensic Pathology for their tremendous humor and great graphics! Oh, that golden Tuesday smeared and misunderstood and no space to move, blurting out insensitive and ugly things because all that is left after the thrashing and spewing are weedy fragments and slug bait. Meat-and-maggots-through-the-mail, stinking parcels curling edges turning brown and blistering, very healthy but horribly revolting. Mental suicide and violent self destruction. The technically sophisticated perversions of the wealthy white collar white. My own mind a theater of simulated warfare where machines run amuck in all directions preplanted explosive charges multiple warhead targeting obsessive morbid inventiveness; the transmission of specific ideas and the repeating of meaningless words over and over only to get confused and so begin again. The womb pierced with a rusty knitting needle, the bag of brown and black and red liquid the consistency of gravy leaching over the graveyard of the industrial revolution. Constant slaughter: The pigeon eating centrifuge, mechanical scorpions, face stabbing conveyer blades, the fragrant scent of the auto-de-f�. The umbilical cord is cut. The mating of meat and machinery, a robot with flesh parts, that is, an organic robot. But for some reason dead things make people feel funny. However, my thinking results from a series of chemical combinations in which I collect information, verify it, and come to some sort of conclusion. Like I've always spent alot of time thinking of all the awful things that could happen to me and then the structure of my mind starts to fall apart and I can't think effectively anymore. It's like sometimes when you're dreaming and you didn't know it until something wakes you up and then later you're not sure if what happened really happened or if it was a dream or happened in a dream or part of it and part of it was in a dream and part of it real and you're not really sure which when you think about it and then try to figure it out later. It's sorta like when people get in an accident and they say, It was dream-like. Everything was in slow motion. They're not really sure about it. Like, I knew someone once who would say something happened but I knew that it didn't happen! That person just dreamed the whole thing. At least I think I knew a person like that. And I think stuff like that also happens to people who take too many drugs, or bad drugs, or the wrong kind of drugs or the set and setting is wrong. Or maybe they're crazy. Only crazy people don't know that they're crazy. The brain does the thinking and when there's a problem, it's the last to know. So someone mad doesn't think they're mad. But a healthy person doesn't think they're mad either. And no one can say what madness is anyway, at least on the fringes of neurosis, so all this makes for a great deal of confusion. And then there is the group who question their sanity. Since neither the crazy or the sane question their sanity, what side of the fence do the fence sitter belong on? That obviously leaves us with the conclusion that there is no such thing as insanity, just different ways to meet the challenge of life. The way to address life takes different forms in different cultures and gives rise to the various moral structures therein. When the world becomes as small as it is now, and a country becomes as heteromerous as ours, then the question becomes not what is the correct or right moral structure or value system, but rather is there a correct moral or value system? Once one questions mores, they cease to exist because questioning means doubt. And doubt means grey area. Mores have to be absolute, right or wrong, black and white. For example, most believe pornography is wrong. Only they don't know what pornography is. This was the dilemma of Henry Miller: art or pornography? Once it was obscene, now it's literature. The great hidden secret is that it's possible to be both art and pornography at the same time. And that is the problem the moral definers of our society have, grey area: art as pornography, pornography as art.

The real pornography lies in the mind waste of television, culture, automated thinking or non automated thinking as Pavlovian response to political and moral stimuli: ring and drool into the poisoned showers and fed to the ovens without a whimper but with the frozen ridiculous late twentieth smile and blank eyes of the zombie, the hypnotized, the brainwashed, the automated fool slipping double time into forgotten dust . . .

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