The answer?

“The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without.”-Ernest Hemingway

the brush, the gun

Lately I've been wondering whether my urge to create powerful pictures--contorted bodies, angry faces, scenes of intense struggle--that all this brutality somehow stems from some subconscious need to compensate. I am Nik, a scrawny, middle-class white kid, but in my studio I am god. I can create anything; I can destroy anything. I am in complete control.

Could pictures, and paintings be an an extension of one's masculinity?--not in a physical sense, but an intellectual sense. It's as though somehow the artist, via his art, is making both making an assertion and a threat. You are showing people what your mind is capable of. You are warning people "I don't even need to touch you; I could destroy you with my mind."

Of course not all artists fall under this category, but many do. Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso are excellent examples. Picasso, for example, used his violently distorted paintings of women as an misogynistic assertion of dominance and Bacon's work (similarly brutal) dealt with his deep homosexuality and obsession with the macabre.

...heavy stuff--a combination of art and psychology. but fascinating.

Metro

The man in the library

stares at porn.

page after page,

chatting on

adult sites.

He has a bushy moustache,

baggy cheeks

and thick wavy grey hair

This man.

Everything

a rapist should look like,

and then some.

I watch him sitting

anxiously at his chair,

knees swaying, rubbing his hands.

awaiting each message

with deranged hawkish eyes

and I can't help but feel I

am watching some

poor wretched animal

at work. Doing only what he

knows

David

My roommate David is stuck at this wasteland campus over Thanksgiving,

to save money presumably, or maybe his family doesn't celebrate it much.

This Oakland boy, he just "wants to go home like everyone else," as his facebook says,

and it breaks my heart. It really does

I guess

most of us will grow old

and die chasing rainbows

reflected in shiny hardwood

floors

and sleek granite

countertops.

nirvana costs

an arm,

a leg,

and it's

worth

every

last

penny

This is Bukowski at his best:

Let It Enfold You

either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you

when I was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb, unsophisticated.
I had bad blood, a twisted
mind, a precarious
upbringing.

I was hard as granite, I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.

I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted, jailed,in and
out of fights, in and out
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at, I had no male
freinds,

I changed jobs and
cities, I hated holidays,
babies, history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.

peace an happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
an
addled
mind.

but as I went on with
my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passage through
any number of
women-it gradually
began to occur to
me
that I wasn't different

from the
others, I was the same,

they were all fulsome
with hatred,
glossed over with petty
greivances,
the men I fought in
alleys had hearts of stone.
everybody was nudging,
inching, cheating for
some insignificant
advantage,
the lie was the
weapon and the
plot was
empty,
darkness was the
dictator.

cautiously, I allowed
myself to feel good
at times.
I found moments of
peace in cheap
rooms
just staring at the
knobs of some
dresser
or listening to the
rain in the
dark.
the less I needed
the better I
felt.

maybe the other life had worn me
down.
I no longer found
glamour
in topping somebody
in conversation.
or in mounting the
body of some poor
drunken female
whose life had
slipped away into
sorrow.

I could never accept
life as it was,
i could never gobble
down all its
poisons
but there were parts,
tenous magic parts
open for the
asking.

I re formulated
I don't know when,
date, time, all
that
but the change
occured.
something in me
relaxed, smoothed
out.
i no longer had to
prove that I was a
man,

I did'nt have to prove
anything.

I began to see things:
coffee cups lined up
behind a counter in a
cafe.
or a dog walking along
a sidewalk.
or the way the mouse
on my dresser top
stopped there
with its body,
its ears,
its nose,
it was fixed,
a bit of life
caught within itself
and its eyes looked
at me
and they were
beautiful.
then- it was
gone.

I began to feel good,
I began to feel good
in the worst situations
and there were plenty
of those.
like say, the boss
behind his desk,
he is going to have
to fire me.

I've missed too many
days.
he is dressed in a
suit, necktie, glasses,
he says, "I am going
to have to let you go"

"it's all right" I tell
him.

He must do what he
must do, he has a
wife, a house, children.
expenses, most probably
a girlfreind.

I am sorry for him
he is caught.

I walk onto the blazing
sunshine.
the whole day is
mine
temporailiy,
anyhow.

(the whole world is at the
throat of the world,
everybody feels angry,
short-changed, cheated,
everybody is despondent,
dissillusioned)

I welcomed shots of
peace, tattered shards of
happiness.

I embraced that stuff
like the hottest number,
like high heels, breasts,
singing,the
works.

(dont get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems just for
the sake of
itself-
this is a shield and a
sickness.)

The knife got near my
throat again,
I almost turned on the
gas
again
but when the good
moments arrived
again
I did'nt fight them off
like an alley
adversary.
I let them take me,
i luxuriated in them,
I bade them welcome
home.
I even looked into
the mirror
once having thought
myself to be
ugly,
I now liked what
I saw,almost
handsome, yes,
a bit ripped and
ragged,
scares, lumps,
odd turns,
but all in all,
not too bad,
almost handsome,
better at least than
some of those movie
star faces
like the cheeks of
a baby's
butt.

and finally I discovered
real feelings of
others,
unheralded,
like lately,
like this morning,
as I was leaving,
for the track,
i saw my wife in bed,
just the
shape of
her head there
(not forgetting
centuries of the living
and the dead and
the dying,
the pyramids,
Mozart dead
but his music still
there in the
room, weeds growing,
the earth turning,
the toteboard waiting for
me)
I saw the shape of my
wife's head,
she so still,
I ached for her life,
just being there
under the
covers.

I kissed her in the,
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside,
got into my marvelous
car,
fixed the seatbelt,
backed out the
drive.
feeling warm to
the fingertips,
down to my
foot on the gas
pedal,
I entered the world
once
more,
drove down the
hill
past the houses
full and empty
of
people,
I saw the mailman,
honked,
he waved
back
at me.

Desolation Angels

"And I had raged purely among rocks and snow...raged at the hundred mile cyclorama of snowcapped mountains under the blue sky of day and the starry splendor of night-- Raged and been a fool" from Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels

It feels good to read Kerouac after quite a hiatus. After a sleepless night, I'm in the mood. At the edge of sleep deprivation the brain stops questioning, processing . It casts off the shackles of rationality. Enjoyment and feeling become paramount. I suppose this looseness of the mind is necessary--a prerequisite--to read his work. One must be of an analogous state of mind. When the puzzle pieces match, you see the picture. Kerouac in his naked grandeur. This is why those who dismiss him do so. They are simply not in the right state of mind.

"I sit there sipping my last possible shot, dizzy and crazy. It don't make no sense, the world is too magical, I better go back to my rock"

More than anything else, reading Keroauc's work is vicariously living a life, a world as colored, vivid and intense as nothing most people will ever feel. It isn't without pain, or melancholy, but it is all beautiful and it is a big breath of fresh air in this (at-times-stifling) environment. Then again, who I am I to complain?

Life didn't deal me no "complete martyr deck."

5:09AM

sleep:

come ravage me

midterm at 8:00am

this spells

trouble

Somebody once told me

that I have sad eyes

The Method

Creativity is a tricky thing to pinpoint-- it's often said that a wide diversity of experience is

a prerequisite. The events, images, people, memories in a person's life--they all become associations, associations that then become new ideas. Combining new things is called creativity.

However experiences--especially new sensory experiences--can be overwhelming. Overwhelming to the point where they paralyze the associative part of one's brain. They force the mind into a state of passive observation. Occupied with adjusting, observing and surviving, it's hard to create much of anything--and for most people this is okay. They enjoy staying busy--the constant assault of people and places, the eternal distraction of modern life prevents boredom. However, they spend little time actually digesting, enjoying and reflecting on life--they're too busy swallowing it.

I believe boredom is necessary component of creativity. It pulls you away from distraction, forcing you into either calm reflectivity or restless agitation--both states conducive to the creative process. Think of Charles Bukowski, whose frustration with the monotony of his work at a post office nearly drove him insane, but also provided the impetus for some of the greatest and most moving poetry of the 20th century.

Anyways, I guess what I'm getting at is that there exists a sweet-spot. Somewhere between boredom and fascination, between immersion and isolation, exists a deep and powerful creativity. I plan on finding it.