March 21 - 5 of Wands

The five of wands, a grotto dedicated to William Blake (1757-1827). At the top, his portrait is surrounded by biographic details: born in Soho, London, Romantic revolutionary, Forerunner of modern anarchism, and distrusted materialism and the corruptive nature of power. Smoke rises from flames that appear to take the form of two human figures below, next to the words artist and writer, on the left cloud of smoke it says "mystical energy free from external restrictions" and on the right it says "Against dogmatic religions". Below, tongues of purple flames list his beliefs and influences too numerous to write out here. A pool in the center shows that he influenced Aldous Huxley, the beat poets, and the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s. A final wisp of smoke along the bottom shows this quote: The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realties of intellect from which all the passions emanate."

Conflict, here represented by one of the OG weirdos William Blake.

An eternal topic for me is, of course, the role of art amidst culture, politics, and technology... a term, starting in part with the romantics, that expresses such an absolute alliance to autonomy and hostility to use-value that it inevitably attracts conflict-- about what it should do, should mean, whether it's irredeemably individualistic or wasteful to pursue...

I have to wrestle with these questions and resistances to be able to express my own values. Again the Adorno idea-- if everything can be known empirically/materially, then why doesn't knowledge have a philosopher's stone like power to persuade and enact change? Do we just sit on our hands and say the world "should" do as we say? Or do we have to consider that our enlightenment may seem just as naive and wrongheaded as beliefs and actions throughout the enlightenment of the 1700s seem to us now? How do we get in touch with what we don't even know we don't know?

I guess that's my personal justification for art that surprises me, expresses something at once alien but clarifying... it puts me back in my place.