The Ashcan School

There are certain works of art, philosophical concepts, historical periods, and ways of looking at the world that I return to periodically with undiminished fascination.

One of the lights in my life - a street lamp lighting the way - is the work of the "Ashcan" artists. Beyond an intense interest (as if returning to the homeland or the bosom of the family) that I can hardly explain, the artwork of the Ashcan school embodies a way of seeing that I believe is instructive in how to live; or, at least, it evokes questions that are important to ask.

The Ashcan artists were largely equivalent with the early "naturalist" writers in the United States -- Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and so on. They depicted mostly urban life in a manner consciously devoid of artifice and found living and breathing tissue in the details of the streets, in loneliness, in standing in the rain...waiting, walking solitary among the crowds, moving in the grimy alleys and sidewalks in the shadows of dark buildings, staring alone at the turbulent harbor -- in a city where there was wilderness not long before and where the loneliness of life distilled to the five senses permeated and transformed the physical place itself.

John Sloan, my favorite of the group, found palpable urban vitality in the "drab, shabby, happy, sad human life."

The questions (some are ancient questions) that pose themselves are: Is the real and true always beautiful?; Is living in the moment a door into perception?; Were the artists exulting in the reality of poverty and the fringes (only partially and confusedly assimilated) of a compulsive commercial culture?; Were they producing works of art offering the possibility of living fully in the moment as we must live to kindle the fire necessary to face the realities of the world?

Across the Fire

This blog, as you may have surmised, is a matter of gathering fragments that may be useful in sustaining us in what we are beginning to encounter. Yes, I believe climate change will bring about global social and economic collapse. Ross Gelbspan has been writing about climate change (specifically global warming) for a few years. He has proposed and advocated solutions to the problem, but now he and others are recognizing the disaster we are facing.

Interestingly, and probably inevitably, Mr. Gelbspan came to the conclusion that environmental and social collapse will certainly happen at very much the same time I realized that we are fooling ourselves to hope for another future. I imagine many others reached the inevitable judgment at approximately the same time as a result of seeing progressively accumulating results of scientific research coupled with the always astonishing extremes of irrationality that many people - possibly most people - will embrace in order to blind themselves to frightening facts.

Arryism is my little project to break through the prisons of mind and spirit, to filter the medium of life into its essential and true elements, elements that are necessary to the moral soul facing disaster and even death (always, with a slight turning,...life).

Arryism will continue, but I am beginning another blog which I call "Across the Fire". It has no content yet, but its purpose will be to analyze and gather the practical means with which to encounter what will appear to us to be violent and dispiriting chaos. We have to start talking about these things and create a cadre of courage, of heart, of intelligence that will lead and move inexorably "across the fire".

I didn't want to reach these conclusions or lead a life incessantly burdened by them, but I can't escape the evidence or look the other way. To me, that blindness would be no life at all. Can we create a community of consciousness and courage that will not wither before chaos but will gather strength to live or die?

Time / Act

I have thought for many years that much of the ineffectiveness, violence, and lost quality of modern life has to do with the inability of people to live with their selves within time or evolving reality. Their relationship with the evolving world is crude, stuck, confused. They are unable to appropriately act at the appropriate time. They are uncomfortable inorganic foreign bodies in an organic and elegant medium.

The wheels of the day, the month, the seasons were of vital and conscious importance in the lives of those who lived in a closer spiritual proximity to the earth, but we stand like frightened and impotent idiots trying to figure out what to do. When we act, the effort is derived from a source of authority (the ego?) that has no experience in being a part of the movement and relations of the day, the month, the seasons, the year; so the act is usually destructive. Evolving reality in the medium of time is all there is.

Freedom is impossible under such conditions. Life itself diminished and slowly dies.

True and Only Heaven

The picture I posted in the last entry was taken about 1966 or 1967. Today, the lushness and health of the forest has diminished significantly due, I believe, to the early (but rapidly accumulating) effects of global warming. The forest is slowly dying.

The meadow in the distance now contains the "estates" of a number of investment bankers, insurance executives, computer entrepreneurs, and the usual wanabees.

Beyond the left side of the picture is a state highway and a Wal-Mart.

When I was there a few years ago, everybody was wired into the grid. It was almost comical to go into a grocery store and hear people apparently talking to themselves whatever aisle I looked down. Of course, they were on their "cells".

How long until we reach the shining city, the true and only heaven?

Random thoughts / seeds

Random thoughts (because I can't seem to get it together blogwise, although I have do have some objectives here.)

-- Someplace I read that modern culture - I mean especially from the mid-1600's on - has been characterized by the notion that "If it moves, subdue it or kill it." In other words, everything must be in its place in the grand system or it must be forcibly put in its place - dead or alive. The point is to see the design - scientific, industrial, economic - and prevent the pesky critters of actual life from messing up the vision. The trouble is, eventually everything is in its place and dead.

-- The three horsemen of the apocalypse are greed, hypocrisy, and willful blindness. Separate, they can be isolated and controlled. Together they are a malignant cancer.

-- There is a kind of zen spirit in American work. Not so much anymore, perhaps, but in American tradition and still powerful below the surface. The mechanic, the rancher, the farmer - iconic figures of awe based on their ability to live in the moment, in their work. So, here we have tactile living-in-the-moment (the essence of life in most wisdom philosophy) that could be useful in building a culture able to sustain itself but that is unconscious of the larger world and often an end in itself (which, paradoxically considering its basis in how to live, can be and is often deadly.)

-- Above is an old b&w picture taken from the "old wagon trail" near where I lived and grew up in Colorado. No place of earth means more to me. Whatever I say or do contains that place.

Breath of life

Sidney Pollard stated in 1986 that "the only possible alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair."

Yet, is it not true that the core of modern sensibility is despair at the sense of impermanence, that "all that is solid melts into air"? There is no story, no ending. Suicide itself has a certain appeal. It satisfies the sense of ending, the confirmation that there was a story with a beginning middle and end.

[I believe I detect an impulse toward suicide in much of the deadly irrational view of "free market capitalism" which has become notable mainly for a free-fall over the cliff to planetary suicide and death of the soul (which is the death of human existence).]

Nevertheless, the sense of floating in a meaningless cloud and having no sense of time (largely because we believe the deception that we are exempt from the judgment of time) and that there is nothing to grasp other than the ephemeral and unsatisfying sensations designed by those who gain most from the "rehabilitation of desire", is general in our culture - an increasingly global culture - and we miss a question that was always on the mind of our ancestors, "How should nations conduct themselves under sentence of death?" How often is this question pondered particularly as we are facing catastrophic global climate change? The theories and propaganda of progress have made us less than men, less than women and blind to primary questions, let alone realities, unable to gaze directly into the void or to stand up in the world.

Christopher Lasch has an interesting historical perspective on the matter. It was the "moral rehabilitation of desire" that opened the way to unsatiable appetites and fueled the commercial engine. "Human needs came to be seen not as natural but as historical - hence unsatiable." But human needs are natural, so we are off on a very rugged and blind path.

"Private vices became public virtues." Isn't it clear why the worldview of progress is irrational and how rationality itself rises from the earth and is enfolded in the human soul? I will add to Lasch's comment and say, "Private irrationality became public rationality", a condition that is in itself irrational and destructive of the soul. (I hope I will make it clear in subsequent postings why I think the "soul" is a useful concept and how I specifically define it. Suffice it to say for now that it consists of the palpable relations of humans to the earth, physical and biological evolution, and the inner/outer relationship that constitutes existence. It is deeply and essentially rational.)

So, we find it difficult or impossible to conceive of full realities and of the milestones of time as we stew in an irrational and existential cage. At the very time we need to embrace the ancient virtues, our character is lacking and we find ourselves unable to fully picture our situation with any clarity or strength of mind or to face it heroically or tragically - "incapable of defending or revenging ourselves."

Shock Doctrine

My plan was to begin closely analyzing the "alternate tradition" from many angles, and I hoped to post a wide-angle piece last week to get started, but I'm reading Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" and can't put it down (exclusive of the fact that I need to get it back to the library by Wednesday where there is a long waiting list for it. )

I concur with what seemed to be progressive hype. It is a magnificent book in terms of subject (of utmost importance) and fine, in-depth journalism.

It documents the mainstream tradition of progress gone utterly irrational and stupidly rapturous, the driving force of which is an unshakable conviction that the power of elite corporatism (they call it "free market capitalism") is the ultimate goal of history and is good (they saw it and "it was good"); so good, in fact, that it must displace all other ways of life by whatever means possible. (Shock and violence have proven effective.)

When hypocrisy is accepted and out-of-control, it is amazing what people can believe and do.

From the perspective of another tradition, the feverish "fun" that the power elite is having looks like destructive childishness and desperation, and the whole edifice of skyscapers, beach resorts, five-star hotels, and private jets appears as a horde of glittering junk gathered by crass and cloddish barbarians.