Arte de Timo

Sometimes I forget that my perspective has changed over the years, and I forget to check where I am. My son does a great job reminding me to do that.

I painting this diptic over ten years ago when I was just out of undergrad. I had had a hidden life as an oil painter during my science studies, and these were two of the only four I completed after school. Eventually, I got around to showing these as a grad student in a show called “Scholarship Denied” with a few of my graduate school friends. The title of the show is a long story, but it was an excuse to show these old works. I ended up writing a companion text to go along with the paintings. It had never occurred to me to write anything before the show, but I realized that I needed to write this in order to finish the work. Here is that text:

When you come to the realization that everything you have done in your life, and seemingly everything that you will ever do, has only contributed to the world’s suffering and deterioration, how will you choose to live out the rest of your life?

Atonement?

Reclusion?

Delusion?

Western society, includina an increasingly globalized East, is entering an era where we will collectively and individually be forced to answer this question. The last several decades have provided us a resource surplus that has let us live in a delusional state. Our delussions have obscured the approaching dark age that will be caused by the mutually amplifying factors of resource exploitation and over population. While in this state of delusion, our societies have dissolved any sense of forward-thought, or inter-generational planning. We have maintained an antiquated and ineffective infrastructure, shed tranditions of stewardship, and unlearned our writen history.

Seeing what is, and what will be may let us predict our fate, but in each passing night, an impending darkness increasingly envelops us.

The paintings and writing pose a question about which path to travel when the light fails. The paintings were made just prior to September 11, 2001, and the writing after. I now find it eery how this question has played itself out in so many other ways since I painted them.

On September 11, OBL, in his view, struck back at an empire who had its dirty hands all over the Middle East, and one that was all too complacent in its wealth and entertainment. He gave us a choice about the future we would make for ourselves in the face of our own vulnerability. We had a choice between a reeling darkness, or one of a painful, yet passing night. Our country’s extreme ignorance of our own involvement in the Arab world, coupled with an over-confidence in our vengeful strength, made us choose a violent darkness, which still over-shadows us now.

On this day, we celebrate another visionary, MLK, who gave us another choice over 40 years ago to move out of darkness and through a passing night. I wonder about the paths we have traveled since I painted “Dark and Night.” As we lashed out at the world after September 11, 2001, we turned on ourselves, eroding our civil liberties, relinquishing parts of our democracy, and turning over immense executive power to the president. As we sought to battle this shadowy “evil” in the world, we stepped into the darkness our selves. Once there, it spread over us.

Ten years later, the middle east has moved closer to democracy, and we have moved further away from it. We have witnessed the rise of anger as our unifying thread in this country. This anger has manifest itself on the political right, as the Tea party, and the political left as the Occupy movement. In the waning years of the Lost Decade we have seen protests on our streets that haven’t been as large since the days of MLK. But those protests have not been about a rise out of racist darkness, though. Ironically, they have been about just stopping the free fall into the darkness of oppression and fear.

From Wisconsin to Tar Sands, to Occupy, these protests have been about stopping a further slide toward domination and exploitation. Where the civil rights movements were about the advancement of people, and progressive ideals, our protests have been about anger over lost control.

MLK had a dream that we would all be treated equally, and live with dignity and respect. It seems, sadly, that we chased after the first by giving up the later. Finally, ending up with neither. Yes, we, US Americans, are all equal in some ways. We are all equal under an increasingly less democratic and more authoritarian state. We are all on the verge of losing our homes, our livelihoods, and our public safety net. We are all equally threatened by pollution, global warming and natural disasters. We all can equally expect to live less healthy and shorter lives. We have become the huddled masses that we called out for all those 200 years ago, except we aren’t huddled now. We are angry, resentful, overstimulated, distracted, consumers who are moving too fast to know we are in the dark.

The last decade has shown us that we do indeed sink together. When a night was all that approached, we chose a fire in the darkness. It has shown us that we aren’t individuals enough to avoid our collective fate. (Unless, of course, we have become uber-rich, but that may just be an illusion in the end.) In ten years, we have become a mass of small chirping creatures in the shadows, fighting over scraps.

We need to close our eyes to feel a dawn, but when we choose to build a fire, a twilight always burns.

And on that note, have a great holiday.

It’s occurred to me that one of the big problems we face is that we as a country and increasingly the world can only make decisions based on an economic model. Economic models are horribly flawed, and economists would tell us that basing everything on them would be a mistake. So why then do we judge everything in terms of an investment or monetary value? The government should be in debt, that’s all it can do is spend money, and in a time when there is not much to go around the government will have to spend more. Education? It’s not an investment, so much as a goal into itself. Educated people make better citizens, partners, lovers, and brothers.

So I wonder what a post-economic model would be. This is not the same as a philanthropic endeavor, because that is still termed in economic ways. Why does giving always revolve around those without the money, and therefore considered to be in need. I know plenty of people that need a lot of emotional and psychological help who have plenty of money. If there were to be a non-profit to help those people, it would get laughed out of town.

Anyway, just a thought. Maybe I’ll expand on this as time goes.

In Kite Runner the main character has a conversation with his father where he explains that all sins can be reduced to one; do not steal. Murder is stealing a life. Blasphemy is stealing god’s holiness. Gluttony; stealing from those in need, etc. It seems reasonable enough, but the precursory idea to stealing is ownership. So if every wrong boils down to stealing, then every relationship that is wrongable boils down to ownership.

The idea of an ownership society is a mainstay of capitalism. The resounding speech in the movie  Wall Street (the original) was about an ownership society. One of Bush’s quiet campaign speeches to his big donors was about the benefits of an ownership based society. It is reasonable to say now that we live in an ownership society. Conservative forces have succeeded in boiling all public relationships down to ownership, and hence equivalent capital value.

I have heard a lot of questions lately in the various institutions in which I partake, about how we can get out from under the large foot of capitalism, which exists only to grow. The problem being that growth is exponential and needs endlessly more resources to sustain. The questions seem to stem from the realization that the resources for growth have run out.

When I ponder the question, my mind swirls around to Native American Indian practices of ownerless societies. We all learn about the great purchases of the 1800′s from the American Indians, and many of us even learn about the truth that the American Indians didn’t have a concept of ownership. In essence, the land was stolen, but only in the frame that the land could be owned.

But land was only the relivant example of ownerlessness. In a society without ownership, all that dictated possession was use and non use. Some of us still get glimpses of what this is like. If you live in a big family who is very close, and/or maybe of African or Latin decent, then everything in the house is communally owned. I’ve felt it a little, and I have to say it is a little unnerving feeling like there is no privacy (an ownership of space and experience,) or security in keeping my things,  but in the end of the day, if all is done well, this borrow-at-will lifestyle has no impact on comfort or privacy.

The benefits of ownerlessness seem to unfold out of very deep value systems. If we all possessed items based on use, nothing would be left idle. We would need less resources. Taking/trading/possessing  things would be founded in relationships, not rules of ownership. Mobility would increase. Indebtedness would disappear. Many of our urban stresses would fade.

This is all a Utopian ideal of course, and a romantic notion of Native American Indians, particularly since we know that different Native groups were always in a state of war over resources. People are people after all. There is something to be learned though.

The big underlying ideas is the sense of relationship, both to others who might possess a thing and to the thing itself.

If possession is a negotiation then we would be forced to empathize with each other and be communocentric. If I want to use something, I would have to think about who else might have to use it, and what impact it would have on my community; something that is COMPLETELY disappearing from our shift to total capitalism.

If we only think about ourselves and none of the consequences of our use of resources and capital, then even laws become a matter of incentives. (If breaking the law is a bigger benefit that obeying, then we will break the law.) This point, as we all might know, has settled in as the founding value of American life. And if laws are negotiable, then so is ownership. And, without security of ownership, as capitalistic economic theory states, then social systems can not function and grow. Capitalism seems to fail on its own motivations.

So the questions are valid; how do we get out from under a system that is self destructing by its own tenets of self interest and ownership?  Oppressive enforcement of ownership laws? Escalating violent struggles for resources? Ownerlessness? Empathy?

There is a reason why we need to make conservation a legislative matter and why free market solutions don’t work to lower waste and overuse. That reason has to do with  how conservation and consumption work. The two are quantitatively different, even though qualitatively they are similar. Conservation and consumption behave in inverse ways. Not to mention all the incentives of our economic system directed toward more consumption.

Here is my description of this issue, and I think it makes sense. The range of consumption per capita is quite large in this country. I would say that range may be as large as a factor of 50, and not in the fractions as it might seem. Lets take my new neighborhood for example. My family consists of 2.25 people and we use about 5 units of water which is about what a single person uses, we drive a Prius, and a small pickup and don’t put many miles or our vehicles. We compost and recycle most of our household waste.  Nearly every electronics product we have is energy star rated, and we don’t use anything other than our computers (mostly laptops) for any length of time on most days… OK you get the picture, we are near bottom of energy/resource usage.

Our neighbors are on the other extreme for the same demographics of course (this means we are only looking at middle class home owners, not the very rich, or the poor.) They are 3.75 people I would say (parents, adult child and teenager.) They have 3 vehicles, two of which are SUV’s, a house more than double the size of ours, a garbage can more than double ours, AC unit  (which runs in the winter sometimes!), massive entertainment system in their garage that gets used heavily every day, etc.

So if you start to add things up, you start to see that they use double and triple what we do instead of the 3.75/2.25 ratio that you might expect. What I am saying, is that family culture and individual lifestyle, because of the consumerist freedom we share, can allow people of similar means to have wildly different impact on our greater society and environment through resource usage.

If we need people to use less in order to save ourselves, common sense and market incentives won’t get people to change. We must be faced by unwavering certainty of an outcome, whether it be fines and jail time for breaking the law, or  an unwavering core value that is backed by drastic consequence (i.e belief in the wrath of God, or understanding of climate science, or a vindictive relative, etc.). Humans have to be forced to change, like any other animal on the planet.

“Life on the edge;” “the cutting edge;” we’ve all heard of the “edge,” and it seems like an attractive place, but the change that this edge-ness represents isn’t just the novelty our bored heads crave. There is a lot at stake when you travel to the edge and back, or work on the bleeding edge. Get too close, and we cut our selves, or … fly off the cliff.

As individuals we seem to seek barriers to break, and triumphs to win. We want to struggle with the unknown, or the seemingly unknown, to conquer some primordial fear. Somehow our quests prove to ourselves that we are more than our impulses and instincts, but alas that drive to face down fear is just that, isn’t it? An impulse.

I’ve always found it odd that the things people fear are the simply overcome things in life; spiders, snakes, heights, enclosures, to name a few. With even a somewhat evolved mind, none of those things pose any threat to our individual safety or or collective well being, yet the phobias mingle on  in generation after generation of people.

Our instincts control us in so many ways, and we are always in a battle with our own minds to feel evolved and carry on reasoned thinking. At any moment we can fall victim to ourselves and become someone else, and maybe someone less, for a moment or for a hundred moments. When it happens, its hard to know what we’ll do next. That scares us.  Maybe we race through a changing street light, or yell at a waitress, or often much worse. We all have that in us, and those moments pepper our lives from the moment we enter the world to the moment we leave it.

We are a hoard of individuals with multiple personalities, and we are all on the edge. No one knows when one of us will be cut or will fall off the other side, so it keeps us on that edge. There’s excitement in it, like a game of Russian roulette, but our collective minds grow weary of the stress. Life on the edge robs us of any sense of solid ground.

The games we play mascaraed as an evolved existence when we live out there… on the edge.

Where do we go when we’ve only learned to walk in a straight line, often pushed to do so by the mob around us, and in our path lies a mortal challenge?

This post represents a new start for this chronicle. It is also a long time coming that I reflect on the economic turmoil we are experiencing. If you read artedetimo v.1, you know that I have lamented the problems that have founded the economic mess for a while, but since all the stuff has hit the fan, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it. It has been one thing to see the gathering storm, but it is another to see where we’re going to come out.

One thing for sure is that the old captains; the economists, investors, bankers and businessmen, that had no vision and have no vision of where we could be going, need to be removed from power. A strong point I have tried to articulate in the past has been that in the last 20 to 30 years we have increasingly traded long term value for short term gain. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all times, but when that gain is used to let s drive around big cars, buy house we can’t afford, and push for high dividends to pad our retirement funds, it has lead to where we are. This mess has been a long time coming.

Its odd now when I flip through the news shows I hear a lot of talk about all sorts of 20-30 year trends; maybe a little too late in my head. Its nice to hear now, but problem was that we should have been picking up on these trends 5-10 years ago when anyone who was looking could see them coming. That’s not how things work is it.

The country needs vision. Obama is trying to provide that vision, but he’s butting up against a whole class of people who won’t be able to let go of the way things are. It’s only when our financial society is pushed aside that we will see a new way forward. I can’t blame anyone though; you live much of the last 2 or 3 decades like you are running the show, you start to think that’s how things are. Society in the US since WWII has been more of a creative man’s cave, despite the man in the gray suit and the middle manager society’s logistical dominance. The problem solvers and innovators have always been the source of our greatness no matter how many layers of corruption, or bureaucracy or finacialism covered them up.

Go back to Lee IA coca. Was he a suit? The auto industry has been in this situation before, but last time there was a visionary left in teh industry to pull it out… I don’t see one today do you?

Steve Jobs? Apple despite its tiny share of the computing world has been the point of the spear head since its foundation. You ask the business world about them and they laugh, but if you think of computer history, its criss-crossed by the style-is-equal-to-practicality visions of Apple. Is this going down that pc v. Apple road? I don’t think so. My point is only that the PC’s type is good for business makers, the Apple type is good for making businesses.

I think this idea of imagining what society, culture and our relationship to nature COULD be, is at the core of why I write this blog. So many of the public figures out there leading our institutions have so little imagination its frightening. I’m not sure if it has been beaten out of them by life or what, but it is something that plagues us in all parts of life. We, both our leaders an us, get caught up in the limitations of the way things are, and can’t see past the trees.

Alas, this post is only a teaser, or a re-starting point. It is where I put my writing on a path that is line with what my work and passions are about.

I hope to weave this thread of the social forest here. I will be presenting my art work along the way, which follows that theme. I’ll post the work of others who use their imagination to get us somewhere beyond the dead end we live in. Above all, I hope to spark the imagination in all its forms within my readers; you.