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[tycal12345]

Poems

Computers Kill Heroes

Knowledge Work is An Abstract, Bodiless Void

Essays

Music is Not a Sound

[tycal12345]

Why You Will Fail at Creating True Art

The downfall of human beings is their unquenchable thirst for instruction.

How to…

Ten ways to…

Seven habits of…

Humans crave the instruction manual, instead of seeking the ultimate Truth about their craft or discipline.

Even artists, the most creative among us, will do this.

Why go to art school?

There is nothing to learn.

In fact, the more you imbibe from an instructor at a school, the more you will have to unlearn, and therefore the longer it will take to Create what you most desire.

It will be argued that one must learn “craft” and “techniques.” That the artist has to hone his skills.

But isn’t that what everyone else is doing?

If all it took was to watch an online video or attend an art school or music school in order to be Great, then more truly Great artists would exist.

Consider that each year, young men and women earn roughly:

- 25,000 fine arts degrees - 14,000 music degrees - 7,000 theater degrees - 6,000 film degrees

If we add up these numbers and multiply them over the decades, that would include some millions of “art degree” holders. How many of these degree holders have achieved true artistic Greatness, let alone commercial success?

Very few.

The story of Siddharta, the Buddha, and his encounter with the ascetics in the forest serves as a testament to this fact. These so-called experts had spent years in meditation and self-denial, yet they were nowhere near attaining Enlightenment.

Only when Siddharta went off the established path, finding his own way, did he sit beneath the bodhi tree and reach Enlightenment.

Failure is not simply falling down but never reaching one's goals. And the reason behind this failure is the human tendency to search for instructions: “Tell me how.” “Show me the way.”

Here is the truth:

There is no way.

[tycal12345]

Computers Kill Heroes

The computer is a distorted rainbow prism —

a technicolor rave where an undercurrent of MDMA washes over neurons.

The modern citizen sees himself reflected in social media — fed by it, suckling its nectar — an illusion, a chimera, a flash of ego in the night. This present tense digital experience feeds his soul — fleetingly, desperately, like lollipops dangling above cherub hands.

Man has created for himself a broken, fractured mirror of culture — where the mediocre are praised and the exceptional are ostracized.

The Hero, once the center of culture, now exists gamified, lilting and prancing in the dark, a flamboyant fairy child with a Cheshire grin.

We once were mighty soldiers on unsung battlefields, now we struggle one pixel at a time.  

The perspicacious man, alert and wild, is no more, entranced by technologists and pornographers both.

[tycal12345]

Music is Not a Sound

It's the 21st century. Why do people still buy and listen to vinyl records?

Human beings are physical creatures. Music, like sex, requires the physical experience to feel real. 

At the end of the day, we want something tangible, something to associate with the object of our desire. 

We want not merely the airy quality of art as an idea, but the rational and relational quantity that is the object on our shelf. 

A vinyl record is that literal touchstone for music, a look and touch and smell that grounds the music to us, reminds us of why we liked the tunes in the first place. 

Music without the physical is mere pornography, a shadow of the experience at best. 

It's easy to dismiss record collecting as a nostalgic affectation. A pastime of bored hipsters. But the practice implies something deep about us. Homo sapiens long for the physical, despite our cognitive and imaginative natures.

Future music technologies will have to provide this physicality, an experience that the current tech — Spotify, et al. — fails to provide. We’ve found ourselves in an algorithm-driven music universe, where the compulsion to “skip” is the most effort we’ll put into our participation in this art form. 

During the pandemic of 2020, vinyl record sales boomed. $626 million in profit — surpassing CD’s — rolled into the pockets of vinyl record purveyors, according to the Associated Press. 

This is perhaps not coincidental, as COVID-19 social isolation and lockdown mandates fractured us from each other, leaving a craving for the physical — some semblance of the real, when only the abstract imaginings on our screens and in our heads dominated our lives. 

So what is music? Not merely the notes, rhythms, harmonies and screams. Music is not a sound; it's an embodiment. A record, a CD, a grand piano or a twirk — that’s what music is.

[tycal12345]

14 Ways An Artist Destroys His Art

I.

You are looking for methods instead of Truth. But there’s no method. There are no steps to teach. The more time you spend learning those steps, the more time you have to spend unlearning them. The more you read, the more you have to unread. The true Artist spends his time in that liminal space — between hero and loser, between permanent and gone.

II.

You labor in vain, striving to please the voyeurs of society. You must transmogrify their gaze and live as if they do not exist. Only then will art flourish.

III.

The reason you Create can only be: Because it’s the method by which you slough off, however temporarily, the self — the intolerable burden. In that moment you are Free — untethered, floating in Perfection, a moon-driven space man.

IV.

You think too much in images. Images ruin art. You are very likely hung up on some facile picture, a child’s cartoon, in your mind — or on paper, or on the screen — that crowds out the truth, your rawest, deepest nature. Art requires no imagery.

V.

“How do I find the truth?”

You can’t be told directly — nor can it be chased directly.

VI.

You are stuck in the digital. Computers are the devices of gadgeteers, not the Plane of artists. If you work only in digital, you’ll never create real art. Analog is the domain of mankind’s body ontology.

VII.

You are forcing it. All force is farce. All “pushing past” is ego. Allow yourself to speak in tongues — to the degree it’s possible given your situation. Discipline is distraction.

VIII.

You are trying to “say” something — to send some missive into the universe, your Big Thing you want to convey, some political contrivance or “altruistic” pseudo-do-goodery, because I am “me” so listen up, so you’re gonna choke on this idea. Stop this nonsense. Messages corrupt art. All things worth saying in art — what can actually be said — are unsayable.

IX.

You are scheduling in time to “work” on your creative project. What a bunch of garbage. Making time for art means tossing it in the waste basket of time and setting it on fire. You may as well quit because you’ve already quit. Some broken brook of pulchritude. Don’t make time for art; if you are lucky, art makes time for you.

X.

You are trying to “sell,” “market” or auction off your art. This makes you a fake. A car salesman with a beard and tattoos. Another hipster with a fake dream — the dreams of others, an apparition set apart by nothing, see-through and hollow. Your world must be Art, in the purest sense — all else is fakery, money-grubbing status-seeking, a feeble attempt to suckle from the nectar of a blinkered populace.

XI.

You are working on something even though it’s done. You’re trying to make more somethings out of nothings — as if it’s “you: making it in the first place. You are not an artist. You are trapped and irrational, a muskrat groping for cheese — when all you need is — or was — a push, a reason to fall again into poetic motion.

XII.

Stop searching for something that makes sense. Stop making sense.

XIII.

You spend too much time working on and slaving away at your creative projects and dreams, neglecting your friends and family and children. What a bastard. Stop working so hard on your art. Stop being an asshole and spend some time with the people you love.

XIV.

Now get back to work.

[tycal12345]

Knowledge Work is an Abstract, Bodiless Void

The modern knowledge worker now swims in a froth of the purely abstract. Like an astronaut cut from the space station, he floats, untethered, gaping at the shrinking earth below him. He’s lost his body.

He thinks he is made of only thought — and the deluge of requests that bubble up from the void in his inbox scatter what sense of self he has like marbles across the floor. He is bodiless, unprotected, fragile.

The knowledge worker has lost sight of the process. Efficiency reigns. He’s a slave to the product — even as he is scarcely its author.

He is besieged by a barrage of electronic missives — creating, as if in a slow-motion video game, an illusory — but somehow real — sense of stress. It’s the stress of an ambiguous email; the awkward, pixelated silences punctuating a Zoom call; or the dreary commute, the feeling of neither coming nor going.

He’s deluded into the belief that the stuff of thought is the only work of value. The body, or still vaster expanses of possibility, the Knowledge Worker must ignore.

His view is only: The Infosphere. That and the cacophonous arena where workers contend with one another in a furious dance of keyboards and screens.

The world of the abstract

When I sit to do “work” — engage in the rigorous and often frustrating exercise of the mind and its tapping fingers — I am analytic, caught in the sticky morass of pure thought. Most of the time, my desk job calls me to wield thoughts as if they were “me” in the ultimate sense. When I submit a piece of “work” via email, I receive a “good job” from the void as if the “job” were me and the “good” were its quality — even though no exchange was made except the abject moving about of information.

Dading! the email software intones, as if I struck a bell with a mallet, although no music exists.

The illusion bred by knowledge work is that the mind is wholly and totally satisfactory. From kindergarten through university, the future Knowledge Worker is told: Slough off this fleshly vessel. You are mindstuff now. You are words and numbers and abstraction.

The cubicle world once satirized by Dilbert and The Office has loosened up in its structure — just enough to appear now less absurd, as dress codes have relaxed and tech CEO’s grace the covers of magazines. The monotonous hum of the worker strangled by his own tie has given way to a certain allure of the avant-garde — a kind of romance of the new and the brashness of startup culture.

Many now work from the convenience of home. But remote work done from the comfort of one’s couch — and even absurd machines like the treadmill desk — does little to settle the problem. It’s still the mind at play in its numbered matrix.

Marx's astute critique of the factory labor system emphasized the worker's alienation from the fruits of his labor. But in the realm of knowledge work, this estrangement takes on a new dimension: Detachment from the body.

Knowledge Work is the work of ghosts. In the words of philosopher Matthew B. Crawford: “What is new is the wedding of futurism to what might be called ‘virtualism’: a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.”

We once wielded tools to shape our world, and fire to nourish ourselves. Now we are left with but one weapon, a weapon that turns against us: The madness of the mind.

Dissolving of concepts and the beauty of emptiness

The modern knowledge worker’s gossamer dreams cling lightly to his mind. The unfinished novel tossed in the trash; the smeary, graphite art sketches hidden under the bed; the exotic getaways never taken, cocktails never quite imbibed, the mysterious girl at the bar never quite spoken to.

But still, he luxuriates in the paychecks, sitting comfortably in the backyard of so many summer eves, assured of his place in the world.

In those moments he’s more than thought, more than knowledge. More, even, than the muscled, sinewy ontology of his body.

When he searches deep within himself for the answer, all he finds is an emptiness, a void where his fears and self should be.

In those moments of existential clarity, he feels like he’s touching something raw and true about the nature of the self and consciousness.

Then back to the Zoom meeting: the video chat displays him — his head, anyway — in the corner. Who — or what — lives in that tiny digital mirror? On the other hand, what lives nearer than his nose, closer than close, wider and shallower — and somehow deeper — than the shimmering pond of vision itself?