History fills up space

We live in primitive times once again, with the proviso now that we always have and always will.

Repression feels palpable. Leadership is in retreat, scurrying around to secure its borders. It's now clear that we live in a culture of actuarial tables and the official state-sponsored valuation of the exact financial worth of a human life. Everytime we creep up toward some sort of shared common-sense, wherein the good of the people is first and foremost, we back-slide, and the golden rule that there ought to be a scrupulous separation of church and state is sacrificed once again. 

The direction now? To see how long we can live with what we've made, and to make something out of what we've been left with. 

So interesting that it's such a good time to make art!  The 3 or 4 artist's I know say so. There's so much time now that hadn't existed before. The image, whether its made of words or pictures, seems empty, or emptied out, inviting the artist to hold it upside down by its feet and shake it so thoroughly that all meaning is shook out of it and new meaning takes its place. Time too to read Benn's essay on the Third Reich or 'The Miller's Tale' by Chaucer, not as cautionary tales but as real-life narratives of the past as the present. 

I stop asking people I admire, "where do you get your news", thinking I might learn something new, and ask instead, "where do you get your history?" Though it's hardly news that the poor are the most vulnerable to contagious disease, or that so many of the wealthy have fled to their vacation home in places as far from harm as possible--it's in the literature of Rabelais and Sterne right up to Samuel Beckett, who was homeless during much of World War II, a member of The Resistence, having to hide from Nazi's under the porch of an abandoned house in the south of France.

History: I don't much like it, but I'm beginning to think I should keep a copy of it somewhere in the house.

Flower arrangement, from the author's backyard, San Francisco, Ca. May 23, 2020.