TV hijack, or how I learned to love faux agency and the pushed envelope paradox

In the pressing project to stop taking myself and the world so seriously, to embrace mortality, I have been reading, consuming, and making a lot of art. This art making mode has been going on for about 12 months or so. Much of it shitty and intemperate stabs at expression, but gleeful all the same. The big grab - the reach that exceeds the grasp - is to be a conduit through which the restless, tensile culture shines. Works, even.

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I am not sure that slathering cheap paint on a cheap canvas is an adequate response to the various realizations that have been dawning on me, like sun to a flower, or seizing me, like an epileptic attack, but I am also not sure that having an adequate response to these realizations is what these realizations call for. Evolution is not undirected, exactly, but it is unresponsive to a guiding hand. It is aloof to intentional intervention, but / like all great neuroses / it is always on call, always with its teeth on the bone of reality, chewing and grasping. These trees gave us hands to climb, these predators gave us unthinking flight, and all that.

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I can say - and do avow - that the burden of inheritance is not lightly borne. And the burden of depiction is not easily transfigured into a burden of signifying something more. And the burden of declaring small, smoldering truth is not more perfunctorily compensated for by snatching embers from someone else’s well-banked fire. Fire makes shadows as evolution manifests effects. That unduly burdensome residue from the smoke and the accumulated ash.