INSIGNIFICANT MATTER

Identity is recognition. Recognition is capital, or, the affirmed version of self properly represented through accepted symbolic forms. These forms have been established for you, as well as before you. You utilize the already constructed past that precedes you, and manipulate it according to the laws of originality, in order to establish some potential new form that might outlast you. You are an artist.

Artists do things like write poems. This is one of them:

Life, from the bathhouse to the slaughterhouse, is.

An erection. An execution. 

A resurrection, an institution.

Both unbearably terrifying and extraordinarily exhilarating,

love and betrayal and sex and execution make it so.

Things breed and spawn and eat and grow.

You consume matter to matter. You grow, enlarge, and call space your own.

You erect.

Like an infection, which is to say, a physical attraction, You find ways of drawing attention to yourself.

This is one of them. (end of poem)

But the universe is an often less than accommodating compilation of insignificant matter... matter which has a chaotic agenda of its own, constantly threatening to tear asunder your carefully crafted constructions. You struggle to develop and forge meaning out of a universe which seems to favor nothingness. Somewhere between the dust of insignificance, and the ultra violet rays of meaning, the idea of who you are exists... Like Cain, who struggles with in-favorable matter, only to meet immaterial exile, and like Abel, who accomplishes favorable transcendence, only to meet material violence. As an artist, a gymnast, a deft manipulator of self, your life and your work is a wrestling match between a presence of self that you can not grasp, and an absence of self that you cannot escape.

“It is the means by which he circumvents or postpones his doom, and bravely meets his tragic destiny. Not tame and gentle bliss, but disaster, heroically encountered, is man’s true happy ending.” (Lewis Mumford).