My esteemed fellow Steemit Creatives, if life is meant to synthesise souls into a mille-feuille pastelito, Steemit could be promising; or any interface where street-wise people and folks seeking direction can meet in a mind of Self-observation. We could be running here a kitchen of distinction. A recruitment board for jacks-of-all-soul-trades. Bring on the festival atmosphere, and may we be worthy of investment!
Ever considering what I am doing here, and how Steemit can make for a part of my artistic life and spiritual awareness campaign, I have come to understand myself as an independent agent, quietly at work in my Sukhansasister studio, with little time or interest in looking for Like-minds. I think that would be very last millenium and more suited to the crochet-club type. Minds geared up for a new utopian "mutual-understanding" (a Utopian island would be very 1627) are looking for a new way of being. I conclude that the new generation has no need for like-thinking and for whom else would an artist be making art (unless his therapist) than the next generation after this?
As a teacher, my particular field of interest would lie in reaching out. As a co-creative steward of colour my interest lies in layering up and the rest of this post will show you what I mean by example.
I do not aim to succeed as a teacher. The youth are in the fast lane of progress (let me know if you know where to) and have learned to depend on artificial intelligence for an extension of the human brain, making a single collective mind available to all who know how to jack in. What is left to find in another mind? Learning from previous generations is very passé.
As an environmentally dependent individual (we are co-produced by our environment) it does not sit well with me to invest in rubbish. I have no opinion about Steemit having its place in the core web-business of recycling but it pains me to liken it to the Bismark (thinking merely of a super-sized hot air balloon who met with a finite drama). Speaking entirely for myself in the pluralis majestatis, we sure are full of ourselves, aren't we! So many great writers and artists making astounding works of art and we little people hope to either sit well alongside them (or do we hang?) or otherwise hitch a cheeky ride with them, like I will be doing below. Hopefully, however to generate layering up.
Here then, still brave at heart, my generous gift to you, in good faith.
I had another blessing bestowed upon me today, in the WAFS (world away from steemit), when a book fell on my foot. It made for an unforgettable day; it also helped to gel my heartmost inentions for my steemit project.
May I invite art and literature lovers to explore the layers of Cripplewood. Perfectly sublime in all its endurable fragility. A fount of meaning to life with its roots in soul to soul contact.
I don’t know much about Coetzee at all, other than that he is South-African, which is - to my shame - one of the reasons I may never have picked him up if not for Malkovich in “Disgrace” (2008, Steve Jacobs). South-Africa seemed to me a very distant place, and full of disconcerting issues, which are still by no means resolved. Most art and literature from this country, therefore, is understandably heavily socio-political, and I had only just started on the Russians...; this was in the days before I started to "research" novels (2016) . (Typically useless linguistic pragmatist who checked out little in practice.)
Now, I do occasionally pick up a book by Coetzee, almost furtively, as if I am a little intimidated by this author who has blindingly brilliant moments, like in the story of the old lady and the cats (not written for but given to Berlinde for her project). Am I worthy of such treats?! Were I to synthesise his thinking with mine (which is eerily possible for this story) would that not be a noisome process of defragmentation and an insult to him and his muses? Here goes anyway. My humble apologies in advance.
About Berlinde de Bruyckere I know even less, and only that she is from Belgium. She is the fine artist, he is the writer, but both are simply life-artists, living for beauty and meaning (where beauty must have philosophical bearings and not a decorative one). To my mind, fairly courageously heeding her intuition (for Coetzee is the Einzelgänger par excellence), she was clearly "sent" by a need that is deeper than a personal one to connect and seek out Coetzee for a curator (a requirement for the Venice Art Biennale).
In the unequivocal masterpiece “Cripplewood” (the name of de Bruyckere's work but I refer in this context especially to the entire synthesised project of the collaboration as recorded in book form), we share the process of connecting. Rather than to bring works of art together, or have his feed into hers, Berlinde de Bruyckere steered to find that sweet-spot of the inbetween and reside in this conduit awhile. The result is what I would call a making of love; not just between two I's but involving pillar precedents; and not only for a Sunday at the museum, but to push off new skiffs in which each of us independently can go back out to sea, again.
This is a notch up from brothers writing sisters (Stendhal/Beyle and sister Pauline: a highly enviable read for those who have poor or no sibling relationships); I don't quite see a brotherhood for artists/creatives, or a (feminist) sisterhood, but I would like to perceive a Schwesterlichkeit between these two, in the way Robert Musil was always looking for this point of connect in his (heterosexual) relationships (he is said to love women like a woman); otherwise it feels to me like they dip into Goethe's Ewige Weiblichkeit (the Eternally Feminine), a very sophic place, which gives this mild, tender and supportive mood between them. It gives an even playing field for these very discrepant people. I believe, that their age is helpful in this "work (of love)" on this spiritual common ground. They are both old enough to know how to value the human experience as something that starts in the heart. They are not looking to be something else or other, or more than heartfelt creations. The stretch they both have with which to reach the other's mind was sizzling to mine. This is to view Human Potential unrolled!
Saint Sebastian by: Dosso Dossi (first half 16th C.). | Lindenwood, 1400-1600, Tirol, for sale at MasterArt | Rubens, 1614
To try the mille-feuille recipe of Coetzee/de Bruyckere, layer up these works of art with the exceptional poem “Apollo and Marsyas” by the great artist and thinker Zbigniew Herbert.
I am too full with puff and pastry and cream and sweetness to layer much onto Cripplewood myself here. Other than that I found another encouragement to ageing.
Both are older. Coetzee the elder by 25 years, and you can feel throughout the brief correspondence around the project of curation, he has the more reserved or restrained nature that indicates for me a man who has seen it all and knows very little can be said anymore. (In the short story he gifts her for her project as curator) the conversation about cats, which is not at all about cats, or thanks to cats also about us, makes for a metaphysical meditation to sit down to twice daily. It reads like a surreal dream grounded in the highly mundane. A thousand leaves to crunch into and let melt upon the tongue. Keep turning those delectable pages, which are light as air, but packed with fuel for the heart. (Dietary caution: puff-pastry is high in calorific value when made right with pure butter!)
You can feel in the to and fro both are committed to listening to every word and examining all the punctuation. Where ideas might come to rest, a little flat initially, in the other's mind, for a lack a context, of a different perspective, they are never crushed but are left to rise up from the patient wait to soar to new elevations.
Words fail me to describe the joy I derive from such maturity.
Another author/artist collaboration of interest is to be found in Paul Auster and Sophie Calle. Double Game
If you click the link you will find The Classic Napoleon | Mille Feuille Cream Pastry recipe by “of batter and dough” which ought to come out looking like the photo at the top.
