On Choosing What Enters the Work

If the first discipline is learning not to carry the whole world at once, the second is learning how to choose, from what remains, what truly belongs to you.

Because the question is not only how much to take in, but how to recognize what is yours to carry forward into the work.

The news arrives as fragments. An event here, a voice there, a pattern hinted at but rarely completed. Most of it passes through the mind as weather. It touches briefly, then dissolves. But occasionally, something stays. It does not pass. It lingers, not as noise, but as a kind of resonance.

This is where the artist’s attention becomes more refined.

Not everything that is important in the world is important for your work. That is a difficult sentence to accept at first, because it can feel like a moral compromise. But it is not. It is a recognition of scale and function. Your work does not serve the world by attempting to contain everything. It serves by going deeply into what it can authentically transform.

So the question becomes:

What stays?

There are certain signals an artist can learn to recognize.

There is the event that provokes immediate reaction - outrage, agreement, disbelief. These are often the least useful. They burn quickly and leave little behind. They belong to the surface mind, to the shared emotional field of the moment.

Then there is something quieter.

A detail that does not resolve. A phrase that returns uninvited. An image that feels slightly out of place in the flow of ordinary perception. A story that does not ask for your opinion, but for your attention. These are different. They do not demand response. They ask for relationship.

They follow you.

This is often where the work begins.

An artist might keep a small record of these moments. Not the full story, not the argument, not the commentary - just the fragment that adhered. A line, a gesture, a situation, a contradiction. Something incomplete. Something alive.

Over time, a pattern appears.

You begin to see that what you are drawn to is not random. Certain themes repeat. Certain tensions return. Certain kinds of human moments continue to surface. This is not the world choosing for you. This is your nature recognizing itself in the world.

Your work lives there.

This is how the overwhelming field of global information begins to narrow into something workable. Not by force, but by affinity.

There is also a second movement that matters just as much: transformation.

To take something from the world and place it directly into the work, unchanged, is often to remain at the level of report. The artist’s task is different. The task is to allow the material to pass through the interior life long enough that it becomes something else. Not false, not distorted, but metabolized.

An event becomes an image.
A conflict becomes a structure.
A voice becomes a character.
A tension becomes a rhythm.

This takes time. It requires that the artist not rush to respond. It requires a willingness to hold something without immediately resolving it into opinion or statement. The world will always try to hurry you into reaction. The work often asks you to wait.

There is a kind of trust involved.

Trust that what truly belongs to you will remain.
Trust that what fades was never yours to carry.
Trust that depth matters more than coverage.

In this way, the artist begins to develop a personal filter that is not based on importance as defined by the world, but on relevance as revealed through attention.

This is not disengagement. It is participation at the level where participation becomes meaningful.

You are still in the world.
You are still aware.
You are still affected.

But you are no longer attempting to mirror everything. You are listening for what calls you into a deeper response.

And over time, something subtle happens.

The work begins to feel less like a reaction to the world, and more like a conversation with it.

Not everything needs to be said.
Not everything needs to be answered.

But something, chosen carefully, carried faithfully, and transformed with patience, can begin to speak in a way that belongs uniquely to you.

And that is enough.

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On Not Carrying the Whole World at Once

Journal Entry: March 31, 2026

One of the stranger burdens of modern life is that we are now expected to know about almost everything.

A war in one place, a scandal in another, a flood, a fire, a collapse, an outrage, a prediction, a market tremor, a fresh indignity before breakfast. The human nervous system, which was shaped for weather, kinship, work, and the occasional nearby emergency, is now made to host the emotional residue of the entire planet’s unrest. This is treated as normal. It is not normal.

To be clear, I am not making a case for ignorance. It matters that we have some sense of the larger world. It matters that we remain morally awake, historically aware, and sensitive to the suffering and dignity of others. But there is a difference between being informed and being psychically overrun. There is a difference between consciousness and saturation.

An artist, perhaps more than most, must learn this distinction.

Because the mind is not simply a storage unit for facts. It is also a climate. It is a field condition. It is the weather in which images arrive, thoughts ripen, and subtle intuitions become available. If that field is constantly battered by the winds of interruption, alarm, and remote urgency, then the deeper layers of one’s own life can become difficult to hear. The signal gets buried beneath static.

This is one of the hidden costs of excessive information. Not merely distraction, but inner crowding.

A life of art requires permeability, yes, but not indiscriminate permeability. One must remain open enough to be touched by the world, yet selective enough to preserve the interior conditions under which meaningful work can occur. If every headline is granted equal access to your psychic space, then your own life begins to lose contour. The near is weakened by the far. The immediate world - your room, your materials, your body, your unfinished page, the person across from you, the light at the window - begins to feel somehow less real than the endless spectacale of elsewhere.

This is a dangerous distortion.

The local is not trivial. The immediate is not morally inferior to the distant. Your actual life is where your attention belongs first, because it is the only place from which your care can become form. The studio, the garden, the notebook, the conversation, the meal, the walk, the workbench - these are not retreats from reality. They are reality at the scale where a human being can still act with coherence.

That may be the key word here: coherence.

The problem is not that the world is happening. The problem is that we are being fed fragments of it continuously, without proportion, context, or any real path toward response. This leaves us carrying impressions we cannot metabolize. We become heavy with unfinished emotional transactions. Concern accumulates without outlet. Attention becomes a dumping ground.

An artist must learn not only what to look at, but what not to let in.

This is not selfishness. It is stewardship.

It may be enough to know a little less, but know it more deeply. To remain aware without becoming flooded. To choose a few trustworthy windows onto the larger world rather than living with every window open all day long. To take in only what one can transform into thought, prayer, conversation, action, or art.

Anything beyond that begins to behave more like psychic litter.

There is no virtue in carrying more than one can meaningfully bear. There is no wisdom in confusing exposure with understanding. And there is no creative advantage in living permanently overstimulated by distant noise.

A life of art asks for a more disciplined ecology of attention.

Not withdrawal. Not denial. Not indifference.

Just a wiser threshold.

The world is very large.
Your soul is not meant to be a loading dock for all of it.

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Also visit my bookstore Ontological Museum Publications

I have been publishing books since 2007.

Hi all,

I will be leaving for the Collage Expedition in Berlin in a few days. I will be out on the road for about seven weeks concluding with the Collage Expedition in London in June. If interested it going contact Les Jones at:

hello@contemporarycollagemagazine.com

to see if there are any spaces still open or if you want to be notified of upcoming events.

MEAWHILE:

We are working on the next exhibition and collage workshop of Visual Poetry and Color and you are invited to contribute a work to the collection. Contributed works become part of the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction.

Visual Poetry and Color in Los Alamos, New Mexico

Call for Works

All works accepted and exhibited.

What you need to do…

Buy an 8 x 8 x .75 inch birch cradled panel from dick blick

https://www.dickblick.com/products/blick-premier-wood-panels/

(does not need to be Dick Blick but the same sort of panel and the same dimensions)

Make a collage on it that somehow has to do with the theme and mail it to me to arrive in July after I get back. I’ll be driving the work over to the gallery in August and doing the install. The show will open August 14 and run through September 16. Then the works become part of the archives and shown in any future iterations of the show or used in other appropriate exhibitions in the future.

Be sure you write your name, title, contact info and online link on the back of the piece.

Here are other works in the show

Send to:

Visual Poetry - Cecil Touchon

4315 Rancho Largo Rd. NW Albuquerque, New Mexico 87120

TO ARRIVE IN JULY, 2026

Here is the poster of the schedule

https://stepupgallery.org/exhibit-schedule/

Visit the bookstore Ontological Museum Publications

I have been publishing books since 2007.

The Tending of Trajectory

Journal Entry: March 31, 2026

A great deal of the creative life has less to do with dramatic breakthroughs than with the quiet tending of trajectory.

That may not sound glamorous, but it is closer to the truth than many of the more theatrical ideas artists are often sold. We are encouraged to think in terms of inspiration, genius, talent, originality, vision, career, breakthrough moments, major works, and defining opportunities. All of those things have their place. But underneath them, and often determining their actual value, is something subtler and more continuous: the line one is carrying forward through time.

That line is not always obvious.

In fact, one of the difficulties of living as a conscious human being is that we tend to experience life as a series of local events while only dimly perceiving the larger movement those events are participating in. We notice today’s mood, this week’s interruption, this month’s discouragement, this year’s opportunity or loss. We notice the immediate weather. What we often fail to notice is trajectory - the deeper directional pattern slowly being formed through what we repeatedly do, avoid, nourish, abandon, reinforce, and return to.

Trajectory is not simply action.

It is not merely the isolated fact of what one did yesterday or failed to do this morning. It is the cumulative shape produced by countless acts, hesitations, attitudes, habits, corrections, reinforcements, and subtle choices over time. It is what is being carried forward. It is the line becoming visible through sequence.

That is why trajectory matters more than intensity.

A person can have moments of brilliance and still be drifting toward incoherence. A person can have long periods of obscurity and still be building a deeply coherent life. A work can begin with great force and lose its line halfway through. Another may begin quietly and gather such clarity over time that it becomes inevitable. What matters is not only what flares. What matters is what continues, and in what direction.

This is true of artistic work, but it is also true of the artist’s life itself.

Because a life in art is not built from isolated masterpieces. It is built from continuity of relation. One keeps showing up. One keeps listening. One keeps making, revising, noticing, clearing, beginning again, protecting the signal, reducing interference, and slowly learning what one is actually trying to carry forward. That line may not be fully visible at first. In fact, it usually isn’t. It emerges gradually, as one learns to distinguish what has life in it from what merely passes through.

That is part of the discipline.

The artist’s task is not only to make things. It is to notice what kinds of things are trying to continue through them.

What themes keep returning?
What forms feel native?
What concerns persist beneath changing subject matter?
What emotional weather recurs?
What symbols gather around the edges?
What kinds of questions keep asking for form?
What tensions remain unfinished enough to keep generating work?

These are not accidental.

They are often signs of trajectory.

One of the reasons artists suffer so much unnecessary confusion is that they frequently judge themselves according to local appearances while ignoring the deeper line. They panic because a season feels dry, because a project stalls, because recognition does not arrive on schedule, because the current week appears unimpressive, because attention has drifted, because confidence has dipped, because some imagined measure of progress has not been met. But local turbulence does not always mean the larger trajectory is broken. Sometimes it means the current has entered rough water.

That distinction is important.

Because if one mistakes every temporary disruption for total failure, one will keep abandoning viable trajectories before they have had time to mature. A life of art requires enough steadiness to remain in relationship to a longer line than one’s current mood.

That does not mean blind persistence. Some trajectories should be interrupted. Some patterns are dead ends. Some projects are false trails. Some habits are quietly destructive. Some ambitions lead nowhere worth going. Part of artistic maturity lies in learning how to tell the difference between a difficult but living path and one that is simply draining the life out of you.

That is where attention becomes so important.

One has to learn how to read the current.

Not abstractly, but practically.

Is this work still alive?
Is this method still carrying charge?
Is this line opening or narrowing me?
Am I moving toward greater clarity, honesty, and coherence, or merely repeating a familiar loop?
Is this body of work deepening, or am I decorating a habit?
What is actually being strengthened by the way I am living right now?

These are trajectory questions.

And they are often better than asking whether one currently feels inspired.

In fact, inspiration can be a misleading guide if treated as the primary measure. Inspiration comes and goes. It is useful, sometimes even glorious, but it is not reliable enough to build a life on by itself. Trajectory is slower and more trustworthy. It asks less about excitement and more about direction. It asks what one is becoming through repetition. It asks what kind of river one is entering by the way one is spending one’s days.

This becomes especially important in a world built to fragment attention and flatten continuity. Modern life exerts a powerful centrifugal force. It pulls outward. It scatters. It interrupts. It tempts one into perpetual reactivity, novelty-chasing, comparison, self-display, and the constant resetting of one’s own center of gravity. Under such conditions, trajectory can be lost very easily. One begins responding to everything and carrying nothing.

That is dangerous for artists.

Because art often requires the opposite movement.

It requires one to hold a line long enough for something to gather.

Not rigidly. Not dogmatically. But steadily enough that motifs can recur, ideas can deepen, forms can mature, and one’s actual concerns can reveal themselves over time rather than being constantly abandoned in favor of whatever flashes nearest.

This is one reason bodies of work matter more than many people realize. A body of work is not merely a collection of outputs. It is a visible record of tended trajectory. It shows what one has been carrying. It reveals the recurring weather, the returning symbols, the unfinished investigations, the changing methods, the deepening line. It allows both artist and viewer to perceive continuity that would otherwise remain hidden inside the day-to-day fog of making.

And of course this applies beyond the studio as well.

Relationships have trajectory.
Health has trajectory.
Spiritual life has trajectory.
Character has trajectory.
A conversation has trajectory.
A nation has trajectory.
A civilization has trajectory.

Everything is always moving somewhere.

The question is rarely whether movement is happening. The question is what kind of movement is being reinforced.

This is where the old idea of karma becomes newly useful, at least for me, if one understands it less as a moral bookkeeping system and more as the continuity of consequence through time. Not simply “action” in the isolated sense, but the accumulated line of movement produced by action. The current one has entered. The drift one is reinforcing. The tendencies being carried forward into future conditions.

That is a very practical way to think.

Because it shifts one’s attention away from dramatic isolated moments and toward pattern. It asks: What am I training into reality by the way I am living? What am I teaching my mind, my body, my hand, my attention, my relationships, and my work to become through repetition? What kind of downstream world am I quietly constructing through the line I am holding, neglecting, or allowing to drift?

This is not cause for anxiety.

It is cause for care.

Because trajectory is rarely changed by one grand act of self-reinvention. It is more often altered by repeated subtle adjustments made with enough sincerity and consistency to gradually bend the current. A degree here. A return there. A refusal. A recommitment. A clearing of noise. A restoration of rhythm. A better question. A more honest cut. A protected hour. A less divided yes.

That is how lives are shaped.

That is how bodies of work are shaped too.

The artist who understands this becomes less obsessed with sudden transformation and more committed to ongoing relationship. One stops asking only, “How do I make something great?” and begins asking, “What am I willing to carry forward?” One becomes more interested in maintaining a living line than in staging occasional brilliance. One learns to respect continuity as a form of power.

And perhaps that is what the creative life asks of us more than anything else.

Not perfection. Not total control. Not uninterrupted inspiration.

But the capacity to keep a steady hand on the drift.

To notice when the current is scattering.

To recognize when the line is still alive beneath surface confusion.

To make the small corrections that keep one in relation to what matters.

To remain close enough to one’s own unfolding that the work, the life, and the deeper movement beneath them do not become entirely estranged from one another.

That is no small task.

But it may be one of the most important forms of wisdom available to an artist.

Because in the end, one does not merely produce work.

One becomes the trajectory one keeps tending.

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On Trajectory and the Drift of Things

Journal Entry: March 31, 2026

If the universe, seen and unseen, known and unknowable, is in some sense a singular being - and I suspect that it is - then one of the most striking things about it is that it is never standing still. It is continuously manifesting as uniqueness. Every moment, every location, every being, every event, every configuration is appearing only once in exactly the way it appears and then passing away forever, giving itself over immediately to whatever comes next.

Nothing is ever repeated.

There may be recurrence. There may be pattern. There may be rhythm, cycle, echo, memory, resemblance, and return in the broad sense. But the actual moment itself never comes back. It arrives, gives itself, disappears, and is gone forever. Reality seems to move like a continuously unfolding symphony - never static, never recoverable, never replayed in its original condition, and yet unmistakably carrying certain motifs forward as it goes.

One of the strangest things about existence is that it is at once utterly unstable and yet somehow coherent enough to feel continuous. Everything is always vanishing, and yet something persists. Or at least something is being carried.

Perhaps memory is part of what makes this possible. Memory, habit, pattern recognition, structural tendency, inertia, and continuity of relationship all seem to help create the impression that there is a stable world moving through time. But looked at more closely, the world may be less like a fixed set of things and more like a ceaseless process of passing away and re-forming. A living event-stream. A field of irreversible emergence.

In that sense, the whole thing may be more breath-like than object-like.

One breath leaves so the next may come in.

There is no way to hold the inhale or exhale and continue living.

There is no way to cling to the last moment and still participate in the next one.

Existence seems to require this continual surrender.

And yet this surrender is not random. It is not merely collapse into fragmentation. There is also trajectory. There is movement from where a thing was to where it is, and from there toward where it is going. There are tendencies carried forward. There are inherited directions. There are themes, habits, structures, and unfinished motions continuing through change.

This, to me, is often a more useful way of thinking about what many traditions have tried to name with the word karma.

The word karma is commonly translated as “action,” and often understood as a kind of moral cause-and-effect system in which one’s thoughts, deeds, and intentions shape future outcomes. That is not wrong as far as it goes, but I think the deeper and perhaps more practical idea is less about isolated action and more about trajectory.

Not just what was done.

But what is now moving.

What has been set in motion.

What kind of current has formed.

What pattern is being carried forward through a complex series of actions, reactions, hesitations, reinforcements, and turns.

Trajectory includes consequence, of course, but it also includes direction. It includes momentum. It includes accumulated tendency. It suggests that what matters is not merely a ledger of separate acts, but the overall line that is forming through them.

That is a very different and, I think, more useful picture.

Imagine a pile of leaves thrown into a river together.

The current takes them all downstream, but not in a fixed arrangement. Some remain close for a while. Some drift apart. Some catch against rocks. Some gather again in eddies. Some are separated permanently. Others pick up twigs, foam, petals, and stray fragments as they go. Then perhaps the whole mass goes over a waterfall and what had briefly looked like a stable arrangement explodes into apparent chaos.

And yet even then, something continues.

Some pieces rejoin downstream. Some do not. Some are carried into side channels. Some are caught in reeds. Some are drawn back into the main current. The original pile is irrecoverably gone, and yet the movement continues carrying forward traces, tendencies, residues, alignments, and possibilities born from everything that happened upstream.

That feels much closer to how life actually works.

We are not fixed things moving through time intact.

We are dynamic patterns drifting through conditions.

Even what we call identity may be less solid than we imagine. We are continuously losing and reconstituting ourselves. Every day certain thoughts fall away, certain attachments loosen, certain cells die, certain assumptions dissolve, certain memories fade, certain desires lose force, and other things gather around the current. We are not the same person from one season to the next, and yet there is enough carried forward that a recognizable trajectory remains.

That is a very interesting kind of continuity.

And perhaps it is one of the reasons artists are so preoccupied, whether consciously or not, with sequence, form, coherence, and drift. Because creative work is made precisely within this condition. One does not make from stasis. One makes from the moving edge.

A work begins as an intuition, an image, a phrase, a rhythm, a scrap, a hunch, a pressure. Then it enters time. It drifts. One follows it, loses it, regains it, mistakes it for something else, overworks it, strips it back, rediscovers the line, loses confidence, regathers, revises, and gradually tries to keep the thing from dispersing beyond recovery before it has fully taken form.

That is a real part of the craft.

Artists, writers, performers, composers, filmmakers, choreographers, and thinkers are all, in one way or another, involved in the management of drift.

The drift of attention.
The drift of intention.
The drift of mood.
The drift of meaning.
The drift of aesthetic.
The drift of confidence.
The drift of the original pulse that first made the work feel alive.

A great deal of artistic maturity consists not in forcing the work rigidly into submission, but in learning how to keep enough of the original trajectory intact while allowing the living process of transformation to occur. That is a delicate discipline. Too much control and the work dies from overhandling. Too little and it disperses into formlessness. One must learn how to stay in relation to the current without pretending one can freeze it.

That may be one of the reasons art feels so close to life itself.

Because life also does not permit us to keep things in their original arrangement.

Everything drifts.

Relationships drift.
Projects drift.
Worldviews drift.
Bodies drift.
Nations drift.
Attention drifts.
Civilizations drift.
Even spiritual understanding drifts if it is not tended.

And so perhaps one of the central tasks of a serious creative life is not merely expression, but the tending of trajectory.

That is a phrase worth keeping.

Because if one understands the creative life as the tending of trajectory, then the task becomes clearer. One asks less often, “How do I control everything?” and more often, What is the line I am trying to keep alive here? What current is this work part of? What direction is my life actually moving in beneath all the local fluctuations? What tendencies am I reinforcing? What patterns am I feeding? What small acts of care or neglect are gradually altering the downstream shape of things?

These are not dramatic questions, but they are profound ones.

And they also return the artist to a more realistic relationship with process. One does not need to solve the whole river. One only needs to remain close enough to the current to notice when the drift has become too severe and to make whatever subtle correction is possible while there is still time.

That is true of a paragraph.
It is true of a painting.
It is true of a friendship.
It is true of a body of work.
It may even be true of a soul.

If the universe itself is a singular being manifesting through irreversible change, then perhaps what we are doing, each in our own local and partial and particular way, is learning how to move consciously within that unfolding. Not by clinging to fixed forms, and not by surrendering entirely to chaos, but by developing enough sensitivity to feel what is being carried forward and enough discipline to participate in its shaping.

That, to me, feels like a very practical kind of wisdom. Not control. Not certainty. But a good and steady hand on the drift.

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On the Moment of Beauty

There is a familiar phrase that circulates whenever the subject arises, as if it were sufficient explanation: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It carries a certain truth, but it also stops just short of something more interesting. It suggests that beauty is subjective, which it is, but leaves unexamined the deeper question of how that subjectivity moves, shifts, and reveals itself over time.

What becomes apparent, if one pays attention, is that our sense of beauty is not fixed. It does not sit still, waiting to be consulted. It migrates.

Our sense of beauty moves through us the way weather moves across a landscape - forming, dissolving, returning in altered conditions. What we find beautiful today might have gone unnoticed yesterday. What once held our attention may fall away, only to return years later with a new kind of clarity. There is a continuous repositioning taking place between ourselves and the world.

I began to understand this more clearly during the years when the archive was more publicly accessible, when artists would come in and spend time moving through drawers of collages, objects, assemblages, fragments of other’s lives and sensibilities. At first, I assumed the role of quiet curator, believing I had some sense of which works carried weight and which did not. But that assumption began to dissolve in the presence of others.

I remember one artist in particular. She moved through the drawers with a kind of searching attention, then paused, lifted a piece, and held it with unmistakable recognition. There was no hesitation. She had found something that spoke directly to her.

It was a work I had never considered especially compelling.

That moment rearranged something for me. It revealed that whatever hierarchy I had formed in my own mind was only that - mine. It had no authority beyond the boundaries of my own experience. What I might pass over could be, for someone else, the very center of their inquiry.

From that point forward, the idea of curating taste for others began to feel misplaced. Each person arrives with their own internal conditions - their history, their emotional state, their current line of questioning, their sensitivities, their readiness. These conditions determine what can be seen, what can be felt, what can be recognized and what will be ignored.

And these conditions are not stable.

They are in motion, constantly adjusting. One might call it a continuous migration of aesthetic interests. It begins anywhere and moves without any fixed destination. Training influences it, yes. Exposure refines it. Practice deepens it. But there remains an element that cannot be predicted - the moment of encounter itself.

This is where the question of a “universal beauty” begins to shift.

Perhaps the universal aspect is not located in specific objects or forms, but in the capacity for beauty to be revealed at all. Not everything appears beautiful at all times, but anything might, under the right conditions.

Take for example a decomposing rabbit found along a walking trail - carries this paradox clearly. There is sorrow present, even revulsion perhaps, yet also a compelling arrangement, a quiet gravity, a form of alignment that arrests attention. The emotional response is not singular. It is layered, even contradictory. Still, something within that moment insists on being seen, held, even preserved.

It suggests that beauty is not merely decorative or pleasant. It is an event of recognition. Something aligns - perception, feeling, form - and in that alignment there is a sense that this matters, even if we cannot say why nor feel the need to.

At times, this recognition moves us beyond language. Tears arrive without explanation without need of justification. It is complete in itself.

And yet, it remains contingent, depending on timing, context and circumstance. On openness. On the subtle readiness of the one who encounters it. The same object, seen under different conditions, may remain entirely mute.

So the question returns in a slightly altered form.

Is there a universal truth to beauty?

It may be that the only universal truth is this: the potential to experience beauty is everywhere. It is not distributed selectively or according to some standard. It does not belong to certain categories of objects or experiences. Rather, it waits in all things, requiring only the meeting of the right moment, the right attention, the right internal state.

Beauty, then, is less a property and more an encounter.

A crossing point between the world and the one who perceives it.

And because both are in motion, that meeting is never fixed. It is always arriving, always passing, always available again under new conditions.

In this way, the search for beauty becomes less about finding the right objects and more about refining one’s capacity to experience them.

To be present enough. Open enough. Attuned enough.

To arrive at the right moment, when the confluences of these circumstances converge with the encounter.

The migration of aesthetic interests is also discussed in the following essay

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Beauty as Evidence of Alignment

Beauty has become a difficult word.

In many contemporary contexts it is treated with suspicion, embarrassment, or condescension, as though it were either too soft to be taken seriously or too compromised by commercial prettiness to still possess any real depth. In some circles beauty has been reduced to surface appeal, decorative finish, or the polished face of things designed to flatter the eye while asking nothing of the soul. In other circles it is regarded as ideologically suspect, a relic of old hierarchies, bourgeois comfort, or aesthetic naïveté. One is often encouraged to distrust beauty before one has even had a chance to encounter it properly.

This seems to me a serious mistake.

Not because every beautiful thing is profound, and certainly not because all art should aim toward prettiness or grace in any simplistic sense, but because beauty, rightly understood, may be one of the most important clues we have that something is in meaningful relation to itself. Beauty, in its deeper register, is not merely ornament. It is not merely visual charm. It is not even necessarily pleasant. Beauty may be one of the ways alignment becomes perceptible.

That is a much more useful way to think about it.

If consciousness is primary, if life is not simply random machinery but an ongoing field of manifestation and participation, then beauty begins to look less like a cultural luxury and more like a structural event. Something lines up. Something resonates. Something in the arrangement of form, relation, proportion, timing, energy, or presence reveals a degree of coherence that is not merely imposed from outside but felt from within. One senses, however briefly, that something is where it ought to be in a way that exceeds explanation.

It may not be final proof of anything, but it is not trivial either.

I have increasingly come to think of beauty as having at least two related qualities: elegance and internal integrity.

Elegance, as I mean it here, is the quality of being pleasingly ingenious by the simplest method. It is not merely simplicity, and it is not minimalism for its own sake. It is the exactness of a solution that arrives without waste. Nothing extra. Nothing forced. No clumsy over-explanation. No unnecessary gesture. The thing has found the most direct and sufficient means of becoming itself. It does not feel thin or reduced. It feels right with economy.

That matters enormously in art.

A beautiful sentence often turns by the simplest necessary hinge. A beautiful image may carry extraordinary depth through very few elements or gestures. A beautiful piece of music may resolve by a move that feels both surprising and inevitable. A beautiful structure often seems obvious after the fact, but only because it has arrived so elegantly that the labor of its making has disappeared into the rightness of its form.

That is one half of it.

The other half is internal integrity - the state of being whole and undivided.

A thing becomes beautiful, in part, when it feels coherent from within. When it is not patched together from conflicting motives. When it is not trying to be five things at once. When its parts belong to the same living necessity. When it is inhabiting itself fully.

That is a very particular feeling.

One senses that the work has arrived not merely assembled, but whole.

The phrase I have often used for this is that it looks like it “fell from the sky whole.”

That does not mean it was made without effort. In many cases it may have taken years, revisions, failed attempts, wrong turns, and a great deal of quiet labor. But when the thing is finally right, it no longer feels constructed in a strained way. It feels discovered. Received. Internally complete. It has the strange authority of something that did not merely get built, but arrived.

That feeling should be taken seriously.

Because beauty often announces itself not first as theory, but as recognition. One feels it before one fully understands it. A line lands. A phrase opens. A shape holds. A room feels right. A gesture has grace. A face in old age carries a weathered radiance. A branch moves in the wind with such exactness that one feels, for a second, the world is not merely happening but expressing. Something in us recognizes that relation before we can fully account for it.

That is why beauty can feel so intimate and so impersonal at once.

It is intimate because it touches us directly. It is impersonal because it often seems to exceed our preferences. We may like many things. We may be attracted to all sorts of surfaces. But beauty, in the deeper sense, carries a kind of inevitability. It gives the impression that some hidden order has briefly become visible without becoming mechanical. It is not dead symmetry. It is living fit.

That distinction matters a great deal for artists.

Because if beauty is reduced to prettiness, then the artist either begins decorating the world with agreeable surfaces or rejecting beauty altogether as a form of dishonesty. Both are dead ends. The first produces empty refinement. The second often produces a culture of deliberate abrasion in which vitality is confused with ugliness, and seriousness is measured by one’s willingness to make work that seems allergic to delight, proportion, grace, or coherence.

But beauty, properly approached, is neither cosmetic nor cowardly.

Beauty can appear in sorrow.
It can appear in severity.
It can appear in fracture, austerity, weathering, and ruin.
It can appear in what is broken but still rightly held.
It can appear in old wood, worn hands, stripped language, honest grief, and the exact placement of a single object in an otherwise empty room.

Beauty is not the absence of difficulty.

Beauty is what happens when difficulty enters meaningful relation.

That is a much harder and much more interesting thing.

One might even say that beauty is not the denial of entropy but a form of local coherence arising within entropic conditions. The world, as we encounter it physically, is always in the process of dispersal, breakdown, and reconfiguration. Things age. Structures collapse. Matter changes state. Time wears through surfaces. Systems unravel. And yet within all of that, beauty still appears. Sometimes more intensely because of it. The crack in the ceramic. The fading pigment. The softened edge. The scar that has become part of the face. The old voice carrying truth with less force and more weight.

In such moments beauty does not announce perfection in the sterile sense.

It reveals fidelity.

Something has remained in right relation through the weather.

This is one reason beauty and truth are often more closely related than modern habits of thought allow. Not because beauty guarantees truth, or truth always appears beautifully, but because beauty often signals that some form of inner coherence is present. Something is not merely functioning. It is fitting. It is not merely assembled. It is integrated. It is not merely there. It is inhabiting itself well.

That phrase may be useful too.

Beauty is often what results when something is inhabiting itself well.

A tree bent by decades of wind may be beautiful because it is fully itself under pressure. A piece of music may be beautiful because every element belongs to the whole and the whole is alive. A person may be beautiful not because they conform to idealized features but because they comfortably inhabit their own skin. A work of art may be beautiful because its formal decisions, emotional charge, and underlying necessity are all participating in the same current rather than pulling in opposite directions.

That is why beauty can be such a profound guide for the artist - provided it is not confused with sentimentality or style. It is about the rightness of things.

Beauty, in this sense, is diagnostic.

It helps us recognize when something is aligned enough to carry life.

A painting may be interesting and still dead.
A text may be clever and still dead.
A concept may be important and still dead.
A body of work may be successful and still dead.

Beauty is one of the things that tells us whether life is actually present.

Not in every case, and not in some simplistic universal formula, but often enough that artists ignore it at their own expense. Beauty has a way of revealing whether a work has found its own necessity or whether it is still posturing, compensating, performing, decorating, or trying to earn permission to exist through effects.

This is where beauty becomes morally and spiritually relevant as well as aesthetically useful.

If the artist is a local aperture through which consciousness is trying to become more visible in form, then beauty may be one of the signs that the aperture is clear enough for something real to come through. Not because all real things are conventionally beautiful, but because alignment tends to produce a felt charge of rightness, and that rightness is often inseparable from beauty in some form.

This does not mean the artist should chase beauty directly.

That is one of the easiest ways to lose it.

Beauty pursued as an effect quickly becomes artificial. It becomes self-conscious, overhandled, prettified, or manipulative. It starts smelling like strategy. The better approach is to work toward truth, relation, integrity, fitness, and living form - and to allow beauty to appear as a byproduct of alignment when it chooses to.

That is a much healthier discipline.

It also frees the artist from the false opposition between beauty and seriousness. Some of the most serious work ever made is beautiful, though not always in a comforting way. Some of the most difficult truths ever encountered arrive with a terrible or tender beauty that deepens rather than diminishes their force. Beauty does not necessarily soothe. Sometimes it clarifies. Sometimes it breaks the heart open. Sometimes it reveals what should have been obvious all along and was somehow missed until that moment.

That too is alignment.

And perhaps this is one reason artists need a more beautiful cosmology if they are to make work that does not merely recycle despair or posture under the banner of sophistication. If one assumes the universe is fundamentally indifferent, hostile, absurd, or spiritually vacant, then beauty becomes difficult to trust. It begins to seem accidental, cosmetic, or ironic. But if one allows for the possibility that reality is participatory, intelligent in some distributed and mysterious way, and not merely dead mechanism, then beauty regains its dignity as a form of evidence.

Not proof.

But evidence.

Evidence that coherence is possible.
Evidence that relation is real.
Evidence that form can carry presence.
Evidence that consciousness, under certain conditions, can become visible enough to feel.

That is not a small thing.

Artists, perhaps more than most, are called to become students of this.

To learn the difference between charm and beauty.
Between finish and fit.
Between decoration and alignment.
Between effect and presence.
Between what is merely attractive and what is actually alive.

That is a subtle education, and it takes years.

But over time, one begins to feel the difference.

One begins to recognize when something is only trying to look beautiful and when something has become beautiful because it has entered into right relation with itself, its materials, its necessity, and the larger field through which it arrived.

And that may be one of the best working definitions available.

Beauty is what becomes perceptible when form enters living alignment through elegance and internal integrity.

Not always easy.
Not always pretty.
Not always safe.

But unmistakable when it arrives.

And perhaps that is why it still matters so much.

Because in a fractured world, beauty remains one of the clearest signs that wholeness has not vanished.

Only that it must be found again.

‘Fake New’s Story for the Court of History based on actual events.”

II. The Upsydownsy Flag and the Reporter at Highbench Hill

(Companion to “Emily of the Signyard and the Cul-de-Sacrum Beef”)

And then, after the Signyard Beef and the curbside cursements and all the prior rounds of hedgehostility, there came the day when the wider world, having finally caught wind of the little domestic weather system swirling around the House of the Benchbeard, sent forth one reporterfellow to ask the obvious.

That is to say:

What in tarnation is going on over there?

And so he came, this newspapyrat of the inkquisition, notebook in paw and scandaloculums in spirit, tiptoeing up toward the porchline of Highbench Hill in pursuit of the flappity truth concerning the now-famous flaggone all wrangly and wrungabout, the one hoisted heel-over-head in a posture of maritime distress and modern rightwing aggrievance.

For in olden sailor days, an upside-down flag meant:
Help.
We are in trouble.
Things have gone cattywampus at sea.

But in these latter-day republic spasms, it had also become one of the chosen laundry-signals of the Stop-the-Steal crowd, the election-denial enthusiasts, the forever-unconvinced, the folks who think democracy is valid only when their horse crosses the finish line first.

So naturally the sight of such a flag on the property of a Supreme Court justice raised a few eyebrows, not to mention a few constitutional blood pressures.

And when the reporterfellow came to inquire into this little matter of upside-down patriot laundering, out she burst again - the Madammast of the Manor, the Wrathwife of Wavington, the vexillovatic herself - not in the spirit of calm clarification, nor even in the more ordinary American register of I ain’t got nothing to say to you, but in a full rolling boil of grievancefroth and porchside prosecutorial weather.

Out she came in a pother and a clabber, all indignashuns and shrillabyrations, the eyes of one who had been privately beefing with invisible enemies for some time and had finally been gifted a visible one onto whom the whole invisible pile might be flung.

And she did not so much address the man as use him for directional purposes.

“Ask THEM!” she cried.

THEM.

A dangerous little word once it starts wearing steel-toed boots.

For Them is the all-purpose ghostcoach of grievance. Them is whoever one has been arguing with in the privacy of one’s own weather system. Them is the cable shadows, the neighboring liberals, the badthought Americans, the anti-usians, the wokeanti-USians, the newspaperfinks, the cul-de-sac unbelievers, the assorted and unsorted enemies of one’s own emotional republic.

“Ask THEM!” she cried, as if the peonies themselves had gone over to the opposition and the azaleas were feeding state secrets to MSNBC.

And there he stood, the poor scribblerman, notebooked and blinking in the blast radius of a grievancegale he had not personally manufactured but had somehow been drafted to absorb.

Then from within the portico of solemnities there emerged, as if reluctantly summoned from the velvet interior chambers of constitutional hushdom, the Husband of the House - the Benchbearded, Lawly One, he of the solemn browbeatitudes and the invisible linens of judicial remove.

And yes indeedly, he had to come calm her down.

Which is itself one of the funniest and most revealing details in the whole absurd pageant.

There he was, a justice of the United States Supreme Court, not in chambers weighing questions of law and liberty, but on the front lawn doing husbandly de-escalation, murmuring little lawsy lullabyes and trying to there-there the tempestwife back from the brink of public combustibelle while the reporter stood there in his driveway bewilderment, absorbing the full civic weather report.

And for a blinkspan it looked as though the stormette might pass.

But grievance, once winded, is a boomerangry.

Back she came.

Yes, back from the inner chambers, not cooled but coaled, not lessened but leavened, returning with a fresh flapdoodle standard in hand - some decorative gobbledygardenflap, some semaphoolery of suburban heraldics, some cloth-based rebuttal to reality itself.

And with all the ceremonipomp of a woman who had decided that what this moment really needed was more flag, she hoistled the thing into the dirt and shouted:

“There! Is that better?”

And truly, if one were tasked with composing a single line to summarize the civic psychology of the age, one would be hard pressed to improve on that.

There!
Is that better?

As though symbolic overproduction were a form of argument. As though emotional escalation could somehow sort itself into coherence if only enough fabric were involved. As though a front yard, properly accessorized, might yet triumph over public interpretation.

But the flag was no answer.
The shout was no thought.
And the gesture was all gesture and no gentlesense.

It was a full-blown flagstravaganza in the theater of selfregard.

And all the while the birdbath cherubim and little statuary saints of the justiceyard kept their stone peepers on the scene, knowing as only limestone knows that the people who sermon hardest on order and decorum and lawliness and old-timey American standards are often one microphone away from a begonian coup d’petunia.

For here, once again, was the true tatterdemalion of our age:

They who lecture the republic on seriousness seem perpetually one mild question away from turning the front yard into a one-house constitutional emergency.

And if the nation, watching from the roadside with its coffee gone cold, were to ask in one exhausted little voice:

“Well is it?”

I believe the hedges would answer first.

No.

No it is not.

No, no and again, no.

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This is an independent fake news report.

Post Dogmatist Standard Disclaimer

“The ideas, views, opinions, attitudes, conceptions or insinuations, both explicit and implicit, contained herein may or may not be those of the International Post-Dogmatist Group as a whole or any of its constituent members, associates, affiliates, subsidiaries or institutions.”

I was thinking it might be fun and interesting and appropriate under the weather we have all been currently living under, and, for myself, having an interest in the idea of writing things and studying writers and writing things myself often through the practice of collage, to try a news reporting experiment in the fashion of James Joyces’s Finnigan’s Wake while listening to it on this podcast:

Finnegans Wake Book 1: Complete Cold Reading (10 hours, WAKE Podcast)

So I went on the internet and decided to hunt down a random news story and ended up with this article

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/politics/justice-samuel-alito-flag-home

Then I copied and pasted some of it into a Chatwick and Co (chatGPT) chat window and asked for a reshuffling of the story into a Finnegans Wake style story a couple of times with slighly different prompts and then collaged together bits and bobs, added some extra stuff, took out a few things and came up with the following ‘Fake New’s Story for the Court of History based on actual events.”

It could make a fun book idea for chronicling loosely and with artistic license the tragic absurdity we are living through on the national politics scale. As we know, there is an endless supply of material to work with at this point. Hope you enjoy if you have the fortitude to make your way through it.

I. Emily of the Signyard and the Cul-de-Sacrum Beef

Pull up a lawnchair, all ye porchsitters and blindpeekers, to the House of the Upsydownsy Flag, there had already been, simmering and sputtering in that same neighborhood stewpot, a prior outbreak of hedgewarfare and politicosignhostility, one of those all-American front-yard feudlets that begins in cardboard and ends in civic psychomania.

For down the bend and around the curvehook of that little Potomac cul-de-sanctum, where every driveway is a minor principality and every mailbox is a customs checkpoint for local feeling, there dwelt one Emily of the Badenfolk, leftleaning by self-declaration, actorwaitress by trade, and not at first especially concerned with the robehousen further down the lane where the Alitogethers kept their chambers and their atmosphericly patriotic convictions.

But then came Election’s Endgame, when the orange claimant was declared defeated and half the country started acting like reality had pulled a fast one and the nation split itself into two giant emotional casserole dishes - one hot with relief, the other boiling over with denialgravy and ballotvapors - and Emily, in the plain citizen spirit of homemade American commentary, did hammer into the family grassplot a hand-lettered yardoracle.

On one side:
BYE-DON

And on the reverseflip: FUCK TRUMP, the great old republic monosyllablast, the hand-painted civic exhale aimed squarely at the soon to be disentrenched would-be king and all his tailpipe mythology.

And there it stood in the frontyard of freedom, a cardboard declaration staked in dirt, wobbling a little in the passing storm but holding its ground like a cussing little scarecrow of electoral closure.

Until one day the wind, that old nonpartisan meddler, knocked the thing flat.

And just then by carriagecar there happened to pass the Madam of Highbench Hill herself, the Wraithwife of Wavington, the future Bannerbanshee of the Flagstorm, who, seeing the sign gone horizontal in the lawn, mistook meteorology for ideological surrender to the shitshow, neighborly decorum or something similar perhaps and offered an embittered thanks of possible victorious owning of a libtard as one might congratulate history for finally coming to its senses. But no such concession from the popcorn seats was intended.

“I’m keeping the sign up,” Emily replied in the clipped plainspake of a person who does not yet realize she has just entered somebody else’s private civil war.

And from that small exchange there began the stare, the glare of contemptuous pityment toward a serf of the realm with an implied threat of a you’ll-get-yours implication. Not a look to gather intelligence. Not a glance from the side of the eye. But the stare of passive aggressive I-am-greater-than-thou arrogance.

The long windshield glarethru, the freeze-frame of neighborly judgment, the weird lingering eyehold that says, ‘I now have you on my radar and promoted you from local residential irritant to active participant in my persecution mythology. Beware.’.

And the one stared-at knows it too. One feels it in a tremor of the ribcage. One texts friends about it immediately. One says to oneself, Well now, that was some Grade-A weirdness right there.

And weirdness, once seeded, is a volunteer crop that grows with little effort.

That should have been the end of it. In a normal world, it would have been. But this was not a normal world. This was post-election America, where every lawn had become a little embassy and every neighbor a possible enemy combatant, spy or traitor and everyone seems confused about what being a patriot looks like.

Soon followed the attempted coup, January 6th, that hogwild pageant of grievance and flagrant idiocy, a new date for the history books and the great unveiling of traitors in neckties and flag capes among us, that day when the republic got to watch itself nearly mugged in broad daylight by its own patriotically inflamed discount militia and cosplay minutemen, all worked into a foam over one man’s inability to lose with even a teaspoon of dignity.

It was the last ditch effort after a long chain of jackassed attempts in an effort to repeat the shenanigans of the 2000 election that placed ‘W’ in the people’s house through a similar questionable hanging chads conspiracy.

There they came, the insurrectionist picnic at the Capitol, the red-hatted hollerfolk and tactical uncles and beardo patriots and prayer-warrior paramilitaries, dragging coolers of grievance and sack lunches of constitutional confusion up to the seat of government like they were attending some sort of liberty jamboree, except with more zip ties, more bear spray, more body armor, more Jesus signs, more traitor merch, more gallows carpentry, more live-streaming, more testosterone theater, more tactical cosplay from folks whose previous battlefield experience had mostly been yelling at teenagers in Olive Garden parking lots. It was all stars, bars, stripes, screams, shofar horns, selfies, stolen valor, Confederate side-drapery, and one giant national bellyflop into the reflecting pool of disgrace.

And where, at this grand climax of the long election tantrum, was the great orange grievance emperor himself, the man who had spent months pumping the bellows and pouring moonshine into the civic carburetor? Why, nowhere useful of course. Not at the breach. Not at the barricades. Not in handcuffs. Not even at the transfer of power. He sat watching the whole think on TV for hours to the great concern and consternation of his staff. But this was all part of the plan.

Come Inauguration Day he lit out early like a man sneaking out the back door of his own bankruptcy banquet, skipping town before the new management arrived, absent from the proceedings in a huff of wounded vanity and spray-tan melancholy, leaving behind a smoking civic crater and a country wrapped in razorwire and bad nerves with a ‘If I can’t have it, burn it to the ground’ attitude as he huffed off like a spoiled three year old.

For Washington by then had gone full embunkerment. The city of marble and pomp, the shining city on the hill, had been transformed into a hardhat fortress, a no-glo snowglobe of democracy that had been driven off the road to a brighter future, flipped over in a ditch and still smoking by a car full of drunks on hooch, fools out on a joy ride in a stolen 1950’s Cadillac sedan.

Miles of black fencing went up around the Capitol like the world’s grimmest county fair, like sealed off area of a crime scene or national disaster. Jersey barriers, concrete blocks, National Guard in every direction, camouflage in the corridors, armored trucks idling under the monuments, checkpoints upon checkpoints, razor ribbon curled like metallic kudzu around the seat of government, and the whole ceremonial transfer of power carried out not in the easy confidence of a stable republic but in the jumpy, overlit atmosphere of a hostage exchange supervised by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln and a thousand heavily armed babysitters. It looked less like the peaceful continuation of constitutional order than the reopening of a casino after tsunami followed by a riot.

The whole capital city had that weird aftertaste of having seen too much of a complicated, convoluted, uninvited hostile takeover of the People’s House by a cadre of criminal misfits claiming, in the attempt, to be the victims of the situation.

Office workers peered through windows at troops. Statues looked embarrassed. The flags still waved, but now they seemed to be doing it with a certain strained self-consciousness, like they knew they had recently been misused by a mob of yahoos in tactical fleece. The republic had not exactly fallen, but it had definitely slipped on its own front steps and gone down hard enough to hear the crack.

So then came Inauguration Day, the Janutwentieth, and Emily and her husbandfellow, moved by curiosity, caution, and the uniquely American instinct to drive past trouble just to see what flavor it is today, took a little loop around the cul-de-sac to observe the emotional barometrical pressuration down by the Alito jurisresidence.

And lo! There she was. Martha-Ann of the Future Flag, already stationed near the housefront, who upon spotting the passing vehicle sprang forth into the streetspace in a flurry of armfling and mouthmotion, shouting things unheard through rolled-up windows like a woman trying to personally object to the transfer of power with nothing but vocal steam and cul-de-sac acoustics.

The problem with dead-end streets, however, is that all exits are circular.

So around they had to come again.

And on the second pass there appeared in the rearview scripture what seemed to be, or almost was, or might as well have been, a spitgesture - one of those tiny bodily punctuation marks that says more than a speechwriter can fit in three paragraphs.

And off they went, no doubt saying the sort of things one says after being nearly expectorated upon by the spouse of a Supreme Court justice in broad daylight. But the roundsackrum remembers all things and forgives none of them in a timely manner.

For then shortly thereafrter came Februwary Fifteenth, trashday of destiny, when Emily and husbandfellow were out in the driveway among the bins and lids and ordinary household burdens, doing the common citizen liturgy of hauling the week’s detritus of leftover nonsense to the curb, when who should come walking by but the Alitogethers themselves - husband and wife, justice and jurist, out on a constitutional stroll through the neighborhood commons and commoners.

And it was there, amid the trashcan liturgy and curbside recycling sacrament, that the Madam of the House let fly one of the more memorable lines in the annals of cul-de-sac statesmanship:

“Well, well, well,” she says, drawing up triple from the artesian wellspring of grievance, “if it isn’t the fucking fascists!”

And not content with the accusation alone, she reportedly named names. Researched names. Full names. Firsts and lasts. The whole dossierdoodle. Emily’s name, husbandfellow’s name, motherhouse name, all conjured up from some unseen filing cabinet of local fixations gather through government channels by court clerks no doubt. And that was the point of it. To misapply the people’s governmental power and point it at a private fellow citizen.

Now isn’t that a misappropriation of funds, time and effort that will put a burr under a citizen’s saddle?

For one thing, it is unnerving enough to be cursed at by a stranger in front of your own garbage cans. But to be cursed at by a stranger who has somehow preloaded your family directory into her verbal artillery adds a little side garnish of how in the Sam Hill do you know all that?

And that was when Emily, having now been drafted against her will into a robe-adjacent neighborhood opera, spoke back in the oldest available dialect of democratic disbelief:

How dare you act like this? Which is really the whole question, isn’t it? How dare. How weird.
How far down the rabbit hole of grievance must a household travel before it starts treating random neighbors like enemy delegates from the Republic of Lawnside Dissent through acts of privileged abuse of access to the slow turning cogs of governmental procedures?

And there, all the while, stood the Highhushed Husband, the Benchbearded one, the Lawly Figure himself, silent as a grandfather clock at a funeral, saying nothing while the whole front-yard fever pageant unfolded under the open sky. Himself a victim of his own proximity and thus complicit through complacency.

And silence, when it is standing in walking shoes next to power, is never exactly silent.

Then came Janusix aftermath and a new sign, blunter now, less interested in niceties, naming complicity and fascism in plainspake black marker, as one does when the nation has just watched its own citizens storm the Capitol in a hornhelmet pageant of patriotic stupidity.

Then came another roadside encounter.
Another exchange.
Another regrettable word, sharp and ugly and later regretted by the one who said it, because language in a pressure cooker does not always emerge in its Sunday-best clothing.

Then came the phonecall to the local constabulary, who answered in the old bureaucratic gospel of mild helplessness:
Well, if they go full bananas again, give us a holler while it’s still happening.

And after all that, after the signs and the stares and the near-spits and the nameknowing and the trashcan theatrics and the justice standing there like an upholstered conscience in loafers, there appeared in due course the famous upside-down flag itself.

Distress, we were told. A household upset. A private matter. Sure. And maybe a goose can pull a plow if you hitch him right. But if a household finds itself repeatedly drifting from front-yard dispute to nationally legible symbolism, then perhaps the weather system is not as private as advertised.

For the true question of the whole Signyard Affair is not whether a sign was rude or a spit was real or a word crossed the line.

The true question is this:

What kind of inward thunderhead has to be brewing inside a house for all this to feel like a normal way to spend one’s afternoons?

That is the part worth writing down in the lawnals of the late republic.

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“The ideas, views, opinions, attitudes, conceptions or insinuations, both explicit and implicit, contained herein may or may not be those of the International Post-Dogmatist Group as a whole or any of its constituent members, associates, affiliates, subsidiaries or institutions.”

The above is partly an asemic document and partly a Fluxus Laboratories experimental artifact.

I have a pile of old papers such as the above that I have collected for use as collage material. This one, dated Oct 1, 1926 is a letter asking for payment of work done from Baker Perkins LTD Engineers.

At the beginning of the year I decided that, instead of putting my coffee stirring spoon on a saucer plate, I would use this sheet of paper as a blotter to rest my spoon and let the staining gradually accumulate both front and back with the eventual intention of using it for some asemic writing.

This sheet was used as a blotter for 90 days from the start of January, 2026 to the end of March, 2026. Let’s call it Stain Test #01 - 2026.

At the end of the 90 days I then over wrote the business text of the letter with a more elegant asemic text with a fountain pen.

The Artist as Local Aperture

Journal Entry: March 30, 2026

If consciousness is not something produced by the individual but something larger working through the individual, then a useful question for the artist is not merely “What am I trying to make?” but “What kind of opening am I?”

That may sound like an unusual way to put it, but I think it is accurate.

Each human being appears to be a localized point of view, a temporary center of experience, a particular way the larger field of life is meeting itself under conditions. No one sees everything. No one knows very much. No one carries the whole. Each of us arrives with a certain temperament, history, sensitivity, nervous system, rhythm, wound pattern, range of perception, emotional weather, body type, aesthetic instinct, and way of noticing. We do not choose all of this, but we are given it, and then asked to become responsible for it.

That responsibility is where the life of art begins to become interesting.

Because if one is an artist, then one is not only living a life. One is also becoming a lens through which certain things can appear. Certain moods. Certain patterns. Certain combinations. Certain recognitions. Certain arrangements of meaning. Certain tonalities of being. And while there may be many people with overlapping gifts or adjacent concerns, no one is arranged exactly as you are arranged.

That matters more than many artists realize.

A great deal of creative suffering comes from misunderstanding the assignment. One imagines one is supposed to become some idealized version of “the artist,” some perfected figure of authority, originality, confidence, mastery, or social relevance. One tries to become what seems culturally legible, professionally rewarded, or aesthetically approved. One compares, imitates, postures, strains, decorates, and performs. One keeps reaching for a better mask while the actual aperture remains half-covered.

But the work does not come through the mask very well.

It comes through the opening.

And the opening becomes most usable not when it is perfected in the conventional sense, but when it becomes more truly itself. That is why I have increasingly come to prefer the phrase: Nobody Is Perfect but Everyone Can Learn to Be Perfectly Themselves.

That sentence contains more practical wisdom than many grand systems of self-improvement.

Because the task is not perfection as abstraction. The task is attunement to one’s actual configuration. Not the fantasy self. Not the social self. Not the branded self. Not the compensatory self built out of insecurity, ambition, or camouflage. The actual self - the one that notices what it notices, feels what it feels, responds as it responds, and carries its own peculiar angle of relation to the world.

This does not mean one should worship every habit, indulge every impulse, or mistake unprocessed personality for destiny. Becoming oneself is not the same thing as remaining unexamined. In fact, it usually requires a great deal of refinement, pruning, honesty, and quiet courage. One has to learn the difference between what is essentially one’s own and what has merely accumulated around it.

That is one of the artist’s lifelong tasks.

To clear away enough distortion that the actual aperture can begin to function.

Because nobody can be you except you.

That is not motivational poster material. It is structural.

If consciousness is indeed distributed through countless local forms of experience, then each individual life is not redundant. It is not interchangeable. It is not replaceable by a better-performing generic version. The whole point may be that reality is trying to see from this angle too. This nervous system. This memory field. This exact arrangement of losses, delights, absurdities, longings, and capacities. Not because you are “special” in the inflated modern sense, but because distinctness is part of the architecture of manifestation.

The world does not need another secondhand version of what already exists. It needs the cleanest possible expression of the angle that only you can occupy.

That is a very different kind of pressure. It is not the pressure to impress. It is the pressure to clarify.

And once that shift happens, much of the artist’s life begins to reorganize itself around a more honest set of questions.

Not:

• How can I become important?

• How can I become original?

• How can I become impressive?

• How can I become successful enough to feel real?

But rather:

• What is actually mine to notice?

• What kind of signal moves through me most naturally?

• What forms feel native to my hand?

• What kinds of perception seem to gather around me?

• What am I built to carry well?

• What distorts the aperture?

• What clears it?

Those are much better questions.

They are humbler, more difficult, and more fruitful.

They also tend to lead toward a kind of artistic dignity that has very little to do with image and quite a lot to do with accuracy. One begins to realize that the life of art is not mainly about becoming “better than” but becoming more exact in one’s participation. More coherent. More honest. More transparent to the quality of perception one actually has to offer.

This is one reason comparison is so corrosive when taken too seriously. It is not only emotionally unpleasant. It is structurally misleading. Comparison assumes that all artists are essentially competing within the same assignment, when in fact the deeper work may be radically singular. There may be technical overlap, shared traditions, and common craft concerns, of course. But at the level of vocation, the real question is not whether someone else is doing something more skillfully in general. The real question is whether you are allowing your own aperture to come online fully enough to do the work only it can do.

That is a very different measure.

And it also helps explain why some technically accomplished work feels dead while some modest work feels deeply alive. Technical skill matters. It matters a great deal. But skill alone does not guarantee aliveness. Sometimes a person has developed remarkable formal control while remaining estranged from the actual current of their own being. The work is polished, competent, even admirable, but it does not feel inhabited. It has no weather in it. No actual pulse. No charge.

Meanwhile another artist, perhaps less technically resolved, may be making something rougher but more alive because the aperture is open. Something real is passing through. Something unborrowed. Something that belongs not to fashion or performance, but to actual contact.

Ideally, of course, one wants both.

One wants the aperture open and the craft strong enough to carry what comes through without collapsing it.

That is the long road.

And it also means that the artist’s development is not only a matter of adding skills. It is equally a matter of removing obstructions. The false identities. The inherited noise. The social mimicry. The fear of looking foolish. The defensive cleverness. The habits of self-protection that keep one from direct contact. One does not become oneself by piling on more persona. One becomes oneself by uncovering the usable core and learning how to live from there more steadily.

This is where the phrase “perfectly themselves” becomes useful again. Perfection, in this sense, does not mean flawlessness. It means fitness and congruence. It means that the instrument is increasingly suited to the work it is here to do.

A violin is not “better” than a drum because it can do violin things. A drum is not failing because it does not produce violin music. Trouble begins when the drum starts trying to behave like a flute because the flute is getting more attention.

A great many artists lose years this way.

They become estranged from their own materials and methods, their own pace and rythmn, their own angle of contact, because they are trying to become a more culturally validated type of aperture than the one they actually are.

But life does not seem interested in producing standardized genius units. It seems interested in variation. In distributed perspective. In countless local expressions of possibility.

That may be one of the reasons the artist’s work often feels less like self-invention and more like self-discovery over time. One does not simply decide who one is and execute it. One listens. One experiments. One follows charge. One notices recurring themes. One discovers where the life is. One begins to sense what kind of vessel one is becoming and what sort of current seems to favor passing through it.

This is not always comfortable.

To become oneself often means becoming more visible to oneself. It means seeing what is truly there rather than what one hoped would be there. It means relinquishing some admired identities in order to stand inside a more exact one. It means accepting one’s own scale, one’s own tone, one’s own pace, one’s own strange set of affinities. It means discovering that one’s real gift may not arrive wearing the costume one expected.

Still, there is relief in it.

Because once one stops trying to become a generic ideal and begins trying to become a more usable local aperture, the whole life of art becomes more workable. Less theatrical. Less haunted by false standards. Less dependent on proving. More rooted in participation.

And perhaps that is the real dignity of the artist’s life. Not that the artist is more important than anyone else. But that the artist, when functioning well, becomes one of the places where the larger field of consciousness is allowed to come through with unusual clarity, feeling, shape, and form.

That is not a reason for vanity.
It is a reason for care.
Nobody is perfect.

But everyone can learn, slowly and with some dignity, to become more perfectly themselves. And since nobody can be you except you, that remains your portion of the work.

It is enough.

How to Tune the Instrument

If the artist is, in some meaningful sense, an instrument through which consciousness comes into clearer form, then the practical question becomes unavoidable: how does one tune the instrument? How does one become more available to the work, more capable of receiving it, shaping it, and carrying it through without unnecessary distortion?

This is where a lot of good ideas go to die. People become interested in inspiration, intuition, transmission, flow, vision, soul, spirit, or the great mysteries of creativity, but they do not want to talk about sleep, clutter, digestion, pacing, attention, emotional backlog, or the fact that a nervous system can only carry so much static before the signal begins to degrade. Yet these ordinary things matter immensely. They are not separate from the life of art. They are the life of art in one of its least glamorous but most consequential forms.

A tuned instrument is not necessarily a perfect one. It is a usable one. It does not need to be polished into some idealized state of spiritual wellness. It needs to be responsive, stable enough to hold charge, sensitive enough to detect subtlety, and clear enough that what passes through it is not immediately muddied by avoidable interference. The artist’s task is not to become flawless. It is to become playable.

The first and most obvious level of tuning is physical. This is not profound, but it is real. A body that is chronically sleep-deprived, overfed or underfed, inflamed, sedentary, or constantly overstimulated does not perceive in the same way as a body that has some measure of rhythm and care. The quality of attention changes. Emotional resilience changes. The threshold for frustration changes. One’s relationship to time changes. Small problems become existential. Fine distinctions become harder to detect. The work itself may still happen under these conditions, but it often happens with more drag and less grace.

There is no universal formula for bodily care because each person’s instrument has its own temperament, thresholds, and needs. But every serious artist benefits from becoming a close observer of their own usable conditions. When do I think best? When do I drift? What foods sharpen me, and which dull me? What kind of movement opens the channel rather than exhausting it? What amount of solitude restores me, and what amount becomes stagnation? These are not self-help questions. They are studio questions. They belong to the craft.

The same is true of environment. Physical space affects mental space far more than many people admit. A studio, desk, room, or work corner need not be immaculate, but it should support contact. There is a difference between fertile disorder and psychic congestion. One kind of mess contains active life. The other leaks energy. One invites work. The other quietly postpones it. The artist eventually has to learn the difference.

A useful space does not need to be expensive or photogenic. It needs to be available. It should make beginning easier. It should reduce friction between impulse and action. The notebook should be within reach. The scissors should be where they belong. The page should not require a ritual of excavation before it can be touched. If every work session begins with ten minutes of low-grade irritation because the basic tools are buried beneath irrelevant debris, the instrument is being asked to perform under unnecessary resistance. That may sound small, but over the course of a life it matters enormously.

Then there is the matter of attention, which may be the most important tuning factor of all. The modern world is designed to fragment attention and monetize that fragmentation. It rewards interruption, novelty addiction, and low-grade cognitive scattering. It trains the mind toward compulsive checking, partial presence, and habitual surface-skimming. This is not merely inconvenient for artists. It is corrosive to the conditions under which deep work becomes possible. A person cannot live in constant interruption and expect subtle perception to remain intact.

Attention is not only a mental resource. It is a mode of relationship. How we attend to the world around us determines what of the world becomes available to us. A hurried mind sees one kind of world. A patient one sees another. A cynical attention and a receptive attention are not observing the same reality. The artist, if serious about tuning the instrument, must become a steward of attention. That may involve practical disciplines that are not romantic but are highly effective: leaving the phone in another room, setting uninterrupted work intervals, protecting morning hours, limiting the amount of trivial input one allows into the mind, and refusing the fantasy that one can remain creatively porous while continuously bathing in digital static.

This does not require monastic withdrawal from modern life but it deas require the development of inner quietude. It requires selectivity. It requires enough respect for one’s own perceptual field to stop handing it over indiscriminately to valueless noise. One does not need to become a hermit. One does need to stop acting surprised when a mind treated like a pinball machine fails to produce sustained insight.

Emotional life is another major part of tuning, and one that many artists either overindulge or neglect. Some people romanticize emotional chaos as if suffering automatically deepens the work. Others try to become so regulated, emotionally cloistered, or professionally composed that they lose access to the living charge beneath the surface. Neither extreme is especially useful. The artist needs feeling, but also containment. Sensitivity, but also ballast.

To tune the emotional instrument means learning how to remain in contact with experience without being overwhelmed by it. It means recognizing one’s recurring distortions. It means knowing the difference between genuine intuition and a nervous system hijacked by fear, resentment, vanity, envy, or despair. It means not confusing emotional intensity with truth. Some of the strongest signals arrive quietly. Some of the loudest feelings are simply old weather blowing through.

This is one reason some form of inner housekeeping is helpful. That could mean journaling, contemplative practice, long walks, prayer, therapy, silence, martial arts, gardening, chopping wood, or staring into the middle distance until the mind untangles itself. The method matters less than the function. The point is to have some reliable means of processing what accumulates so that one is not dragging an entire unresolved backlog into every creative encounter. Untended emotional residue often enters the work not as depth, but as blur.

Reading also tunes the instrument. So does looking. So does listening. The artist should live in the presence of strong work, not to imitate it in a derivative way, but to remain in active relation to standards of vitality, structure, subtlety, and force. Good work recalibrates perception. It reminds the body-mind what aliveness feels like in form. It refreshes one’s sense of possibility. It also exposes mediocrity, especially one’s own, which is healthy if one can survive the sting without melodrama.

But here too there is a matter of balance. One must take in enough nourishment to stay fed, but not so much that one loses contact with one’s own interior movement beneath the noise of everyone else’s voices. Reading, listening, and looking should fertilize the field, not bury it. The artist has to learn when to absorb and when to withdraw. When to study and when to stop studying and make something with one’s own hands.

There is also the matter of rhythm. Creative people often fail not because they lack inspiration, but because they have no durable rhythm. They work in bursts, disappear into avoidance, overexert, crash, then become suspicious of their own inconsistency. A tuned instrument benefits from regular contact. Not necessarily endless hours. Not always heroic effort. But regularity matters. Better to maintain a living thread than to keep tearing the loom down and rebuilding it every few weeks.

This is where the humble discipline of showing up becomes much more valuable than its clichés would suggest. A regular relationship with the work trains the system. It reduces the drama of beginning. It keeps the channel open. It lets the unconscious know that it will be met. It makes creativity less dependent on ideal moods and more woven into the actual structure of life.

And perhaps that is the real heart of tuning: reducing the gap between the life and the work.

A great many artists unconsciously split themselves in two. There is the “creative self,” who appears in special conditions under proper lighting, and then there is the ordinary self, who trudges through errands, dishes, paperwork, conversations, moods, fatigue, obligations, and the low-level absurdities of being alive. But if consciousness is primary and life itself is the field of participation, then this split begins to weaken. The ordinary day is not the enemy of the work. It is often the source material, the testing ground, and the means of embodiment through which the work acquires its density and truth.

To tune the instrument, then, is not only to prepare for making. It is to live in such a way that one remains increasingly available to what is already moving through the day. To notice. To catch. To retain. To discriminate. To feel the difference between signal and noise. To know when something has charge and when it is merely passing mental exhaust.

This kind of tuning does not happen once. It is ongoing. The instrument drifts. Life accumulates. Noise returns. One loses the thread, then finds it again. This is normal. The point is not to achieve permanent perfect attunement. The point is to become skillful at returning and retuning.

That may be one of the defining marks of a mature artist - not uninterrupted brilliance, not flawless discipline, not spiritual radiance glowing from the pores, but the ability to notice when the instrument has gone out of tune and to patiently bring it back into relation.

That is enough to build a life on.

Not every day will feel inspired. Not every work session will feel charged. Not every season will feel fertile. But if the instrument is being cared for, protected, sharpened, and kept in a working relationship to the source of the work, then over time something reliable begins to form. A current. A continuity. A way of being available.

And in the long run, that is worth more than flashes of glamour.

Because the artist’s real power may not lie in intensity alone.

It may lie in sustained receptivity.

And that, like any fine instrument, must be kept in tuned.

Editor’s Note:

This is a concentrated version of the previous article for wider circulation. The following was posted as a comment on this Texas Monthy Article. It was swiftly rejected as spam (maybe becuase I put this website address on it, I’ll try again later without that external link). If you have any suggested locations where these border dispute articles could meaningfully be posted, let me know in the comments or spread them around yourself. It is an opportunity for some ‘good trouble’ as John Lewis would say.

Report on the Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico

April 4, 2026 - 9:54 PM (Mountain Time)

Over the past several days, while Texas and New Mexico continue their increasingly unserious border flirtations, I have found myself in intermittent and imaginary contact with a man from the western edge of the state who has now advanced what he insists is the only truly intelligent solution.

His name is Billy ‘the Snake’ Schytte.

Billy, who appears to have appointed himself Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico, has been following this border dispute closely and has concluded that both Texas and New Mexico are thinking too small.

His position is that if people are finally willing to admit that West Texas is not really Texas-Texas in the cultural, geographic, temporal, climatic, cinematic, or metaphysical sense, then there is no reason to merely redraw a county line here or there. His proposal is to take the entire western vertical slice of Texas, run it all the way south to the Mexican border, and establish a new sovereign desert republic to be known as New Texico.

He insists this is not secessionist extremism but administrative clarification.

Billy’s argument, in brief, is annoyingly coherent.

He points out that much of West Texas already:

• operates on Mountain Time in spirit,

• looks like New Mexico in film,

• shares more in common with sparse-country borderland culture than with Houston or Dallas,

• and has spent decades being governed by people too far away to smell the weather.

He also notes, not incorrectly, that Texas itself often speaks of “West Texas” as though it were already a separate country requiring special handling, atmospheric interpretation, and occasional pity.

His feeling is that if everyone already knows it’s different, then the polite thing to do is formalize the situation.

Among Billy’s early policy planks are:

• correcting the time zone injustice

• aligning government with actual geography

• reducing Texas’s southern border burden by shifting a substantial section of it to the new republic

• and, perhaps most ambitiously, building what he calls the Big Bend Maritime Corridor, a canal system intended to give New Texico future access to the Gulf while simultaneously solving several border, economic, and beachfront deficiencies.

When I pointed out that the Gulf is not especially close, Billy responded:

“That’s quitter talk. We got all this sand. The oceans are risin’ so, in the future, we’ll meet them half way. That’s beachfront property just waitin’ on the water.”

Suggesting he appears to be planning for long-range climate instability and seems to believe that when enough of the lower Gulf Coast and Florida become untenable, New Texico will be well-positioned to absorb displaced populations, provided they are willing to respect local timing, sparse-country values, and constitutional seriousness.

Billy comes from what he describes as “railroad people”, drives a red 1955 Chevy pickup, carries his grandfather’s working gold Swiss pocket watch, and holds strong views on the decline of modern machinery, federal overreach, and why no one should trust a system that can’t be repaired with ordinary tools in ordinary daylight.

He is also, somehow, very persuasive.

Among his better recent observations:

“Government ain’t nothin’ but organizing shit with stationery.”

And:

“Bad government is finally getting your shit together and then forgetting where you put it.”

And perhaps most importantly:

“When shit hits the fan, it won’t be Billy Schytte.”

At this stage, New Texico remains unrecognized by both Austin and Washington, though Billy appears to regard this as a temporary administrative lag.

I am not yet prepared to endorse the Republic of New Texico as a fully actionable statecraft initiative. But I will say this: the more Texas talks about annexing pieces of New Mexico, the more likely it becomes that someone like Billy the Snake Schytte will decide Texas itself needs to be partitioned for its own good.

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You may recall the earlier post Why West Texas Should be a Part of New Mexico

But wait, that's not all.

In my imagination and google satellite images I started traveling down to the designated part of west Texas concerning my border proposal to get a bird’s eye view and ended up wandering around in Wink, Texas and befriended a new charactor by the name of Billy 'the Snake' Schytte, a native of Wink and he was telling me he has a completely different take on things.

What follows is the beginning of an occasional series documenting the statements and proposals of Billy “the Snake” Schytte.

According to Billy, he has, in recent weeks, positioned himself as the acting Presidential Governor of what he describes as the Provisional Republic of New Texico.

While the existence of such a republic remains, at present, unconfirmed, Billy’s commentary on the ongoing Texas-New Mexico border tussle has proven difficult to ignore. As Billy says;

“There’s thought, speech and action. I’m currently in the speech phase.”

These entries are offered as a matter of record.

Who Is Billy ‘the Snake’ Schytte?

Journal Entry: April 2, 2026 - 12:57 PM (Mountain Time)

There are men who arrive in public life by way of law school, donor networks, polished shoes, and the kind of smile that suggests a committee taught it to them.

And then there is Billy the Snake Schytte.

At present, Billy tells me that he serves as Presidential Governor of the Provisional Republic of New Texico, a position he assumed, by his own account, not out of vanity but out of what he describes as “insuring continuity of governance in an uncertain time while there is a shortage of serious-minded alternatives.” Whether New Texico is to become a fully sovereign desert republic or eventually enter the Union as a U.S. state later, if they act right, Billy maintains that his title has been designed with sufficient constitutional flexibility to accommodate either outcome. As President if he can gain enough support to become an independant republic or as Governor of the 51st state should that become an option.

But in the meantime, to advocate for his West Texas community depending on how things play out between Texas and New Mexico.

Those who know him, or claim to, say this is typical of Billy’s civic minded nature.

Billy was born Wilhelm Schytte, a name inherited from the old family line and worn down over time by weather, labor, and local practicality. In childhood it became Willim, and for a period in his younger years he was known as Wolf, either because of a solitary disposition, a habit of watching before speaking, or some other event no one now tells in the same way twice. The name Billy came later, during his years working on a crew in West Texas. Billy insists this was because his coworkers recognized early that he was the GOAT at what he did and began calling him Billy Goat accordingly. Surviving witnesses may remember the matter differently.

The title “the Snake” came after, and in Billy’s own carefully repeated phrasing, “after an incident I consider resolved.”

Pressed beyond that point, he has occasionally offered a more philosophical explanation.

“I have come to think the Snake part is less about the incident and more about how my mind works. I tend to slither around through ideas, lookin’ for what’s hidin’ under things, takin’ ’em in whole and digestin’ ’em till I come up with my solutions. That’s what I’m good at.”

This may be the clearest available summary of Billy’s governing style.

He is not, by any conventional measure, an ideologue. He appears to hold a broad distrust of centralized authority in nearly all forms, including but not limited to Austin, Washington, most large urban planning initiatives, and anyone who says the phrase stakeholder engagement without visible embarrassment. His politics, if one can call them that, seem to emerge less from theory than from prolonged exposure to:

• distance,

• weather,

• labor,

• machinery,

• and what he once referred to as “the accumulated stupidifications of people in office.”

Billy comes from what appears to be a long line of Schyttes, a family whose self-understanding is both specific and expansive. Billy has often repeated the family doctrine that the Schytte name is so particular that anyone carrying it is kin. This has not, to date, been formally verified by any genealogical authority, but it possesses a rough internal plausibility, especially given the rarity of the name and the tendency of sparse-country families to maintain a stronger sense of bloodline than paperwork.

The Schyttes, by all available signs, were never much drawn to crowded places.

They appear to have been, in origin, a Danish / Scandinavian people, perhaps carrying with them whatever old northern instincts survive migration:

• weather sense,

• route sense,

• practical intelligence,

• a certain dry fatalism,

• and a preference for places where there was still enough room left for thinking.

One branch of the family, Billy maintains, is distantly related to the Danish composer Ludvig Schytte, whom he refers to simply as “the European branch.” While no documentation has yet been produced to settle the matter, Billy cites the connection whenever questions of refinement, structure, or inherited cultural range arise.

The family appears to have drifted southward and westward through the American interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, likely through Colorado and eventually into the rougher reaches of West Texas / southeastern New Mexico country, where one branch secured and held onto a modest stretch of dry family land known simply as the Schytte place.

It is not a grand ranch in the modern aspirational sense.

It is something older and more useful than that:

• a piece of held ground,

• a fallback position,

• a family argument,

• and a point of return.

The Schyttes seem to have worked, across generations, in the practical sparse-country professions:

• railroad work,

• land routes,

• surveying-adjacent labor,

• transportation,

• and the broad family of occupations involving timing, territory, movement, and survival.

Billy’s great-grandfather, according to family memory, may have worked in some relation to the railroad, possibly in land acquisition, route judgment, or rights-of-way, helping determine where lines would pass through difficult country. His grandfather is said to have worked as a conductor or rail man in rough country and, according to one durable family legend, was once caught up in a train robbery during which his pocket watch was taken - an event Billy still speaks of as though it were not merely theft but an assault on order itself.

Whether all of these details can be fully verified is perhaps beside the point.

They are true in the way family structures are true.

Billy’s father appears to have belonged to that next familiar generation of desert-edge men whose work touched land, machinery, movement, and practical systems - oilfield work, road work, lease work, or surveying in one form or another - while keeping some connection to the family place alive.

That pattern passed directly into Billy.

He is most often seen in a red 1955 Chevrolet pickup, equipped with a 261 straight-six, which he appears to regard as both transportation and moral argument. The truck is not a polished collector’s object so much as a lovingly maintained working artifact - the kind of machine that continues to justify itself. This, Billy seems to feel, is the proper standard for both vehicles and republics.

He is also rarely without his working gold Swiss pocket watch from the 1920s, marked Touchon & Co., which he says belonged to his grandfather and which he appears to trust more than nearly any modern timekeeping system. The watch is not ornamental. He winds it. He checks it. He consults it. He carries it with the seriousness of a man who believes that if you no longer know what time it really is, then you are already in the early stages of civilizational drift.

As Billy has observed:

“A watch like that don’t run on sentiment. It runs on discipline.”

And elsewhere:

“The only time you’ve got is the time you keep and you gotta keep a watchful eye on what matters at that time.”

This may be the nearest thing he has to a political theology.

To Billy, a thing worth trusting ought to be:

• understandable,

• maintainable,

• durable,

• and built to last.

He has little patience for systems designed:

• to drift invisibly,

• fail quietly,

• become unfixable,

• and then require replacement by somebody else’s authority.

This appears to explain:

• his affection for old trucks,

• his suspicion of bad government,

• his views on time zones,

• and his growing insistence that West Texas, southeastern New Mexico, and the Big Bend region ought to be governed according to actual lived geography rather than inherited clerical laziness.

It is in this context that Billy has become the leading public advocate for the creation of New Texico, a proposed sovereign republic encompassing the western reaches of Texas and the adjacent borderlands, to be established initially as an independent desert nation and potentially considered for U.S. statehood later, that is, ‘if the federal government demonstrates sufficient maturity’.

His major policy initiatives include:

• time zone realignment

• straightened borders

• desert self-rule

• strategic alien discretion

• future climate migration planning

• and the construction of the Big Bend Maritime Corridor, a vast canal project intended to provide New Texico with maritime access, border security, economic development, and what Billy has repeatedly described as “all the beachfront property this sand’s been waitin’ on.”

Critics have called these proposals impossible, delusional, and geologically unserious.

Billy considers this encouraging.

He is known to speak in:

• rough aphorisms,

• unexpectedly memorable slogans,

• and the kind of vulgar civic wisdom that sounds ridiculous until one notices it has somehow explained the situation better than the governor.

Among his better-known lines are the following:

“Government ain’t nothin’ but organizing shit with stationery.”

“Bad government is finally getting your shit together and then forgetting where you put it.”

“When shit hits the fan, it won’t be Billy Schytte.”

Around parts of West Texas, where reverence and mockery have long maintained a practical coexistence, Billy is known in some circles simply as Billy Shit, a fact he appears to have folded into his public identity with amusement and increasing strategic use.

He does not appear especially precious about names.

Among his Hispanic friends, he is often known as Guillermo, or Memo for short.

As he has said:

“I’ve been called all kinds of things. Most of ’em I answer to. But like I always say, Call me what you want, just don’t call me late for dinner, especially if fajitas and margaritas are involved.”

This, too, seems typical.

At present, Billy has:

• no official office,

• no recognized government,

• no formal campaign apparatus,

• and no digital presence of his own.

And yet he already carries himself with the settled confidence of a man who believes history has merely been delayed in catching up to him.

Whether Billy the Snake Schytte will one day preside over a sovereign desert republic, govern a future U.S. state, or remain what he is now - a highly articulate regional disturbance with constitutional ambitions - remains to be seen.

But one thing appears increasingly certain: he has already begun acting as though the map belongs to whoever is committed enough to go through the effort to make some improvements upon it.

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I have posted the beginnings of this extended feature as comments an this article on Texas Monthy The Texas GOP Has a Plan to Make Part of New Mexico New Texas
I just felt this was a prime opportunity to say a few things and was having so much fun it actually it got a bit out of hand. I wouldn’t blame you if you can’t make it through the whole 6,000 words of it. But I have to admit it is a pretty good read.

So top off your coffee cup, get comfy and have a read.

To start, in case you haven’t heard, the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of Cecil. I have a map to prove it. I named the gulf after me when Trump decided it was Gulf of America. So next time you head down to what was formerly called Padre Island which is now called The Isle of Cecil, remember that you are stepping into the Gulf of Cecil.

Myself, I am a native Texan born in Austin but I live in New Mexico. I consider the antics of the current Republican Party or perhaps I should say the Rethuglican Party, an embarrassment to all Texans. Ted Cruz? I rest my case.

OK, onto the main topic...

The Big Bend Reconsidered

There are moments in public life when a proposal arrives that is so casually unmoored from reality that it invites, almost obliges, a response in kind. Not out of spite, but out of symmetry. A kind of civic call and response.

Recently, the good people of Texas, through the procedural imagination of Speaker Dustin Burrows, have taken up the question of whether certain counties of New Mexico might be better off under Texan stewardship. Not action, not yet. A study. A consideration. A thoughtful leaning over the fence line with a measuring tape and a gleam in the eye.

Very well.

If we are now entering an era of speculative cartography, New Mexico would like to submit its own modest proposal.

We propose to extend our eastern border southward in a clean, elegant descent to the Mexican frontier, incorporating the region presently known as Big Bend National Park and its surrounding lands into the greater cultural and ecological body of New Mexico.

We offer this not as a provocation, but as a gesture of balance. If maps are to become conversational again, let us converse properly.

There is, after all, a certain logic to the matter. The land itself has been making quiet arguments for millennia. The deserts do not recognize Austin. The mountains do not report to committees. The river bends according to older instructions than any legislature has yet managed to draft. The great sweep of that region - basin, sky, canyon, silence - speaks in a dialect far more closely aligned with the long vocabulary of New Mexico than with the administrative ambitions of distant offices.

One might say the land has already voted. It simply has not yet been asked in the correct language.

Texas, for its part, has always possessed a certain largeness of personality. One hesitates to call it expansionist. It is more of a habitual stretching, a reflexive reaching toward the horizon as though the horizon were a suggestion rather than a boundary. This has produced many admirable qualities - confidence, scale, a certain operatic sense of self. It has also, from time to time, produced the impression that everything visible might be improved by being Texan.

We do not entirely disagree. We simply believe that principle should be applied with reciprocity.

If southeastern New Mexico can be imagined as Texan, then Big Bend can certainly be imagined as New Mexican. The symmetry is almost mathematical. One could sketch it on a napkin. One could present it to a committee. One could commission a study.

And why stop there. Let us convene a panel of geologists, poets, ranchers, and those who have spent a night alone under that West Texas enormous sky. Let us ask them where the line truly runs. Not the inherited line, but the lived one. The one that reveals itself somewhere between the last paved road and the first clear recognition that the world is larger than any claim placed upon it.

We suspect their answer would not arrive in the language of jurisdiction.

There is also a matter of aesthetics. New Mexico, as a shape, would benefit from a more graceful extension. A southern reach. A continuity of gesture. The map would breathe differently. It would feel less like a compromise and more like a sentence completed.

Texas, in turn, would lose nothing essential. It would remain vast. It would remain Texas. It would continue, as it always has, to contain multitudes, contradictions, and an admirable ability to take itself both very seriously and not seriously enough.

We are, in this sense, offering a service.

Of course, we understand the practicalities. Such a change would require agreements, legislatures, and the slow machinery of federal approval. It would require signatures, hearings, and a great many documents stamped in ink. It would require, in short, reality to reassert itself.

But that is not quite the point.

The point is that maps are not only records. They are expressions of desire. They reveal how a place imagines itself in relation to its neighbors, its resources, its future. And when one state begins to imagine the rearrangement of another, it opens a small and curious door.

We have simply stepped through it.

So let this proposal stand. Not as a demand, but as a mirror. Not as a plan, but as a clarification.

If we are to redraw the lines, let us at least admit that we are drawing them with the same human hand that draws everything else - with a mixture of reason, appetite, humor, and the faint suspicion that the land itself is quietly amused.

In the meantime, the river will continue to bend. The desert will continue to speak in its slow, precise grammar. And the maps will wait, as they always do, for someone to come along and imagine them otherwise.

#Texas #annexNewMexico #WestTexasPolitics #ElPaso #BigBend #Southwest #SouthwestCulture #TexasPolitics #NewMexicoPolitics #Borderlands #DesertLife #AmericanWest #WesternCulture #PoliticalSatire #Satire #RegionalPolitics #MountainTime #ElPasoTexas #Marfa #Terlingua #Presidio #Wink #BigBendCountry #DesertHumor #AnnexWestTexas, #annextwoNewMexicocounties

On the Practical Advantages of a More Elegant Border

Let us now leave aside, for a moment, the higher poetry of geography, the spiritual rights of deserts, the whispered self-determination of mesas, and all such noble atmospheric matters, and consider instead the question in the plain, hard, practical language so beloved by committees, appropriations boards, defense contractors, and men who wear lanyards at regional policy conferences.

What, precisely, would be the advantages to each state if the eastern border of New Mexico were simply extended in one clean vertical line all the way south to Mexico?

The answer, upon sober reflection, is: many.

Indeed, one is surprised no one has yet had the courage, or the cartographic imagination, to propose it more forcefully.

To begin with, New Mexico would gain what every serious southwestern state ought to possess in abundance: additional federally useful emptiness.

This is not a criticism. It is an asset category.

New Mexico has long understood that one of the great hidden currencies of the American West is not merely land, but land upon which the federal government feels comfortable conducting things it would prefer not to explain in detail. It is a rare and underappreciated specialization. While other states clutter themselves with population, commerce, and suburban entitlement, New Mexico has maintained a proud and disciplined relationship with remoteness.

That remoteness has already proven useful in matters of national security, advanced secrecy, improbable aircraft, atmospheric ambiguities, and the occasional project whose budget is blacker than the night sky over the Jornada del Muerto.

By extending the border southward, New Mexico would acquire additional acreage for the storage, concealment, testing, misplacement, rediscovery, and plausible denial of all manner of sensitive national endeavors. You know, nuclear warheads and such.

Should the federal government ever decide that it once again needs more room for blowing shit up in the name of peace, deterrence, freedom, or the general maintenance of geopolitical confidence, New Mexico would be able to respond in the mature, civic-minded manner for which it is known:

“Yes, we believe we can accommodate that.”

There would be more room for:

• missile ranges,

• secret hangars,

• underground facilities,

• suspiciously unmarked roads,

• fenced compounds with signs that say NO TRESPASSING - USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED,

• and, naturally, more secure locations in which to hide aliens and their technology from the general public.

And let us be honest here. If one is going to hide extraterrestrial technology anywhere in the United States, one does not tuck it behind a Chili’s outside Dallas. One places it somewhere with proper atmosphere. Somewhere with dignity. Somewhere with enough silence, dust, and military signage to support the mythology.

New Mexico already has a strong brand in this department. What it lacks is simply a little more elbow room.

This proposal would remedy that.

Now let us turn, with equal fairness, to the advantages for Texas.

Texas, as everyone knows, is forever complaining about the burden of protecting the southern border with stunts like bussing Over 100,000 Migrants To Sanctuary Cities and proud of it. This complaint has become one of the state’s most enduring folk traditions, right alongside brisket, boosterism, and saying the phrase “energy independence” with the gravity of a religious sacrament.

The border, we are told, is expensive. Difficult. Lengthy. Burdensome. Vast stretches of river, desert, and ranchland must be monitored, patrolled, surveilled, dramatized, televised, and periodically used as a backdrop for gubernatorial photography.

Very well.

What if New Mexico, in a spirit of regional cooperation and neighborly sacrifice, simply took nearly half of the miles of that border off Texas’s hands?

Think of the relief.
Think of the savings.
Think of the emotional release.

A significant portion of Texas’s border responsibilities would be gently transferred to a state far more temperamentally suited to the task. New Mexico, with its more meditative relationship to space and fewer compulsions toward theatrical overstatement, could manage the newly acquired stretch with a calmer hand and considerably less shouting.

Texas could then devote more of its precious time and treasure to:

• repairing its power grid,

• explaining its water future,

• litigating against books,

• build more data centers,

• or simply enjoying the reduced administrative stress of having slightly fewer miles in which to perform frontier masculinity for cable news.

This would be, in effect, a mercy annexation.

And there are secondary benefits as well.

A cleaner vertical border would be easier to understand. Easier to map. Easier to explain to schoolchildren. Easier to print on coffee mugs and souvenir tea towels. It would reduce visual clutter in the national imagination.

There is something deeply satisfying about a straight line carried through to completion. It has confidence. It has clarity. It says, “We meant this.”

The current arrangement, by contrast, feels like the result of a distracted clerk being called away mid-ruler.

No, if we are to be serious about governance, we must also be serious about line quality.

And there is one more advantage, perhaps the most important of all.

This proposal would allow both states to save face while pretending to act in the interest of mutual strategic necessity.

New Mexico could frame the expansion as a patriotic contribution to national defense, scientific advancement, and extraterrestrial containment logistics.

Texas could frame the cession as a fiscally responsible act of sovereign burden reduction and inter-state efficiency.

Both states would emerge claiming victory.

The federal government would nod gravely.

Consultants would invoice.

And the desert, as always, would absorb the absurdity with perfect composure.

Which is perhaps why this proposal feels, in its own ridiculous way, almost reasonable.

Not because it is likely.
Not because it is lawful.
Not because it is wise.

But because it has that distinctly American quality of sounding half insane and half administratively plausible at exactly the same time.

And if that is not the true spirit of the republic, it is at least one of its more durable operating principles.

#AnnexWestTexas #FreeTheClocks #NewMexico #Texas #WestTexas #MountainTime #ElPaso #Marfa #Terlingua #BigBend #Southwest #DesertPolitics #PoliticalSatire #Borderlands #WesternAbsurdity #MapCorrection #DesertRepublic #TexasHumor #NewMexicoHumor #WrongTimeline

On the Deep New Mexican Character of West Texas Place Names

And now we arrive at one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of this entirely reasonable border adjustment: the names have already chosen sides.

This, in truth, may be the most compelling argument of all.

Before one examines economics, military logistics, desert stewardship, or the proper storage of recovered alien propulsion systems, one must first ask a simpler and more intimate question:

What does the land call itself?

Because names matter. They are not incidental. They carry weather, memory, conquest, prayer, migration, trade, grief, inheritance, and the old mouth-shapes of those who stood there before surveyors came along with rulers and federal confidence.

And when one looks westward across that stretch of Texas under discussion, one finds not a robust field of aggressively Anglo certainty, but an entire landscape already speaking in a voice that sounds suspiciously, unmistakably, and quite respectably New Mexican.

Take El Paso.

I ask you, with complete seriousness: does this not already sound like a city that should be in New Mexico?

It does.

It has the dignity. It has the cadence. It has the proper desert syllables. It does not sound like a place that should be governed by distant men in polished boots holding press conferences about freedom while standing in front of a Buc-ee’s billboard. It sounds like a place where one should be able to buy a burrito, hear three languages before noon, and encounter a retired ceramicist with profound opinions about saints, coyotes, and chile.

In other words, it sounds New Mexican.

Then there is Marfa.

Marfa? Come now.

That is not merely acceptable to New Mexico. That is practically overqualified. It already sounds like a small, mysterious art town full of weathered adobe walls, conceptual installations, dogs sleeping under pickup trucks, and a former sculptor living in semi-voluntary obscurity while making impossible furniture from salvaged wood and speaking only when necessary.

That is not foreign territory. That is family.

And what of Presidio?

Presidio is so New Mexican in temperament that one suspects it has simply been waiting, politely and without complaint, for the paperwork to catch up.

Terlingua? Entirely plausible New Mexico.
Alpine? A little less obvious perhaps, but still perfectly assimilable after a brief orientation and some exposure to proper chile governance.
Fort Davis? Slightly more Texan in posture, yes, but not beyond rehabilitation.

One could go on.

The point is not that these places are not Texan in the current bureaucratic sense. The point is that their names, atmospheres, and existential frequencies suggest a more nuanced identity. They already belong to the greater Southwestern sentence that New Mexico speaks more fluently than perhaps any other state in the union.

Texas, by contrast, often behaves as though every town within its borders must participate in the same giant statewide personality cult. But this is simply not true. Texas contains many Texases. There is the oil Texas, the cattle Texas, the suburban stadium Texas, the finance Texas, the megachurch Texas, the border Texas, the weird artsy Texas, the German-Texas, the Tejano Texas, the hill-country dream Texas, and the Texas that would very much prefer not to be included in whatever the governor is currently yelling about.

West Texas, especially along that long desert stretch, has always seemed to exist in a slightly different register. It is drier in spirit, quieter in posture, more spacious in its thinking. It is less interested in spectacle and more willing to let the sky do the talking.

That is a New Mexican trait if ever there was one.

In fact, one might say that the further west Texas goes, the less Texan it becomes and the more it begins to remember something older, stranger, slower, and more desert-shaped.

Which is to say: it begins to behave like New Mexico.

This is not an insult to Texas. It is, if anything, a compliment. It means that even Texas, in its western reaches, eventually improves.

And let us also note the linguistic dignity of the matter.

New Mexico is a state whose atmosphere has long been shaped by Spanish, Indigenous, frontier, Catholic, Mexican, Anglo, mystical, military, artistic, and plain old desert influences all jumbled together into a kind of weathered cultural braid. Its place names do not merely label locations. They often sound like they are carrying history in a clay bowl.

West Texas place names already fit comfortably into that bowl.

No one would blink if one heard of a road trip passing through El Paso, Presidio, and Terlingua on the way to some obscure shrine, abandoned mission, artist residency, or highly questionable but unforgettable café. In fact, it sounds less like a crossing of state lines than a coherent itinerary.

That coherence should not be ignored.

It is the map, once again, lagging behind the deeper truth.

For names are often wiser than governments. They persist. They carry forward what the land remembers even when official boundaries become clumsy, arbitrary, or politically overcaffeinated.

So yes, this proposed border correction is supported not only by military logic, fiscal generosity, alien storage capacity, and humanitarian border relief for our overburdened Texan neighbors.

It is also supported by the simple and obvious fact that many of these towns are already, in name and in spirit, perfectly respectable New Mexican places.

The paperwork, as always, is merely the final stage of recognition.

#Leacounty #Rooseveltcounty #Annex #annexation #RepublicofNewTexico #secession

On the Linguistic Self-Exposure of “West Texas”

Once one begins to examine the matter linguistically, one discovers that Texas has already confessed.

The phrase itself gives the whole thing away:

West Texas.

Now let us pause and look at that carefully.

Not simply Texas.
Not proudly and indivisibly Texas.
But West Texas.

A qualification. A caveat. A directional disclaimer.

An internal footnote.

The phrase carries within it the unmistakable sound of a people saying, in effect:

“Yes, yes, technically it’s ours… but it’s a little different out there.”

And there it is.

That is how empires talk about their borderlands. That is how central authorities refer to regions that have always sat a little outside the emotional, cultural, and atmospheric center of the thing. It is the language of partial belonging. The vocabulary of managed ambiguity.

No one says East Texas with the same nervous explanatory energy, because East Texas is not under suspicion. It is securely Texan. It is soaked in the proper statewide broth. It carries the approved flavor profile. But West Texas always arrives in conversation with a faint tone of exception, as though the speaker is trying to reassure both themselves and the listener that, while things may become geologically or spiritually irregular out there, one need not panic.

It remains, for the time being, within the paperwork.

But the phrase tells the truth.

Because if a region must constantly be described as a directional variation of the parent identity, that usually means it is already drifting toward another one.

This is basic cultural tectonics.

You can hear it elsewhere:

• West Berlin

• West Bank

• Western frontier

• the West End

• the Western Territories

Such names do not merely indicate position. They indicate threshold.

And threshold is precisely what West Texas is.

It is not Texas proper in the full ceremonial sense. It is Texas becoming uncertain at the edges. Texas thinning into desert. Texas entering a zone where its usual assumptions begin to lose altitude. Texas wandering so far into silence, distance, Spanish place names, mountain light, and metaphysical weather that it gradually ceases to behave like itself.

At a certain point, one is simply watching Texas slowly become New Mexico without wanting to admit it.

This is why the term West Texas is so revealing.

It is the verbal equivalent of a man introducing his cousin by saying, “He’s family, but he’s… different.”

Different how?

Well.
Quieter.
Older somehow.
Less impressed by volume.
More comfortable with empty space.
More likely to contain an abandoned mission, an art installation, a ghost town, three dogs sleeping in shade, and a man named Rafael who knows things he has no intention of putting online.

In other words:
New Mexican.

And if we are being honest, the phrase West Texas has always had a faint undertone of administrative denial.

It sounds less like a place fully integrated into the Texan psyche and more like a holding category for land that never quite submitted to the brand.

It is the state’s way of saying:

“This is still us, technically, though we admit it has become rather strange and beautiful and difficult to govern according to our usual habits.”

Exactly.

That is how provinces become borderlands.
That is how borderlands become arguments.
That is how arguments become maps.

In fact, one could make the case that the entire phrase West Texas is merely a temporary placeholder for the more accurate and historically honest term:

Eastern New Mexico South.

Or, if one wishes to preserve local dignity and transitional stability:

The Lower New Mexican Extension Zone.

Naturally, this would require tasteful signage and a modest public education campaign.

But the principle stands. And don’t worry, we’ll work it out ourselves.

When Texans themselves instinctively speak of that region as a directional exception, they are already acknowledging that it belongs to a different interior world than Dallas, Houston, Austin, or even the mythic self-image Texas prefers to project onto itself.

West Texas is what happens when Texas wanders too far into the desert and begins, against its own intentions, to attain depth.

And depth, as we know, is dangerous.

Depth leads to reflection.
Reflection leads to humility.
Humility leads to adobe.
Adobe leads, inevitably, to New Mexico.

This is simply the natural order of things.

So yes, the very phrase West Texas is less a regional descriptor than a quiet confession.

It is Texas speaking under oath and hoping no one notices.

And now, regrettably for them, we have noticed.

On the Cinematic Case for the Transfer of West Texas

#NewMexicoFilm #FilmedInNewMexico #NewMexicoFilmmaker #NewMexicoFilmmaking #NewMexicoCinema #FilmNewMexico #NMFilm #IndependentFilm #IndieFilm #Filmmaking #FilmProduction #LocationScouting #FilmLocation #SouthwestCinema #SouthwestFilm #DesertCinema #AlbuquerqueFilm #SantaFeFilm #LasCrucesFilm #MovieMaking

And now we arrive at what may be the most incontrovertible evidence of all:

cinema.

Because if politics can be evasive, and history can be selective, and maps can lie with a ruler and a straight face, film has a way of exposing the underlying truth.

And the truth is this:

If you are filming “West Texas,” you might as well just be filming in New Mexico.

In fact, very often, that is exactly what happens.

This is one of the great unspoken embarrassments of regional identity in the American Southwest. The visual mythology of “Texas” - especially the mythic, sparse, windswept, haunted, western, old-weird, frontier, desert, existential, post-cowboy Texas that people actually want in movies - is very often cinematically indistinguishable from New Mexico.

Or, worse for Texas, it is sometimes better achieved in New Mexico.

And why?

Because New Mexico has long since mastered the art of being the distilled visual essence of the American West.

It does not merely contain western landscapes. It contains the idea of westernness in a more concentrated and photogenic form. It has the proper horizons. It has the proper weathering. It has the proper silence. It has the right ratio of ruin to sky.

It knows how to stand there and look like destiny.

This is why filmmakers love it.

When a director wants:

• a morally ambiguous desert,

• a town where something ominous happened in 1887 and perhaps again last Tuesday,

• a borderland of heat, distance, dust, and consequence,

• a road that appears to lead toward either revelation or death,

• or a horizon vast enough to make a man reconsider his life choices,

they are, whether they know it or not, asking for New Mexico energy.

And what is West Texas, especially in the cinematic imagination, if not simply New Mexico with more state-sponsored self-regard?

Let us be blunt.

No one dreams of filming “suburban Texas.”
No one yearns to capture the spiritual mystery of six lanes of frontage road and a Cheesecake Factory near Plano.
That is not the Texas of filmic longing.

What filmmakers want is the desert edge, the lonely gas station, the faded motel, the border-town twilight, the empty highway at dusk, the mountains beyond legality, the wind moving through old signage, the sense that civilization is present only on probation.

That is the West Texas package.

And that package is already, aesthetically and atmospherically, fully compatible with New Mexico.

One might even argue that New Mexico has spent decades serving as the stunt double for the Southwest’s deeper subconscious, while Texas has too often been busy insisting on top billing.

If the visual DNA matches, if the architecture harmonizes, if the light behaves correctly, if the desert agrees, and if the camera cannot tell the difference, then one must ask the obvious administrative question:

Why maintain the fiction?

Why force productions to navigate this emotional and bureaucratic redundancy?

Why continue pretending that “West Texas” is some wholly separate cinematic species when every director, cinematographer, location scout, and weathered character actor with a squint and a flask already knows what time it is?

It is New Mexico-adjacent at minimum.
At best, it is simply pre-recognized New Mexico.

And let us not ignore the practical implications.

By formally incorporating West Texas into New Mexico, the state would become even more attractive as a one-stop production environment for all desert, borderland, neo-western, apocalyptic, revisionist, noir-western, post-frontier, alien-contact, cartel-adjacent, mystical-road-movie, and “man-in-hat-walks-silently-across-parking-lot” genres.

Think of the efficiency.

No more awkward disclaimers:

• “Set in Texas, filmed in New Mexico.”

• “Inspired by West Texas, shot outside Las Cruces.”

• “A Texas story captured in a state with better light and less administrative friction.”

The truth could finally be stated plainly.

And Texas, if it is wise, should welcome this.

Because there is no shame in handing off a region that is already living a double life on screen. In fact, it may come as a relief. Texas could then focus its cinematic brand on what it truly excels at:

• oil-money family sagas,

• courtroom swagger,

• football fathers,

• suspicious governors,

• megachurch parking lots,

• and tense conversations held over iced tea on very expensive porches.

A rich tradition in its own right.

But West Texas?
That belongs to the long, quiet, morally complicated visual narrative of New Mexico. Think Breaking Bad.

You can see it in the light.

And film, perhaps more than politics, is merciless about light.

A camera knows when a place is pretending.
A camera knows when a place belongs to a myth larger than its paperwork.
A camera knows when a region has wandered spiritually across a border long before any legislature has managed to catch up.

And what it knows, over and over again, is this:

If you are trying to film the haunted desert soul of West Texas,
you are already most of the way to New Mexico.

You may as well finish the trip.

#NewMexicoFilm #FilmedInNewMexico #NMFilm #FilmProduction #FilmCrew #ProductionLife #FilmIndustry #IndieFilm #SetLife #LocationScouting #FilmLocation #CrewLife #ProductionDesign #Cinematography #FilmDirector #FilmMaker #MovieSet #SouthwestFilm #AlbuquerqueFilm #SantaFeFilm

Even Time Refuses to Remain Texan

And now, perhaps the most elegant evidence of all.

Not geography.
Not language.
Not cinema.
Not military secrecy.
Not border management.
Not extraterrestrial storage logistics.

Time itself.

Because when one looks closely at the far western edge of Texas, one discovers something almost too perfect to have been invented:

Part of Texas already keeps New Mexico time.

This is not metaphor.
This is administration.

Places like El Paso and the surrounding western edge of Texas are already living by Mountain Time, while the rest of Texas remains in Central Time. Which is to say, in the most literal possible sense, West Texas is already operating on a different timeline than Texas proper.

And if that does not tell us something profound, then frankly nothing will.

Because what is a time zone, if not a civilization admitting where its true orientation lies?

Time zones are not decorative. They are among the deepest confessions a place can make. They reveal where a region actually lives in relation to work, weather, commerce, sunrise, travel, and the felt rhythm of ordinary existence. They are a daily act of alignment. A repeated agreement with the turning of the Earth.

And West Texas, in its farthest reaches, has already chosen. After all, whole doesn’t want to be in mountain time. That sound way cooler than central time any day of the week. Texans come to mountain time on vacation or have second homes here.

West Texas wakes with New Mexico.
It eats lunch with New Mexico.
It misses appointments with New Mexico.
It arrives at the hardware store, the dentist, and the funeral home with New Mexico.
Its clocks are already facing westward in spirit.

One could hardly ask for a clearer declaration of intent.

This means that the current situation is not merely a border anomaly. It is a temporal injustice.

Imagine the absurdity.

Imagine living your whole life under a state government whose emotional center is in one time zone, while your actual day unfolds in another. Imagine being administratively Texan while existentially New Mexican. Imagine knowing, every single morning, that your clock and your legislature are not in full agreement.

This is no way to run a republic.

What we are witnessing is not simply a discrepancy of convenience. It is a people being forced to inhabit the wrong narrative frame. They are, quite literally, living in the wrong timeline.

And this is where the beauty of the proposed border correction becomes undeniable.

By extending New Mexico’s eastern border southward in one clean vertical descent to Mexico, we would do more than adjust a line on a map.

We would heal a tear in spacetime.

Those current West Texans would at last be restored to their proper temporal habitat. Their civic identity would finally match the hour on the microwave, the dashboard clock, the church bulletin, and the feed store sign.

They would no longer have to endure the subtle psychic strain of belonging to one state while keeping time with another.

Their maps would match their mornings.

Their jurisdiction would match their sunlight.

Their paperwork would, at long last, catch up to their clocks.

This is not annexation.

This is chronological reconciliation.

One might even call it a humanitarian correction.

Because how many generations must a people endure the quiet bewilderment of waking up in one state and one metaphysical condition, only to discover that the capital governing them is operating according to a different noon?

This cannot continue.

There is a reason frontiers are often strange. They are not only geographical thresholds. They are often time leaks. Places where one reality begins to thin and another starts pressing through. West Texas, especially that far desert edge, has all the signs of such a condition. It already lives in a different light. It already speaks in a different register. It already bears the names, the silence, the cinematic atmosphere, the borderland temperament, and now, indisputably, the correct hour.

What more evidence is required?

At some point, the burden of proof shifts.

At some point, one must stop asking whether West Texas should become part of New Mexico and begin asking why we have tolerated this obvious temporal mismatch for so long.

A state line should not force a people to live in bureaucratic drag.

A people should not have to perform one identity while their clocks are loyally reporting another.

The clocks, unlike legislatures, have no ideology.
They simply tell the truth.

And the truth is this:

West Texas is already keeping New Mexico time because, in the deeper order of things, it already belongs to New Mexico.

The proposed border correction would merely formalize what time itself has been trying to tell us all along.

The land knew it.
The names knew it.
The filmmakers knew it.
The desert knew it.

And now, at last, the clocks have spoken.

#AnnexWestTexas #Texas #NewMexico #WestTexas #ElPaso #BigBend #Marfa #Southwest #Borderlands #PoliticalSatire #MountainTime #DesertPolitics #FreeTheClocks #WrongTimeline

The Only Intelligent Border Adjustment Left to Us

In conclusion…

Now that the matter has been given the serious, balanced, and multidisciplinary attention it so clearly deserves, the conclusion is unavoidable.

Once the evidence is gathered, arranged, and viewed in full, only one intelligent course of action remains before the American people:

West Texas should become part of New Mexico.

This is no longer a whimsical notion. It has advanced beyond jest into the far more dangerous territory of becoming obviously correct.

At first, one might have assumed the idea to be merely a satirical response to recent Texan fantasies of annexing portions of southeastern New Mexico. A playful mirror. A little desert mischief. But as often happens in public life, once the joke is allowed to breathe, it begins to reveal the more serious truth hiding beneath it.

And the truth, in this case, is almost embarrassingly clear.

The land itself has already made the case.
The names have already made the case.
The film industry has already made the case.
The border politics have made the case.
The military-industrial atmosphere has made the case.
And now, most decisively of all, time itself has made the case.

One by one, every supposedly minor detail has betrayed the same deeper pattern.

The region in question does not speak with the full accent of Texas proper. It does not move with the same rhythm. It does not carry the same psychic weather. It does not even keep the same hour.

It exists as a kind of cartographic afterthought - a magnificent, dry, cinematic, spiritually overqualified appendage hanging off the western side of Texas while already behaving, in every meaningful respect, like New Mexico.

This is not a criticism of Texas.

Texas has many admirable qualities. It is large, committed, theatrical, and capable of producing both excellent barbecue and a nearly uninterrupted stream of self-mythology. It has made an enormous contribution to the American experiment, particularly in the fields of oil extraction, state pride, and legislatively sanctioned overconfidence.

But one must be honest.

Not everything Texas touches becomes more Texan.
Sometimes, the further west it goes, the more it simply becomes desert.

And desert, if left alone long enough, tends to sort things into their proper essence.

That is what has happened here.

West Texas has been slowly clarified by exposure to distance, silence, mountain light, Spanish names, border weather, artistic eccentricity, geological dignity, and temporal noncompliance. In the process, it has become less a western province of Texas than a southern extension of New Mexico waiting for administrative recognition.

It is already halfway across the border in spirit.

What remains is simply to allow the map to catch up.

And let us not overlook the practical advantages.

New Mexico would gain additional strategic emptiness for all future federal endeavors involving classified projects, mysterious installations, and the periodic need to test whether something can be made louder, hotter, faster, or less explainable.

Texas, meanwhile, would be relieved of a meaningful portion of its southern border obligations, a burden about which it has complained with such theatrical consistency that one can only assume it would welcome any arrangement allowing it to complain slightly less.

The region’s towns already bear names of excellent New Mexican standing.

Its cinematic identity already belongs to New Mexico.

Its clock already belongs to New Mexico.

Its atmosphere, one might even say, already belongs to New Mexico.

At this point, the only thing still insisting otherwise is a line drawn by people who are all long dead and had no idea how many think pieces, cable-news segments, committee reports, and speculative alien-storage needs the future would eventually require.

Why should their confusion continue to govern us?

A nation must be willing, from time to time, to correct its lesser cartographic mistakes.

And if it cannot do so through wisdom, then at the very least it should do so through humor sharpened into insight.

That is where we now stand.

So let it be said plainly:

The transfer of West Texas into New Mexico is no longer merely an amusing possibility. It is, upon mature consideration, the only intelligent thing to do.

Not because it would solve every problem.
Not because Congress would ever permit it.
Not because Texas would surrender it without a fit of operatic indignation.

But because the proposal, absurd as it first appears, reveals with startling clarity how much of public reality is already absurd, and how often truth enters the room wearing the mask of a joke.

And in this case, the joke has become too well-supported to ignore.

The clocks have spoken.
The names have spoken.
The desert has spoken.
The camera has spoken.

All that remains is for the map to stop being stubborn.

Until then, West Texas will remain what it has quietly been for some time now:

New Mexico in exile.

Then there is the idea of New Texico where the same line is drawn to big bend that becomes a new independant state.

And now that is worked out, let’s consider Chihuahua, Mexico…

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“The ideas, views, opinions, attitudes, conceptions or insinuations, both explicit and implicit, contained herein may or may not be those of the International Post-Dogmatist Group as a whole or any of its constituent members, associates, affiliates, subsidiaries or institutions.”

On Becoming a Good Instrument

If one were to accept, even provisionally, the possibility that consciousness is primary and that life is one of the ways it enters manifestation, then the artist would have to rethink the nature of creative work from the ground up. The question would no longer be merely, “What am I trying to make?” It would become, “What kind of instrument am I becoming, and what is trying to come through me?”

That is not a small shift. It changes the posture of the whole life.

Most people are trained, implicitly or explicitly, to think of themselves as producers. One is expected to generate output, manufacture originality, shape a career, and maintain a stable and marketable identity while doing so. The artist is often encouraged to treat creativity as an extension of personal will - a matter of intention, force, style, and self-expression. There is some truth in that, of course. Art does require decisions, labor, discipline, and a degree of selfhood strong enough to withstand resistance. But if consciousness is something larger than the individual personality, if the human being is less an isolated author and more a local aperture within a wider field of intelligence and feeling, then the work begins to look less like pure invention and more like participation.

This does not make the artist passive. It does not excuse vagueness, laziness, or pseudo-spiritual hand waving. It places a greater demand on the artist, not a lesser one. Because if the work is not simply “made” by the isolated ego, then the task becomes one of refinement. One must become capable of receiving, recognizing, shaping, and transmitting what is trying to emerge. That is a different kind of work. The emphasis shifts away from self-display and toward internal calibration.

In practical terms, this means that the artist’s life is not merely a lifestyle wrapped around occasional moments of production. The life itself becomes part of the studio. The body, the mind, the nervous system, the habits of attention, the emotional weather, the quality of one’s listening, the clutter one allows to accumulate inwardly and outwardly - all of it affects the clarity of transmission. If one is to become a good instrument, then one must learn to care for the instrument.

That care is not vanity. It is maintenance.

A poorly tuned piano cannot produce what it is capable of. A camera with a fogged lens cannot render what stands before it. A radio buried in static may still be receiving something, but what comes through will be distorted. The same is true of a human being. Keeping the body well rested and properly nourished matter. Physical movement, rhythm and solitude all matter. The management of attention matters. Emotional regulation matters. A life full of friction, resentment, compulsive noise, and scattered focus is not neutral to the work. It enters the work. It muddies the waters. It makes fine perception more difficult.

This does not mean the artist must become pure, serene, optimized, or spiritually polished like a decorative stone in a wellness shop. In fact, much of the artist’s usefulness lies in the ability to remain in contact with disorder, ambiguity, sorrow, contradiction, and unresolved material without collapsing under it. The point is not sterilization. The point is sensitivity with enough steadiness to mainain intuitive contact. The instrument need not be spotless. It needs to be playable.

If one adopts this view, then another shift follows almost immediately: the artist no longer needs to know everything in advance. The modern imagination is often burdened by the fantasy that one should have a full concept, a polished identity, a coherent body of work, and a long-range map before anything meaningful can begin. But if the creative life is participatory rather than purely declarative, then much of the work will only reveal itself through process. One does not always begin with total knowledge. One begins with contact.

A sentence arrives. A scrap appears. An image catches. A tone emerges. A shape feels charged. One follows it.

This is not irrational. It is procedural. The next necessary move often becomes visible only after the current one has been committed to. The work unfolds by sequence, not by omniscience. One only need know what one need know when one need know it. That is not just a comforting slogan. It is one of the most practical principles an artist can adopt. It protects the work from over-conceptualization and protects the artist from the paralysis of trying to solve everything before touching the material.

To live this way requires trust, but not blind trust. It requires disciplined trust. One must be willing to begin before certainty is available, but one must also be willing to refine without sentimentality. If something is trying to come through, the artist’s job is not to worship every first impulse as sacred. The artist’s job is to test, revise, compare, and shape until the thing begins to stand on its own. Participation is not the opposite of craft. It is what makes craft meaningful.

This is where many artists lose the trail. Insecurity enters and begins decorating the work. Noise gets added to cover uncertainty. Explanation multiplies where clarity is lacking. Effects are piled on top of gestures that were already alive enough on their own. One starts putting too much cream on the tacos. It happens everywhere. In writing, in painting, in music, in design, in life itself. One adds because one is unsure where the cut point is. One embellishes because one no longer trusts the original pulse.

But if the artist is trying to serve the work rather than defend the ego, then reduction becomes one of the great disciplines. Not reduction as fashion. Not reduction as sterile minimalism. Reduction as honesty. What is actually needed here? What serves the movement? What remains alive? What is camouflage? What is residue? What is there because it belongs, and what is there because I am nervous?

These are technical questions, but they are also spiritual ones.

To become a good instrument is to become less interested in appearing profound and more interested in being accurate. It is to trade performance for attunement. It is to become increasingly sensitive to what rings true, what lands cleanly, what has life in it, and what is merely trying to impress.

This kind of life also changes one’s relationship to time. If the artist is participating in a larger unfolding, then timing becomes as important as intention. Some things are not ready when we want them to be. They require incubation. They need more life around them before they can fully appear. There are works that can only be written after enough weather has passed through the body. There are forms that only become visible after years of circling. There are intuitions that arrive early and cannot yet be translated without being flattened into slogans.

Part of the artist’s maturity lies in learning to recognize this without drifting into endless postponement. One must not force what has not ripened. But one must also not keep delaying what is already ready out of fear. This is a difficult discipline because it requires a kind of inward honesty that cannot be outsourced. One must become a student of one’s own timing.

Attention, then, becomes one of the central materials of the life. More than talent, more than ambition, more than identity, attention may be the true medium of participation. What we attend to, and how we attend, shapes what becomes available to us. A distracted life produces a different world than a concentrated one. A cynical attention produces a different world than a reverent one. A hurried attention, a scattered attention, a commodified attention - these are not just moods. They are conditions under which reality itself appears differently.

The artist who accepts consciousness as primary would therefore have to become a guardian of attention. Not in a grim or monkish way, necessarily, but in a practical one. One must learn what feeds perception and what degrades it. One must become selective about noise. One must become willing to protect intervals of receptivity from the endless abrasion of the manufactured world. This is not withdrawal for its own sake. It is stewardship.

And perhaps the most liberating consequence of this whole view is that it loosens the artist’s obsession with self-importance. If one is an instrument within a much larger process, then not every work needs to carry the burden of proving one’s worth. Not every piece needs to announce one’s identity. Not every project needs to justify one’s existence. Much unnecessary pressure falls away when the artist stops trying to manufacture significance and begins trying to cooperate with what is actually alive.

Paradoxically, this often produces stronger work.

Meaning arrives more cleanly when it is not being strangled into existence.

A great deal of artistic suffering comes from trying to dominate what should be listened to. Another great deal comes from trying to explain what should simply be made. Often the artist understands the meaning of the work more fully after the work exists than before. That is not evidence of confusion. It is evidence that the process has integrity. Meaning is not always something one imposes. Sometimes it is something one discovers by staying close enough to the material for long enough that its hidden coherence begins to show itself.

This may be one of the deeper practical implications of accepting consciousness as primary: one begins to treat experience itself as meaningful raw material. The ordinary day is no longer merely the interval between “real” creative sessions. The life is the field. The conversations, accidents, losses, scraps, dreams, overheard remarks, found images, mood shifts, encounters, failures, and little moments of strange charge - all of it becomes potentially relevant. Not because everything is precious, but because the artist learns to notice what carries signal.

That may be the whole practice in the end.

To maintain the instrument. To attend carefully. To follow the next necessary move. To remove what is not needed. To let the work reveal itself through disciplined participation. To trust the process without abandoning craft.

This is not a formula for genius. It is something better. It is a way of living that keeps one in usable relation to the source of one’s own work.

If consciousness is indeed trying to know itself through life, then the artist may simply be one of the places where that effort becomes visible.

The task is not to force meaning into the world.

The task is to become a clear place where meaning can take form.

https://donorbox.org/fundraise-for-a-short-film-family-tree

Help film maker Dimitri Nasennik create the short film “Family Tree”

The Story
It will be a 20–25 minute short comedy that tells the story of a foreigner traveling to a Ukrainian village to find his long-lost relatives.

Director Statement:

This story is based on my own experience searching for my relatives. Every summer during my childhood, we traveled from Estonia to Ukraine. Being so connected to Ukraine inspired me to build a family tree that now includes more than 500 people. I see so many people supporting Ukraine today, and I am certain that after our Victory, many of them will want to visit. Some will go to see the cities they only learned about during the war; others, like me, will go to find their roots. I want this story to be an inspiration for people to learn even more about Ukraine.

Director:
Dimitri Nasennik

The Goals

Short term
We are inviting as much as possible active-duty personnel with a background in cinema to join our cast and crew. For example, Alex (Blogger) from the 79th Brigade will be taking on a major role.

Mid-term
To raise funds through online ticket sales for limited community screenings of the movie. These funds will go as aid to the soldiers participating in our film. Last time, with “The Land We Fight For,” we raised 1.5 times the movie’s budget.
Watch trailer here:

Long-term
To enter the film into various international festivals. This will help tell our story and attract more attention to Ukraine. Because it is a comedy, it will be much easier to get into many festivals.

For more details of the movie concept, heroes, vision and statement, read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16suPR9_LtIGBvMdN3c-Ok8TgLELiVU57KqMVbMvJhBs/edit?usp=sharing

The Budget
Since we aim to reach festival audiences, we want to produce a film of the highest quality, which is reflected in our target goal. I tried to hold it as minimum as possible. For transparency, I’ve outlined all the costs in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m0TPLWMqaTsA3Sx8jgRuFw-iSLdzg1Zyrlo3a-GLFfQ/edit?gid=1692803347#gid=1692803347

COLLAGE EXPEDITION - LOS ANGELES - 2025

JUST PUBLISHED
Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at Collage Expedition Los Angeles 2025 - a week-long gathering of collage artists exploring the city, hunting for materials, creating new work, and sharing the creative process together.

Fifteen artists came together in Los Angeles for an immersive week of collage art, artist collaboration, found material collecting, studio practice, and exhibition making. The expedition culminated in a one-day exhibition featuring the work created during the week.

Filmmaker Zach Touchon joined us as the expedition documentarian, capturing the experience and shaping it into this film.

If you are interested in collage art, mixed media, contemporary collage, artist residencies, creative process, or artist community, this film offers a glimpse into what happens when artists gather to make work in real time.

Upcoming Collage Expeditions in 2026:
Berlin - May 2026
London - June 2026

Interested in joining a future expedition?

Please email Les Jones and include links to your website and Instagram page or whatever digital platform you work can be seen on.

For more information:
hello@contemporarycollagemagazine.com

#CollageArt #ContemporaryCollage #MixedMediaArt #ArtistRetreat #CreativeProcess #CollageArtists #ArtistCommunity #FoundMaterials #VisualArt #ContemporaryArt #ArtDocumentary #StudioPractice #CollageExpedition #LosAngelesArt #MixedMediaArtists

PARTICIPANTS ON INSTAGRAM
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Here is the next related article inspired by answering comments on the last article
On Consciousness Discovering Itself Through Life

Toward a More Beautiful Universe

Journal Entry: March 30, 2026

An artist eventually has to ask not only what to make, but what sort of universe they are making within.

That may sound abstract at first, but it has very practical consequences. The assumptions one carries about reality shape everything downstream - how one sees, what one notices, what one values, what one trusts, what one believes is worth doing, and whether one approaches life as participation, resistance, endurance, or absurd performance under doomed conditions.

A great deal of modern thought, even when intellectually sophisticated, leaves the artist living in a universe that is fundamentally dead. One may still be allowed emotion, beauty, rebellion, irony, and a little private meaning-making, but the larger picture often remains grimly fixed: matter first, consciousness second, life accidental, beauty incidental, meaning local, death final, and the whole machinery running forward under conditions of indifference until everything eventually falls apart. One can decorate that picture in various ways, but it remains what it is - a cosmology of exile.

Many artists have worked brilliantly under those assumptions, but one begins to wonder whether brilliance alone is enough compensation for living inside a picture of reality that quietly poisons the roots.

At the other end, one often finds inherited religious systems that insist the universe is meaningful, but only at the cost of requiring allegiance to worn-out dogmas, brittle certainties, secondhand metaphysics, and forms of obedience that often flatten direct perception rather than deepen it. One is asked to choose between a meaningless universe and a prefabricated one.

It seems to me the artist may require another option.

I am interested in a way of thinking about reality that is at once more spacious, more beautiful, more demanding, and more alive. A way that does not require pretending away suffering or disorder, but also does not begin by assuming that existence is fundamentally absurd, tragic, mechanistic, meaningless, hostile, or spiritually vacant. I am interested in the possibility that consciousness is primary, that physical life is one of the ways it manifests, and that the artist, of all people, ought to at least entertain the implications of that possibility.

This is not a scientific claim in the strict sense. It is a philosophical and imaginal orientation, though I would argue it may fit the facts of lived experience at least as well as the increasingly dominant story that consciousness somehow emerges from sufficiently complicated arrangements of matter. That story has become common enough to feel inevitable, but inevitability and truth are not the same thing. We often mistake the dominant explanatory language of an era for the nature of reality itself.

What if consciousness is not the result of life?

What if a universal all-pervading consciousness is what is generating life?

That changes nearly everything.

If consciousness is pre-existing, if it belongs to the foundational structure of reality rather than arriving late as a side effect of neural complexity, then organisms begin to look less like accidental containers and more like instruments. The brain, in that case, would not be producing consciousness any more than a radio produces the broadcast it receives. It would be shaping, translating, localizing, and filtering a much larger field into a workable individual experience. The nervous system would become a means of participation rather than the origin of awareness itself.

That seems to me a very plausible, even probable, reversal.

And it also explains something important: why our individual perception is so partial and particular.

Each of us is operating through a very narrow aperture. We see little. We understand less. We are heavily conditioned by our biology, our personal history, our mood, our attention, our internal noise, and whatever local conditions happen to define our current state. We do not perceive “reality” as such. We perceive what our present structure allows. The world experienced by a frightened person is not the world experienced by a calm one. The world experienced by a child is not the world experienced by a mystic. Even within a single life, what can be known or felt depends greatly on one’s experiences, degree of refinement and one’s immediate circumstance.

We are all, it seems, living on a kind of need-to-know and able-to-know basis.

But if consciousness itself is larger than the individual organism, then these little local limitations do not necessarily define the whole. They define only the present lens. Infinite consciousness, if such a thing exists, may not be centralized at all. In fact, it may only be able to experience manifestation through decentralization - through countless local points of view distributed across living beings, each one carrying a tiny angle of the whole with each species of being its own project. That is a funny thought, and in a way a moving one. The universe, if it is conscious, may be learning to see itself through innumerable temporary beings.

There is something both comic and noble in that.

Comic, because it begins to resemble an infinite intelligence trying to understand itself through a million partial, confused, vulnerable, often seemingly ridiculous creatures. Noble, because each one, knowingly or not, participates in the work.

This way of thinking also changes how one interprets the brutality of the physical world. Entropy remains real. Things do fall apart. Bodies age. Systems break down. Structures decay. Stars burn out. Planets collapse. Organisms die. Nearly everything in the visible world appears temporary, unstable, and vulnerable to dissolution. There is no point pretending otherwise. Life in manifestation is not a gentle affair. It is exacting, seemingly wasteful, improvisational, and often merciless at the local level.

And yet the physical world is not only disintegrating. It is continuously reassembling.

Things do not simply vanish. They change state. What falls apart becomes substrate. What dies becomes nourishment. Ruin becomes material. Dissolution becomes possibility. The world is perpetually reconstructing itself from its own debris. Matter, under these conditions, seems less like a finished machine than an active workshop in which form is forever breaking down and reforming.

That is important for artists to notice.

Because artists work in exactly this territory.

We gather fragments. We salvage. We recombine. We shape meaning from remnants. We participate in the strange labor by which scattered elements are invited into new coherence. The creative act itself begins to look like a miniature version of the larger cosmological process. Something falls apart, something remains, something regathers, and out of that sequence a new form appears.

That does not feel mindlessly accidental to me.

Even some of the more technical language around consciousness points in suggestive directions. There are arguments that consciousness in the brain requires not perfect order but a living balance between order and unpredictability, coherence and randomness. Too much rigid organization and the system goes flat. Too much chaos and it loses functional form. Consciousness, it seems, may require a kind of dynamic edge condition - neither frozen nor scattered, but improvisationally alive.

That too should sound familiar to artists.

The creative state is often not one of total control, nor one of total abandon, but of charged participation somewhere between the two. One is organized enough to work and open enough to receive. The form holds, but the form is still alive. That may not merely be a psychological preference. It may reflect something structural about how consciousness itself operates through living systems.

All of this, for me, points toward a more beautiful way of thinking about reality.

Not a prettier one in the sentimental sense. Not a decorative spirituality pasted over the roughness of life. I mean beautiful in the older sense - a vision of reality that is spacious enough to include suffering without enthroning it, intelligent enough to include mystery without collapsing into superstition, and alive enough to invite participation rather than alienation.

Artists, perhaps more than most, need such a universe.

Not because we require comfort, but because the quality of the cosmology we inhabit shapes the quality of the work we are able to make. If one assumes the universe is fundamentally absurd, one will likely produce one kind of art. If one assumes it is only mechanistic, one will produce another. If one assumes it is hostile, ironic, indifferent, spiritually vacant, or merely the stage upon which ego performs its brief little struggle for relevance, then that assumption will quietly train the eye, the hand, and the nervous system.

But if one begins from a different premise - that consciousness is primary, that life is a distributed field of experience, that the world is not dead but in process, that manifestation may itself be part of a vast unfolding act of awareness - then one may begin to work differently.

One may become more attentive to the intuitive, the poetic, the imaginal, the subtle, the symbolic, the numinous, the deeply relational, the strangely charged. One may become less interested in cleverness for its own sake and more interested in contact. One may stop treating beauty as ornament and begin treating it as evidence of alignment. One may become more willing to listen for what wants to emerge rather than only imposing private will upon inert material.

That is not a retreat from seriousness. It is a deepening of it.

The artist, in such a universe, is not merely an entertainer decorating the void.

The artist becomes a participant in the unfinished work of consciousness becoming aware of itself in form.

That is a very different vocation.

It does not solve suffering. It does not eliminate confusion. It does not exempt one from craft, discipline, or the brutal realities of embodied life. But it does change the atmosphere in which one works. It allows the creative life to be lived as participation in something larger, stranger, and more luminous than mere self-expression under terminal conditions.

And that, to me, is a far more workable stance.

Not certainty.

But a living, responsive universe to experience and participate in with the whole of our being.

On Consciousness Discovering Itself Through Life

There is a way of looking at life that is difficult to prove and yet strangely difficult to dismiss once it begins to make intuitive sense. It is the thought that consciousness is not a late accident of matter, not a flicker produced only after enough biological circuitry has been assembled, but something more original than that. Something prior. Something foundational. In this view, consciousness does not emerge from life as a kind of side effect. Life emerges within consciousness as one of its great experiments in manifestation. Mainifestation being a form of self discovery.

This is not the language of provable laboratory certainty. It belongs more to philosophy, contemplation, metaphysics, and the long intuitions of artists and mystics. Still, there is a profound seriousness to it. It offers an answer to some of the oldest questions: why should a universe composed of apparently inert particles ever become a universe that feels from within itself? Why should there be experience at all? Why should there be sensation, memory, longing, fear, tenderness, music, color, grief, or wonder? Why should there be a world that is not merely indifferently present, but somehow also living and lived?

One possibility is that consciousness was never absent.

If consciousness is original, if it belongs to the root structure of reality itself, then life may be understood as the long process by which consciousness learns how to enter form more fully. The first forms would have been simple. A cell. A membrane. A sensitivity to conditions. A tendency toward self-maintenance. A distinction between inside and outside. These are not yet the richness of what we ordinarily call mind, but they may be among its earliest thresholds. From there, over billions of years, more complex structures slowly emerge. Nervous systems. Mobility. Sensation. Perception. Memory. Emotion. Sociality. Symbolic thought. Self-reflection. Art. Prayer. Moral anguish. Love. The long evolutionary story, read this way, is not only a history of increasing biological complexity. It is also a history of increasing experiential range.

A bacterium lives in one kind of world. A bird in another. A wolf in another. A human being opens a different order of interiority altogether. Language enters. Time thickens. Memory becomes narrative. Desire becomes aspiration. Loss becomes existential. The world no longer simply appears. It becomes interpreted, suffered, cherished, shaped, and remembered. If consciousness is working through life, then evolution begins to look like a patient and ceaseless refinement of instruments through which the universe can feel and experience itself more deeply.

That does not mean later forms are simply “better” in some crude hierarchy. Nature is not a software upgrade chart. A hawk, an octopus, and a poet are not improvements upon one another in any simple sense. They are different apertures. Different windows. Different ways of being in contact with reality. It may be more accurate to say that consciousness has not been seeking “higher” forms in a merely vertical sense, but richer, more varied, more subtle, and more complex possibilities of participation.

If that is so, then individuality begins to look less like a cosmic error and more like a functional necessity. For a unified infinite consciousness to experience life in manifestation, it would need some way of entering perspective. It would need locality. It would need contrast, sequence, relation, and limitation. It would need viewpoints. A consciousness that remained wholly undifferentiated might know pure being, but not the sensation of lived experience. It would not be able to distinguish this from that. It would not know nearness, distance, surprise, memory, desire, discovery, grief, or reunion. Experience requires difference. It requires the diversity of the many.

That may be why life appears decentralized. Each organism becomes a local center of experience, a temporary lens through which the larger field encounters the world under endless conditions. A bird’s nervous system, a dog’s body, a whale’s hearing, a human imagination - each is a different instrument. Not separate in essence perhaps, but distinct in experience. The One becomes many, not necessarily to lose itself, but to encounter itself from innumerable angles.

And yet the story does not seem to end in dispersion.

One of the most striking features of life is that it does not only individuate. It also seeks relation. It does not only divide. It also gathers. Everywhere we look there are signs of this. Cells cooperate into tissues. Tissues into organs. Organisms into ecosystems. Symbiosis appears. Sociality appears. Communication appears. Bonding, attraction, mutuality, and pattern formation appear. Even conflict itself often occurs within larger webs of interdependence. And in human life this tendency becomes conscious enough to ache. We seek intimacy, belonging, meaning, communion, understanding, friendship, marriage, community, artistic collaboration, spiritual union, and some form of home we can rarely describe with precision. We are not merely separate beings. We are separate beings haunted by the intuition of wholeness.

That haunting may be one of the great clues.

Perhaps the movement of life is not only outward into differentiation, but also inward toward integration. Not a return to some blank undivided state that erases all distinction, but a more difficult and more beautiful possibility: unity-through-diversity. A many-ness that becomes transparent to its underlying one-ness. Under this view, the decentralized life of manifestation is not the abandonment of unity, but the means by which unity can become conscious of itself under conditions of plurality.

That would mean the longing for reunification is not merely psychological sentimentality. It may be structural. It may be built into the very nature of manifestation. The pull toward love, coherence, relation, and awakening may be part of the original design, not as a simplistic guarantee of harmony, but as a deep current of return and rememberence moving through immense friction. Nature is not gentle enough to support a cheap optimism. Predation, rupture, death, competition, estrangement, and suffering are all real. The world is not a spiritual greeting card. But neither is it adequately described by absurdity, indifference or random fragmentation. There remains a visible tendency toward increasing orders of relation, integration, and participation.

This is where the artist may have something important to say.

The artist works at the seam between fragmentation and wholeness. Out of scattered impressions, found materials, accidents, memories, and broken pieces, something is gathered. Something is arranged. Something begins to resonate as if it belonged together before it was ever consciously assembled. A work of art does not merely display the world. It often reveals hidden continuity within it. It allows disparate things to participate in a larger pattern. In that sense, the artist is not simply making objects. The artist may be assisting consciousness in one of its oldest labors: the labor of becoming aware of itself through form.

This may be why creative work can feel more like tuning than inventing. More like listening than forcing. More like cooperating with an intelligence already moving through things than asserting one’s private will against the grain of existence. The body, mind, and nervous system become instruments. Not passive ones, but cultivated ones. What matters then is not merely talent, but refinement. Clarity. Integrity. Receptivity. One begins to suspect that the task of a life in art is not to manufacture significance out of nothing, but to become sufficiently available to what is unfolding.

Seen this way, awakening is not an escape from manifestation. It is not a rejection of individuality, embodiment, or the world. It is the gradual recognition that the local self may be a temporary aperture within a larger field of being, and that the work of a human life may involve learning how to participate in that field with increasing lucidity. One does not disappear. One becomes more transparent.

And perhaps that is what the long experiment has been working toward all along.

Perhaps life is not only consciousness dispersing itself into form.

Perhaps life is consciousness discovering itself through form.

If so, then every living thing is more than an isolated biological event. Each one is a site of participation. Each one is a viewpoint in the great distributed theater of manifestation. Each one carries, however dimly or brightly, some portion of the ongoing effort of the Whole to know itself.

That would mean consciousness is not merely in us.

It would mean we are in it.

And that changes nearly everything.