4 - The Ontology of Joy

To speak of joy in ontological terms is to approach it not as an emotion, but as a mode of being. It is not something we feel about the world, but the way the world feels itself through us. Joy belongs to the essence of existence, a spontaneous affirmation that life, despite its sorrows, desires to continue.

In this sense, joy is not the decoration of being but its signature. It is the shimmer by which life recognizes its own presence. Even in its faintest trace, joy reveals that being is not a flat fact but a luminous event - something that wants to express, to unfold, to become.

When one touches joy, one is briefly relieved of the burden of separateness. The self loosens. The inner and outer fuse into one seamless movement. There is no subject enjoying an object; there is only the flowing act of being joyfully. In that moment, perception and participation are one.

Philosophically, this differs from happiness, which is teleological - it depends on reaching an end deemed desirable. Joy is non-teleological. It has no purpose beyond itself. It is the revelation that the present moment is sufficient, and that existence, by simply being, fulfills its own reason for being.

If we follow this thread deeper, we discover that joy is evidence of coherence. It is the felt recognition that the universe, however chaotic in appearance, holds a secret order that includes us. This is why joy can arise even amid grief: it is not denial, but the knowing that what dies returns, what breaks becomes part of the larger music.

In mystical language, joy is the resonance of the One recognizing itself within the many. It is the vibration that runs through all things when being contemplates itself and says, “I am.” Thus joy is ontological proof - not in logic but in experience - that life is not meaningless, but meaning itself in motion.

To cultivate joy, then, is to align with reality’s own pulse. Not to add something new, but to remove what separates us from what already is. When the veil of resistance drops, when we cease arguing with existence, joy floods in like light through a door left ajar.

In that openness, we discover a paradox: joy does not belong to us, yet we are made of it. It is not something we possess, but something that possesses us when we remember our place in the living whole.

The Myth of the Effortless Genius: How Shortcuts Kill the Creative Lifestyle

We have all seen the archetype. The romanticized, cinematic image of the artist: cigarette dangling, brooding in a chaotic studio, suddenly struck by a lightning bolt of divine inspiration. They slash a brilliant stroke across a canvas, step back, and effortlessly capture the zeitgeist. It looks grand. It looks heroic.

Above all, it looks incredibly cool.

But behind the studio doors of a long-term, self-sustaining practice, that myth is a trap. It is a seductive fiction that captures the imagination of young creators and seasoned dreamers alike, tempting them to fall in love with the image of being an artist while completely evading the reality of the creative lifestyle.

When an artist buys into the myth of the effortless genius, the first casualty is patience.

The Panic of the Headless Chicken

When a creative mind is firing on all cylinders, the energy inside the studio can be brilliant but blinding. Ideas rush in like a torrent. An artist working on a series of raw, abstract expressionist paintings might find themselves darting from one corner of the room to another - throwing down a mark here, grabbing a new tool there, chasing five different intuitive impulses at once.

From the outside, it looks like pure, unadulterated passion. But if that frenetic energy isn’t anchored by a deeper discipline, it quickly degenerates into what I call the “headless chicken” loop.

You spend days running around in circles, exhausted by your own momentum, yet accomplished very little of substance. Why? Because darting from one exciting idea to another is often a subconscious defense mechanism. It is an escape hatch. Following a new spark is easy and fun; sticking with the difficult slow steady persistance of the an unglamorous, daily grind is another story.

When impatience wins, the artist begins looking for shortcuts. They want a silver bullet - a sudden viral breakthrough, a heroic sprint that solves everything, or a massive, dramatic deal that vaults them to the top without the climb. They mistake a brief, chaotic burst of short-term energy for true long term commitment.

The “Heroic” Escape Hatch

The trap of the shortcut is that it always dresses itself up as heroism. A creator will proclaim, with absolute sincerity, that they are willing to do “whatever it takes” to make their vision a reality. They will pull all-night sessions, talk in grand terms about their upcoming masterworks, and map out sprawling, ambitious projects.

But watch closely where that energy goes. Usually, it is poured exclusively into the things that feel exciting, high-stakes, or socially validated - the things that makes one “look cool.”

When it comes to the stark, boring, completely uncool foundations of a sustainable life, that heroic willingness suddenly vanishes. There is absolutely nothing romantic about setting up a Single-Member LLC, organizing bookkeeping spreadsheets, managing inventory numbers, or researching publishing and digital distribution portals. It doesn’t look cool. It doesn’t impress anyone at a party.

Yet, those exact unglamorous tasks form the invisible scaffolding that protects creative freedom.

Sprinting is easy because it is dramatic. True adventurousness, however, is a quiet, daily discipline. It is the creative equivalent of putting on your shoes and walking 10,000 steps a day, every day, rain or shine, regardless of whether the muse showed up or not.

Becoming a Wholesale Manufacturer

If you want to build a stable, self-sustaining creative life that lasts for decades, you have to completely invert how you view your practice. You have to strip away the ego of the lone genius and adopt the mindset of a wholesale manufacturer.

Your studio is not a temple of unpredictable lightning bolts; it is a high-volume production line. You are the manufacturer, and your job is steady, disciplined output. The art galleries, digital platforms, and newsletter spaces are simply your storefronts and your sales staff. They are there to handle the retail interface so that you can focus entirely on your trade.

If the manufacturer only steps onto the factory floor when they “feel like it” or when a shortcut presents itself, the storefront sits empty. The business dries up.

To survive the traps of impatience and the desire to take shortcuts, a creative must build systems that remove choice from the operational process. When your mind is darting in a thousand directions, choices are a paralysis tool. “Figuring things out” becomes an elegant excuse to avoid doing the heavy lifting.

By establishing strict physical constraints, clear digital administrative routines, and automated business frameworks, you shut out the noise. You force yourself to commit entirely to the exact next step right in front of you. You stop trying to look heroic, you stop trying to take a shortcut, and you finally dig in to do the work.

3 - On the Distinctions of Joy

We often confuse joy with its many cousins - satisfaction, pleasure, happiness, contentment, gratification, amusement, and enjoyment - but each belongs to a different register of being. To know joy clearly, one must hear its unique tone among the choir of human feeling.

Satisfaction arises when desire completes its circuit. It depends upon the meeting of goal and outcome, task and reward. It is an exhale that follows achievement, but it fades once the next hunger appears. Joy, by contrast, has no object. It does not wait for results. It springs from being itself, not from what being accomplishes.

Pleasure is sensory, rooted in the body’s immediacy - the taste of ripe fruit, the warmth of sunlight, the touch of another’s hand. It is fleeting and often cyclical, bound to contrast: one feels it because one once felt its absence. Joy may inhabit pleasure, but it outlasts it, remaining even when the fruit is gone and the light has changed.

Happiness tends to move with circumstance. It depends on fortune, on alignment between our wishes and the world’s behavior. Joy, on the other hand, can coexist with sorrow. It is not the opposite of suffering, but the glimmer that endures within it, the quiet knowing that life itself is still holy.

Contentment is the peace of sufficiency - the gentle satisfaction of “enough.” It is stillness after striving. Joy may blossom from this soil, but it also transcends it, for joy can burst forth even when one has not yet arrived at sufficiency. It does not ask for “enough”; it recognizes that being alive already is.

Gratification is immediate reward, the small coin of satisfaction paid by the senses or the ego for getting its way. Joy pays no such wages. It belongs to a larger economy, one without transaction. Where gratification ends, joy begins.

Amusement is lighthearted distraction. It entertains but rarely transforms. Joy is never mere diversion; it draws one deeper into presence, not away from it. Amusement escapes reality, joy enlarges it.

Enjoyment stands somewhere between pleasure and participation. One enjoys when one is engaged, attuned, receptive to experience. Joy can infuse enjoyment, turning a simple act - drinking tea, walking through dusk - into revelation. But enjoyment remains an activity, while joy is a condition of being.

Joy is not one feeling among others. It is the subtle field in which all feelings arise and dissolve. It is spacious, luminous, resilient - the still center that remains when every other emotion has played its note and fallen silent.

2 - On What Obscures Joy

Joy is not fragile, yet it is easily obscured. It never truly leaves us, but becomes hidden beneath layers of distraction, fear, and self-concern, like sunlight veiled by thick clouds. To rediscover joy, we must learn what dims its light.

Noise and haste are the first veils. When life moves too quickly, attention fractures. We skim the surface of our own existence, never touching the depths where joy dwells. Joy moves at the speed of stillness. It cannot be caught in the flutter of constant doing.

Comparison is another thief. When we measure our lives against others, we exile ourselves from our own unfolding. Joy requires presence, not measurement. The moment we judge our portion against another’s, we step out of the eternal and into the marketplace of illusions.

Expectation builds its own cage. The mind says, “I will be joyful when…” and thereby postpones the possibility of joy into an imaginary future. True joy is unconditioned; it arises not because life meets our demands, but because we finally meet life as it is.

Attachment to narrative also clouds the view. We become entranced by the story we tell about ourselves - our successes, our failures, our wounds - and forget to feel the living pulse beneath the story. Joy does not require a plot. It arises in the gap between sentences.

Emotional self-absorption - even in the name of sensitivity - can distort joy’s frequency. When our awareness bends inward without openness, sensitivity hardens into fragility. Joy cannot breathe in the closed chamber of the self.

And of course, fear: fear of loss, of uncertainty, of change. Fear contracts what joy expands. But the strange truth is that joy and fear share the same threshold. Each asks us to open to what is beyond our control. The difference lies in trust.

Forgetting our belonging may be the deepest shadow. When we feel separate - from nature, from one another, from the sacred texture of being - joy fades. But even then, it waits beneath the surface, patient as the roots of a tree beneath winter ground.

To clear the obscurations is not to chase joy, but to remove what blocks its light. The work is inward but gentle: slow down, unclench, return to presence, return to gratitude. Then joy, like the sun after fog, will reveal that it had never departed.

Hi everyone.
Ok we made it back to Albuquerque about a week ago with 27 banker’s boxes full of Fluxus box assemblges and mail art from Picasso Gaglione for the museum archives. This pick up in Knoxville, TN was the prime initiative for going out on the trip. It is going to take a while to document all of that, probably a year at least.

We also returned with many great memories of experiences from along the trail as well as newly developed relationships with people we met along the way.

Zach and I also captured four video conversations with artists along the way related to the Creative Life which we will start releasing when they have been edited by Zach and ready for release.

As usually happens when I go out on trips, various things go wrong on the homefront while I am out and there seems to always be a week of stuff to do to try to get everything back on track and get back into my routines.

While out, we explored the idea of producing a country album. Once back, we decided that right now that may not be the right plan of attack for the moment from a business point of view. So we have been brain storming other ideas this past week for how an artist achieves a self-sustaining lifestyle.

I have achieved that myself since in my 50’s (I am currently 70) now the experiment is to try to apply that wisdom to Zach’s creative life which for me should be a rich environment for new Creatve Lifestyle articles and should prompt me to get busy publishing the actual series of books on the topic based on these articles here on the Touchonian.

Meanwhile, this post is me sitting back down at the computer to try to get back to writing stuff and my own general routines as we prep for the next new adventure.

But I do have a cheat. There is a series of articles I developed about one year ago for this time of year and never posted becuase I got busy at that time with other things I was writing. This is a series of about 10 articles on the contemplation of joy. Here is article #1…

1 - On the Development of Joy

Joy is not a goal to be achieved, nor a reward for good behavior. It is more like the fragrance released when life is crushed gently between our fingers. To develop joy is to become more permeable, to let the pulse of the world move through us without always trying to name or control it.

When we begin to pay true attention, the smallest things reveal their music. A beam of sunlight resting on the table. The sound of rain tracing its patient ripples. The laughter of someone we love in another room. These moments, when received without haste, become portals through which joy enters.

Gratitude is the breath that keeps joy alive. Not the bright forced kind that insists on silver linings, but the quiet recognition that this too belongs. Even the difficult, the uncertain, the unfinished - all are participants in the same mysterious whole. Gratitude does not decorate life; it roots us more deeply within it.

Joy also asks for simplicity. It hides beneath excess. When we pare down - possessions, ambitions, the noise of the mind - joy returns as naturally as birds to a cleaned fountain. What remains is not emptiness, but a clear space where being can be felt again.

There is a form of joy that only blossoms through others: in generosity, in conversation, in the subtle exchange of warmth between companions. We learn that joy is not private. It ripples outward, enlarging the world wherever it lands.

And there is another form, quieter still, that arises from acceptance. When we cease dividing our experience into good and bad, joy weaves itself through everything. It becomes the shimmer within sorrow, the grace inside imperfection, in the recognition of a perfect moment.

To create is also to commune with this hidden current. The artist, the gardener, the cook, the builder - each, in their attentive making, touches the living rhythm of the cosmos. In that alignment, joy appears unannounced, as though the universe momentarily recognized itself through our hands.

In the end, joy develops not through effort, but through attunement. It grows in us like light through a window cleaned of its dust. What we call joy is simply the natural brightness of being, once we’ve stopped turning away from it.

We have been on a whirlwind and little time or energy to post much. We are currently having lunch in Saint Louis after visiting my mom and brothers for the weekend at Lake of the Ozarks. Heading back toward Albuquerque starting in the morning.

Sunday we went to Waffle House for breakfast with the gang then off to Picasso Gaglione’s place for a day of Fluxfesting. Fun was had by all.

We hung out with Jean Hess who invited us over to her lovely studio and we conducted a studio interview with Jean.

The interview was fantastic. Zach will be working on that and the other videos we have been shooting to present later. Watch for all of that coming up when they are ready.

We have had a heck of a day in Memphis. We met and hung out with our new friend Jay Etkin at his gallery/archives. We decided to do an interview. That coming soon.

Ok, I picked up Zach from the airport at 10:00am. We left the Big Chili about 5:30-6:00 pm on Monday the 28th and headed out toward Amarillo to get in front of the rain coming up from the hurricane in Mexico.

We made it to the hotel in Amarillo at about 10:30pm.

Today, Tuesday the 29th, we are starting to figure out how we are going to create content as we go along and post as ready. Since we are on Practice Tour #1 for Zach country album, now is the time to start figuring out how we will document and share..

We are trying to build up Zach followers at @zachtouchonmusic on instagram. please follow that page to keep up with the tour and watch us figure it out.

Ok, Zach also wrote a new song this morning over our conversation at breakfast.

Then we found the perfect photo for it.

More soon…

The following is a more fleshed out essay from a responce I made to a Reg Grant comment on the article about Creative Immersion: When the Work Makes Itself

The Inner Committee

We hear a great deal about the inner critic.

Artists are advised to silence it, ignore it, overcome it, make friends with it, or simply keep working until it gets bored and goes away. And certainly the inner critic can be troublesome. It can stand over the shoulder while we work, questioning every decision before we have had time to discover where that decision might lead.

But the critic is not alone.

Sitting beside the inner critic are several other characters who can quietly interfere with the creative process. They are less obvious because they often sound perfectly reasonable.

There is the inner assumer.
There is the inner expecter.
And there is the inner comparer.

Each has a useful function. Each can also become a problem when we mistake its provisional judgment for reality. Who else might be on that committee?

The Inner Assumer

We make assumptions constantly. We have to. We could hardly begin anything otherwise.

When I start a piece, particularly because much of my work is process oriented, I often begin by taking a stance. I establish certain boundaries. I might determine a size, choose a limited group of materials, establish a particular procedure, select a vocabulary of forms, or decide that I will work according to a certain set of rules.

These are assumptions about what the work might be.

There is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, constraints can be enormously productive. A boundary gives us somewhere to begin. Faced with absolutely infinite possibility, we might never make the first move. So we temporarily reduce infinity to something manageable.

This canvas.
These materials.
This procedure.
This afternoon.
Begin here.

The difficulty comes when the assumption becomes a prediction.

The original premise was only supposed to get the process moving. It becomes troublesome when we begin insisting that the work remain faithful to what we thought it was going to be before it existed.

There is an important difference between saying, I will begin here, and saying, I already know where this must end.

I want the first and distrust the second.

The boundary establishes the playing field. Inside that field, anything might happen.

Indeed, that is precisely why I am interested in making the work.

If I already knew what the finished work was going to be, making it would become largely an act of execution. I would simply be manufacturing something I had already completed mentally.

The creative process becomes much more interesting when the initial assumption is understood as provisional. We take a stance so that we can begin, then allow the work itself to challenge that stance.

The work begins talking back.

The Inner Expecter

Then there is the inner expecter.

Expectation is slightly different from assumption. The assumer thinks it knows what the work is. The expecter thinks it knows what the work ought to become.

We begin wanting something from it.

We expect it to be beautiful. Important. Successful. Original. Saleable. Profound. Better than the last one. Worth the materials. Worth the time. Worth showing someone.

Perhaps we simply expect it to be good.

And almost immediately we have created the possibility of disappointment.

The work has barely begun and already it is being measured against an imaginary finished object.

That imaginary object can become remarkably oppressive because it has an unfair advantage over the actual work: it does not have to exist.

The imagined painting has no awkward passages. The imagined poem contains no clumsy sentences. The imagined song arrives perfectly formed. The imagined project has never encountered the resistance of actual materials.

Reality has to contend with gravity, paint, language, time, mistakes, interruptions, limitations, accidents and our own changing attention.

Imagination does not.

Perhaps one of the most useful things an artist can do is temporarily put aside the categories of success and failure.

Instead, think in terms of experiment.

An experiment asks a different question.

Not: Will this succeed?

But: What happens if I do this?

That small change can completely alter the atmosphere of the studio.

A work that does not become what we hoped it would become has not necessarily failed. It may have shown us something we could not have discovered otherwise. It may contain one passage, one gesture, one relationship, one accident that opens the door to the next ten works.

In a sustained creative practice, what appears unsuccessful today may become essential information tomorrow.

The experiment continues.

The Inner Comparer

And then there is the inner comparer.

This one is particularly difficult because comparison is built into the way we understand things. We recognize differences by comparing one thing with another. Artists study other artists. Writers read other writers. Musicians listen to other musicians.

This is part of education.

The trouble begins when observation becomes self-measurement.

Someone else has a larger exhibition.
Someone else sells more work.
Someone else seems more original.
Someone else has received recognition we have not received.
Someone else is younger yet further along.
Someone else is older and has accomplished more.
Someone else appears to know exactly what they are doing.

Comparison can manufacture disappointment almost indefinitely because there will always be someone against whom we can construct an unfavorable measurement.

But there is an even more fundamental problem. Often there really cannot be a meaningful comparison.

A mature creative practice becomes increasingly particular. It accumulates its own history, vocabulary, obsessions, mistakes, discoveries, methods and questions. The longer an artist works, the more the work becomes the record of a particular consciousness moving through a particular life.

How exactly should that be compared?

We can study another artist’s decisions. We can admire their work. We can learn techniques from them. We can observe how they have organized a career or solved particular formal problems.

But their trajectory cannot be ours. Comparison is useful when it provides information. It becomes destructive when it provides a unrealistic verdict.

From Judgment to Curiosity

The inner critic, assumer, expecter and comparer are not enemies that need to be defeated. They simply need different jobs.

The assumer can establish the initial conditions.
The expecter can propose possibilities.
The comparer can gather information.
Even the critic can eventually help us evaluate what has happened.

But none of them needs to govern the studio.

During the actual making, something else can take precedence: curiosity.

What happens if I move this?
What happens if I remove that?
What happens if I repeat this form fifty times?
What happens if I violate the rule I established yesterday?
What happens if the accident is more interesting than the intention?
What happens if I follow the work instead of forcing it to follow me?

This is the great freedom of thinking experimentally.

An experiment does not require us to know the answer before we begin. In fact, if we already know the answer, there is little reason to conduct the experiment.

We establish conditions and then pay attention.

That may be one of the deepest disciplines of creative practice: learning to begin with enough intention to enter the work while remaining sufficiently available to be surprised by it.

Set the boundaries. Take a stance. Make the first move.

Then see what happens.

Taking that approach, anything might happen.

Life Is an Adventure for the Adventurous

Back in the Spring I got a phone call from my old friend Picasso Gaglione.

Picasso is an artist, a Fluxus artist, mail artist, rubber stamp artist, assemblage artist and general practitioner of the sort of art that has always had difficulty staying politely inside the boundaries assigned to it. He has been at it for decades.

He is also getting older.

The reason for his call was twofold; to invite me to participate in QuickKopy Conceptualism: Bay Area Dada to Bay Area Punk and that he had decided to contribute a significant body of his work to the archives of the Collage Museum. As I understand it, we are talking about quite a few bankers boxes filled with his Fluxus box assemblages.

Picasso’s boxes are in Knoxville, Tennessee.

So there was the practical question of how to get them from Knoxville to Albuquerque. I could probably have figured out some way to have them packed and shipped. Instead I thought:

We’ll go get them.

And with that, something changed. A shipment became a trip.

Picasso had called me while I was preparing for a 49-day collage expedition through Europe and the UK. During the conversation about the QuickKopy Conceptualism exhibition in Geneva.

As it turned out Geneva was already going to be part of my journey. I was planning to meet the collage artist Berni Stephanus there after Berlin.

Then we compared dates. As it turned out, through no planning on my part, I was going to be in Geneva at exactly the time Picasso’s exhibition was opening.

So Berni, his wife and I attended.

And because I went to the opening, I also had the opportunity to meet the curator, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University, New York.

None of this was part of some carefully constructed master plan. One thing simply followed another thing. I happened to be going somewhere. Picasso happened to call. He happened to mention an exhibition. The dates happened to coincide.

But coincidence alone doesn’t get you through the door.

You still have to show up and I’ve been thinking about that lately.

We tend to imagine adventures as things we set out deliberately to have. We book the flight to some exotic place. We climb the mountain. We sail across the ocean. We make the grand plan and then execute it.

But I’m not sure most of the interesting adventures of my life have happened that way. In fact, I tend to prefer not planning things out too certainly becuase the future is so uncertain. Still, some planning must be involved and I am usually not too good at that part.

More often something appears. A person calls. Someone makes a suggestion. A door opens. Two unrelated things suddenly turn out to be related.

Something you weren’t looking for crosses the path of something you were already doing. And for a moment there is a little opening. You can walk past it. Or you can say, Well, let’s see where this goes.

My son Zach and I had already been talking about doing some traveling together. He invited me along to Thailand when I was in Los Angeles last December and I decided to go on the spur of the moment. We had a great time.

Zach has spent most of his life bouncing around among creative forms: acting, dancing, filmmaking, writing, painting and music. Lately music has moved to the foreground. He has been writing songs at an astonishing rate and is putting together a country album.

We have also decided to work together more deliberately. Zach is the talent. I have been appointed Executive Producer, which sounds considerably more impressive than my current qualifications would suggest for producing a country album of which I know utterly nothing.

I know how to build a life around making art. The music publishing business… hum... This seems to me like an excellent reason to learn something about it.

So now we have an artist in Knoxville with a collection of work that needs to come to Albuquerque, a father and son looking for an excuse to get out into the world together, a country songwriter with a guitar, a collage artist who has never required much encouragement to turn travel into an expedition, and a vehicle with room for a considerable number of bankers boxes.

That seems like enough ingredients to begin with.

There is one more thing.

Picasso hosts an annual Fluxfest in Knoxville, and our timing happens to coincide with it. Of course it does.

So we’ll attend the Fluxfest. We’ll interview Picasso for the YouTube channel we’re developing. I’ll bring along some basic collage materials and collect more along the way. Zach will bring his guitar. We’ll have cameras and recording equipment.

What we don’t have is a tour. No string of venues. No performances booked. No elaborate itinerary designed to make us appear more organized than we actually are. In fact, we have no idea how to go about setting up a tour.

We’ve decided to call it our practice tour. Practice Tour #1.

The idea is to practice getting out there. Practice traveling together. Practice documenting what happens. Practice making things along the way. Practice recognizing an opportunity when it appears. And perhaps most importantly, practice leaving enough empty space in the plan for something we haven’t imagined yet.

I am reminded of the recent article:

The Best Use of the Will is to be Willing.

I’m suspect that willingness has a great deal to do with adventure. But I’ll leave that thought alone for the moment.

Right now there are some bankers boxes in Knoxville that need to be picked up and a Fluxfest to attend.

We have a guitar and some sound equipment
I have my collage tools.
We’re taking the cameras.
And we’re going to see what happens.

Life is an adventure for the adventurous.

Stay tuned for Practice Tour #1
We are heading out imminently and will be reporting from the road.

And hey, send us some gas money! It’s a long way to Knoxville, TN and back.

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This is a continuation from the last article: When the Work Makes Itself

How to Disappear Without Becoming Lost

There is, however, another side to this move from rational intelligence to intuitive intelligence and that is to return back to rational intelligence.

I have spent countless hours in this state of creative absorption. Sometimes an entire day can disappear. Sometimes several days seem to collapse into one continuous period of working, sleeping, waking and returning to the work. I have missed appointments. I have forgotten what day it was. I have become so completely unaware of the clock that I once forgot to pick up my children from school. Ok, more than once.

At some point, what sounds like a wonderful description of artistic flow becomes a practical problem.

My son Zach has the same capacity for deep creative immersion. He sometimes calls it a “condition,” almost as if it were a psychological disorder. There is humor in the word, but also genuine apprehension. He knows how completely he can disappear into something he is making, and he recognizes the danger that accompanies it: while the creative life is flourishing, the rest of life can begin falling apart.

The bills still arrive. People are waiting. Appointments have been made. The body needs food and sleep. Someone has to remember what day it is.

Perhaps the artist therefore needs to develop two complementary abilities: the ability to disappear into the creative wilderness and the ability to return from it.

We talk a great deal about the first. We cultivate concentration. We seek solitude. We arrange studios. We silence phones. We meditate. We develop rituals for beginning. We try to quiet the internal critic so that we can enter that place where self-consciousness diminishes and the work seems to make itself.

We speak much less about how to come back from that state.

Yet reentry may be an equally important artistic discipline.

If I know that my internal sense of time becomes unreliable when I am deeply immersed, then I cannot reasonably depend upon that internal sense of time to bring me back. The boundary has to exist somewhere outside the deep intuitive state itself.

The clock must be outside the dream.

That might mean an alarm, a calendar notification, a written stopping time, another person expecting a call, or some other external interruption that cannot easily be absorbed into the creative process. These things may appear to be intrusions upon artistic freedom, but perhaps they are better understood as the structure that makes such freedom sustainable. Freedom requires discipline.

The deeper the freedom inside the container, the stronger the container needs to be.

We accept this principle everywhere else in art. A canvas has edges. A poem has a final line. A piece of music begins and ends. Even improvisation occurs within some kind of structure. Boundaries do not necessarily diminish freedom. Very often they make freedom possible by allowing us to work unfettered and unworried within that space.

Creative time needs boundaries as well.

I can disappear into the studio from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. Within those hours I can stop watching the clock altogether. I can forget myself. I can follow the work wherever it wants to go. But at two o’clock an alarm sounds from another world.

It says: Come back.

And perhaps returning requires its own little ritual.

Save the document. Photograph the painting. Put down the brush. Write a sentence to your future self: This is where I stopped. This is what I was about to do next.

That last gesture may be particularly important. Sometimes we resist stopping because we are afraid of losing the thread of inspiration we are following. We have finally arrived somewhere, and we don’t know whether the door will still be open when we return. Leaving ourselves a marker is a way of tying a rope around the tree before descending back into everyday life.

Then we can leave.

We wash our hands. We look at the calendar. We remember the hour. We remember the day. We remember the people who inhabit our lives.

The ordinary rational self returns. And the ordinary self has important work to do. It remembers appointments. It buys groceries. It answers messages. It pays bills. It notices that someone else has needs we must attend to. It takes care of the body through which all of this creativity is happening. It remembers that there is a world beyond the studio.

This is why the disappearance of the self should never become the disappearance of responsibility.

There is nothing particularly enlightened about forgetting that someone is waiting for or depending on you.

The selflessness of creative immersion is valuable precisely because it is temporary. We enter it and emerge from it. We surrender ourselves to the work and then reclaim ourselves for the rest of life.

Over a lifetime of making things, one begins to recognize this rhythm.

Disappear into the creative wilderness.
Return.
Disappear again.
Return again.

The mature artist may therefore be neither the person who maintains perfect control nor the person who abandons themselves entirely to inspiration. The mature artist becomes a traveler between these conditions.

You learn where the entrance is. You learn how far you can wander. And eventually you learn to leave markers along the way.

Because the artist must learn how to disappear without becoming lost.

Head in the clouds, then feet on the ground.

Creative freedom is a discipline.

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When the Work Makes Itself

Artists have often described a peculiar moment in the making of a work when they seem to stop being the one who is making it.

The painter has been working for hours and suddenly looks up to discover that the painting is finished. The writer reads a passage afterward and wonders where it came from. The musician stops playing and realizes that an hour has disappeared. Decisions have been made, problems solved, passages negotiated, yet there is strangely little memory of having consciously made any of those decisions.

Something took over.

We have many names for this condition. We say we were in the groove. We were in the zone. We entered a state of flow. Older traditions might describe the person as an empty vessel or a hollow reed, something through which the music, the poem, the gesture, the idea, or the image passes.

These descriptions differ, but they point toward a remarkably similar experience: the temporary disappearance of the feeling that I am doing this.

This does not mean that nobody is doing anything. Quite the opposite. The artist may be extraordinarily active. The hand is moving. The eye is judging. Choices are being made constantly. Years of experience are being brought to bear on every gesture. Yet the internal commentator who is ordinarily announcing, evaluating, questioning, congratulating, worrying and criticizing has gone quiet.

The work continues without requiring a narrator.

Consciousness in such moments can be imagined as a luminous mirror.

A mirror does not have to struggle to produce a reflection. If it is clear and unobstructed, it simply reflects whatever appears before it. Nor does the reflection belong to the mirror. The mirror cannot possess it. It cannot store yesterday’s reflection and insist that today’s resemble it. It cannot reach out and hold what passes across its surface.

The image appears. The image disappears. The mirror remains available.

For the artist, this availability may be more important than inspiration.

Much of what interferes with creative work is not an absence of ideas but the accumulation of ourselves around them. We feel the need to intervene. We want the work to be good. We want it to be original. We want it to look familiar to us. We wonder what the gallery will think, what the reader will think, what our friends will think, whether anyone will buy it, publish it, understand it, misunderstand it, praise it, dismiss it, remember it.

The mirror becomes covered with our mental fingerprints.

Then we are no longer simply seeing what is before us. We are seeing our anxieties about what is before us.

The peculiar selflessness of creative immersion clears some of that away.

This is one reason the word selflessness interests me more than the word flow. Flow describes what the experience feels like. Selflessness suggests an obstruction that has temporarily disappeared.

The self has not actually ceased to exist. We have not become unconscious. We may, in fact, have become unusually conscious. What recedes is the constant insistence upon ourselves as the center of the activity. That is when we are in our own way. When we are in our own way that is called creative block.

But when in a state of selfessness there is still seeing, but less of me seeing. There is simply seeing, painting, writing, listening, moving.

And then an interesting reversal becomes possible. Instead of imagining that I am making the painting, I begin to experience the painting as something that is happening, and I am participating in its happening if I even notice me at all.

Anyone who has worked seriously at an art form probably knows something about this reversal. A work reaches a certain point where it begins making demands of its own. A color requires another color. A sentence changes the sentence that must follow it. A shape creates a problem elsewhere in the composition. Something is removed and suddenly an entirely different possibility becomes visible.

At that point, imposing one’s original intention upon the work can actually interfere with it.

This is when the artist begins listening.

This is why creative work can sometimes feel less like invention than discovery. One begins with an intention, but somewhere along the way the work acquires enough internal relationships that it begins suggesting its own possibilities.

The artist’s task changes from intervening to attending.

What does the work need?
What is trying to happen here?
What happens if I move this?
What happens if I leave it alone?

Eventually even those questions disappear. Eye, hand, material, memory and imagination enter into a continuous conversation that happens too quickly and too intimately to require words or self awareness.

Then time disappears.

We often say that we “lost track of time,” but perhaps the phrase deserves closer attention. The clock has continued running. What has disappeared is our monitoring of ourselves moving through time.

For a while there is only the activity.

And this experience is hardly confined to artists.

A gardener can disappear into a garden. A carpenter can disappear into a piece of wood. A cook can disappear into preparing a meal. A person repairing an engine, walking through a forest, sewing a dress, solving a mathematical problem or playing with a child can enter the same condition.

The activity becomes sufficient unto itself.

This suggests that the state we associate with artistic creation may belong to a much larger human capacity: the ability to become so completely immersed in an encounter that the boundary between the observer and the observed becomes temporarily less important.

We become what we are attending to.

The painter becomes color, edge, interval and gesture. The musician becomes rhythm and tone. The writer becomes language. The gardener becomes soil, root, moisture and season. The walker becomes the path.

Perhaps this is why such experiences can feel restorative even when the activity itself is exhausting. For a little while we are relieved of the burden of continuously maintaining ourselves as a story.

We are simply present.

Of course, nobody can permanently live this way. The artist eventually steps back from the painting. The writer rereads the page. The musician listens to the recording. Judgment returns. Editing returns. Practical questions return. The self comes back and has useful work to do.

But the problem is not that the self returns. The problem comes when it never leaves.

An artist who cannot occasionally forget themselves may find it difficult to encounter anything that has not already been filtered through what they think they are supposed to be or do.

So one of the disciplines of an artistic life is learning how to become available. To be fully present in the present.

We prepare the studio. We sharpen the pencil. We tune the instrument. We arrange the materials. We develop our skills over years and decades. We show up repeatedly, whether inspired or not. All of this matters.

But underneath those practices is another practice that is harder to describe.

Keeping the mirror clean.

Not so that we can disappear forever, nor so that some mysterious outside force can take possession of us, but so that when something appears before the imagination, we are capable of receiving it without immediately trying to own it.

The reflection does not belong to the mirror. The music does not belong to the hollow reed. Even the work does not entirely belong to the artist.

We participate in its coming into being. We give it our experience, our skill, our memory, our hands, our attention and our time. But in the deepest periods of making, the distinction between maker and made can become surprisingly thin.

And then, every once in a while, we look up. Hours have passed. The room has changed and often we are surprised by what has just occurred.

We have moved from intuitive intelligence back to rational intelligence. To move back and forth between these two forms of intelligence is, at first difficult and disorienting.

Let’s move on to article #3

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Entering the Work

There is a moment in creative work when the ordinary world begins to fall away.

You may have been in the studio for twenty minutes or two hours. At first you are still carrying everything with you. There are emails to answer, groceries to buy, bills to pay, people to call. Something somebody said yesterday is still rattling around in your head. You wonder what time it is. You remember something you forgot to do. You reach for your phone.

You are physically in the studio, but you haven’t arrived yet.

Then, if you stay with the work long enough, something begins to change.

The distance between yourself and what you are doing starts to diminish. The conversation in your head becomes quieter. You stop wondering whether you feel like working. You stop evaluating every decision. One action suggests another. A piece of paper leads to another piece of paper. A color requires another color. One sentence opens a door into the next.

Eventually you stop noticing the room.

And then you stop noticing yourself.

How do we get there?

That may be one of the most important practical questions in an artist’s life.

We often speak about inspiration as though the artist must wait for something extraordinary to arrive. My experience has been almost the reverse. The important thing is to make oneself available.

You cannot demand immersion.

You can prepare a place for it.

Crossing the Threshold

Every artist eventually develops ways of crossing from ordinary consciousness into creative consciousness, whether they recognize them as such or not.

The studio itself can become one of these devices.

When I enter the studio, the materials are already waiting. There are paintings at various stages, collages underway, scraps of language, images, books, brushes, paper and unfinished possibilities. I do not necessarily have to know what I am going to make.

I only have to begin interacting with something. It is a call and response action. Something calls to me and I respond. That is a low stakes threshold. Do one thing and that leads to the next thing.

This is important because waiting on inspiration to know what you are going to do can prevent you from ever discovering what you are doing.

Pick something up.
Move something.
Make a mark.
Read yesterday’s paragraph.
Mix a color.
Cut a piece of paper.

The first action does not have to be important. Its purpose may simply be to lead to the second action. Then the second leads to the third. Eventually intention gives way to momentum.

Give the Mind Somewhere to Go

The distracted mind is not necessarily an undisciplined mind. It may simply be a mind presented with too many possible objects of attention.

A phone is an extraordinary machine for providing possible objects of attention. So is a computer connected to the internet. So, for that matter, is everyday life.

The artist therefore has to create a temporary narrowing of possibilities.

For this period of time, I am here. This is what I am doing. Everything else can wait. That doesn’t require hostility toward the outside world. It requires a temporary agreement with it. I will come back later. Then clear your mind. Be present.

This is where ritual becomes useful. Coffee made a certain way. Particular music. Silence. Sweeping the studio. Sharpening pencils. Laying out brushes. Reading what was written yesterday. Taking a walk before beginning.

The ritual itself has no magical power. Its power lies in repetition. Eventually the mind recognizes the sequence. Ah. We are going there now.

Stay Long Enough

The most difficult part is remaining through the period when nothing much seems to be happening.

We sit down to work and immediately encounter resistance. The painting seems uninteresting. The sentence feels dead. We are restless. Suddenly cleaning the refrigerator seems unusually important. This may be precisely the moment when we need to remain.

Immersion often requires time to gather itself.

The surface agitation of everyday consciousness does not necessarily disappear the moment we enter the studio. It may take twenty minutes. It may take an hour. Some days it may never happen.

That is all right.

The practice is not entering the immersive state on command. The practice is remaining available long enough for it to become possible.

Protect the Threshold

This also means recognizing how fragile the transition can be.

A single interruption at the wrong moment can return us instantly to ordinary consciousness. The phone rings. A notification appears. Someone asks a question. We check an email “for just a second.” And suddenly we are back.

The problem isn’t simply the minute consumed by the interruption. We may have to travel the entire distance inward again.

This is why uninterrupted time is so valuable to creative work. An hour without interruption may be worth considerably more than three scattered twenty-minute periods.

We need enough time to forget about time. Enough silence to stop noticing silence. Enough solitude to stop noticing that we are alone. And enough engagement with the work that eventually there is no longer an artist standing outside it wondering what to do. There is only the doing.

That is the threshold we are trying to cross.

And once we cross it, something even stranger can happen. The person who entered the studio begins to disappear. The work seems to take over. Hours pass without notice.

And sometimes, when we finally look up, we have the peculiar feeling that whatever has appeared before us was not entirely made by us.

Which raises another question.

If I wasn’t consciously directing everything that happened, who exactly was making the work?

Stay tuned for #2

It has finally cooled off here in the high desert and it has been raining all day. Hooray! It was the hottest summer on record. Even the Rio Grande went dry this summer. Not hot like Texas thank goodness becuase Albuquerque is at 5,000 feet. It still cools off at night.
I was sitting here at the computer thinking I need to write a little something for my journal which I try to write into every day. I have noticed that I have gotten a little off track becuase I have gotten lost in my studio immersed in new artworks and have forgotten to sit down and write the most minimal entries:

• The date,

• what time I woke up

• and later; what time I went to bed

• and how many steps I walked that day.

Also I write my substack articles in my journal and was thinking I need to write about something or other. So I started writing a little something about this problem of creative immersion and it led me to this series of new articles.

This first article in an introduction to the series of three essays about Creative Immersion. So here we go…

The Cycle of Creative Immersion - Entering, Disappearing, Returning

There is a place artists sometimes go.

It is not exactly a physical place, although the studio, the writing desk, the rehearsal room, the workshop or even a particular chair may provide the entrance to it. It is a condition of attention in which the ordinary world begins to recede and the work moves toward the foreground until, eventually, there seems to be very little else.

Time behaves differently there.

Hours can pass unnoticed. Hunger can go unnoticed. The phone may ring without being heard. At some point the distinction between the artist and the activity begins to soften. Instead of thinking about making the work, one is simply making it.

Sometimes even that description feels inaccurate.

The work seems to be making itself.

Artists have described this experience in many ways. We speak of being in the groove, being in the zone, being carried along, losing ourselves in the work. Psychologists have given us the useful term flow. Older spiritual traditions have offered images such as the empty vessel, the hollow reed and the clear mirror.

These different descriptions circle around a common experience: for a period of time, the ordinary sense of ourselves as the person directing everything becomes quieter.

But there is more to creative immersion than what happens while we are inside it.

There is an entrance.
And there is an exit.

Those two thresholds may be just as important as the experience itself.

Over many years of working as an artist, I have come to think of creative immersion as a cycle with three movements:

Entering. Disappearing. Returning.

Each requires a somewhat different skill.

Entering

First we have to get there. This can be surprisingly difficult.

We arrive at the studio carrying the ordinary world with us. There are messages to answer, appointments to remember, things that need fixing, conversations still running through the mind, news from elsewhere, unfinished obligations and the endless invitation to look at a screen.

The body may have entered the studio while the attention remains scattered across twenty other places. So the first problem of creative work is not necessarily What should I make?

It may be: How do I become completely present enough to make anything?

Artists develop countless techniques for accomplishing this, sometimes without recognizing them as techniques.

We prepare the studio. We arrange our materials. We make coffee. We put on certain music or insist upon silence. We take a walk. We sharpen pencils. We clean the brushes. We reread yesterday’s pages. We sit in the same chair. We turn off the phone.

Then we begin.

Perhaps most importantly, we begin before inspiration arrives.

We make one mark. Move one object. Write one sentence. Play one chord. Cut one piece of paper.

The first action leads to another. Then another. Repetition gathers momentum. Attention begins to narrow. The noise of ordinary consciousness gradually becomes quieter.

We cannot necessarily command immersion to occur. But we can learn to make ourselves available to it. Every artist eventually discovers a particular doorway. The first task is learning how to find it.

Disappearing

Then something changes. We cross a threshold without necessarily noticing when it happened. The person who was wondering what to do has become absorbed in doing it.

The internal commentator becomes quieter. Decisions occur without requiring lengthy deliberation. The hand seems to know something before the conscious mind can explain it. One thing calls for another. The work develops an internal logic that begins suggesting where it wants to go. The artist moves from commanding to attending. Time begins to disappear.

There is an old metaphor that I find useful here: consciousness as a luminous mirror.

When the mirror is clouded by our anxieties, ambitions, expectations, judgments and self-consciousness, we see everything through them. When the mirror becomes clear, it simply reflects what appears before it.

The reflection does not belong to the mirror. The mirror does not need to possess what it reflects. It simply becomes completely available to what is there.

Something similar can happen during creative immersion.

For a while, we stop standing outside the work judging it. The separation between observer and observed becomes thinner. The painter becomes absorbed in color, edge, rhythm and gesture. The writer disappears into language. The musician disappears into sound.

The ordinary self has not ceased to exist. It has simply stopped insisting upon its presence. This is often where the work surprises us.

Something appears that we did not plan. We look at it afterward and wonder: Where did that come from?

This is what artists mean when they say that the work made itself.

Returning

But eventually we have to come back.

This is the part of creative immersion that interests me increasingly because it receives much less attention.

I know from experience how completely time can disappear while working. Hours can pass. Sometimes entire days seem to merge into one another. I have missed appointments, forgotten what day it was and become so absorbed in working that I once forgot to pick up my children from school. Well, OK more than once.

Creative immersion can be wonderful. It can also become a problem.

My son Zach, who has the same capacity for intense creative absorption, sometimes calls it a “condition,” almost as though it were a psychological disorder. There is humor in the word, but there is also apprehension behind it. He knows that when he becomes deeply engaged creatively, the rest of everyday life can begin falling apart.

That observation raises a question that belongs alongside all our celebrations of artistic flow:

How do we disappear without becoming lost?

Perhaps the ability to enter creative immersion requires a complementary ability to leave it. The artist needs to learn reentry. If our internal sense of time becomes unreliable while we are working, then the boundary has to come from somewhere outside the immersive state.

An alarm.
A calendar.
A stopping time.
Another person expecting us.
A ritual that says: save the document, photograph the painting, put down the brush, write yourself a note about what comes next.

The alarm clock must remain outside the dream.

External boundaries do not necessarily interfere with creative freedom. They may be what makes that freedom sustainable. A canvas has edges. Music occurs within time. A poem eventually reaches its final line.

Creative immersion may also need a container. Within that container we can disappear completely. Outside it, there are people waiting for us. There are promises we have made. There are bodies that need feeding and sleeping and moving. There is an ordinary life that must somehow coexist with the extraordinary life of making things.

The Complete Practice

This suggests to me that creative practice consists of something larger than learning how to make paintings, poems, songs, novels, films or anything else. We are also learning how to move between different states of attention.

We learn how to leave the distracted world without rejecting it. We learn how to surrender ourselves to the work without trying to control every moment of its becoming. And we learn how to return.

Entering.
Disappearing.
Returning.

These are three movements of a single creative practice.

The first requires preparation.
The second requires surrender.
The third requires responsibility.

Over the next three essays, I want to examine each of these movements separately.

First: how do we prepare ourselves to enter sustained creative attention?
Second: what actually happens when the ordinary sense of being the doer recedes and the work seems to begin making itself?
And finally: how do we come back without destroying the very capacity for immersion that we are trying to protect?

Because perhaps the goal of an artistic life is neither to remain safely on the shore nor to disappear permanently into the depths. It is to become increasingly accomplished at making the crossing.

To know how to enter.
To know how to disappear.
And to know the way back home.

The next three articles to look more closely at each of these three stages.

OK, what am I going to wrtite about today… what’s on my mind?

Naturally, since it is close to an election in the USA and since there has been such an assault on the arts by the current administration, that is on my mind as it should be on yours. The Arts are always underrated, undervalued and under attack in Washington, DC.

A Quick Review

The current administration is reshaping federal arts policy through major budget cuts, ideological content reviews, and leadership changes at national cultural institutions. [1, 2, 3]

Federal Funding and Agencies

• Budget and Staff Cuts: The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) faced staff layoffs and canceled grant programs under administration pressure. [1]

• New Rules: Federal agencies began asking grant applicants to avoid using funds to promote certain topics, such as gender ideology. Civil rights groups challenged these rules in court and won favorable rulings. [1]

• Chilling Effect: Arts groups report that federal changes create fear and uncertainty for local and state culture programs that rely on federal money. [1]

Changes at the Kennedy Center

• New Name and Leadership: The board at the Kennedy Center added President Trump’s name to the building facade after replacing most board members with political allies.

• Renovation Battles: Plans for a sudden two-year closing of the building led to legal fights and temporary blocks by judges.

• Artist Withdrawals: Many scheduled musicians and performers canceled their appearances at venue events, citing political disagreements. [1, 2]

Smithsonian and History Museums

• Content Reviews: The White House issued strict content reviews for the Smithsonian Institution to remove items or exhibits it considers anti-American or biased. [1, 2]

• Executive Orders: New directives order museums to present a single, uplifting view of American history and to remove race-centered frameworks. [1, 2]

Artist and Public Reactions

• Protests and Art: Some individual artists use their work to protest social issues like police violence and immigration raids.

• Cautious Response: Many large museums and groups choose to stay quiet and avoid direct fights with the White House to protect their operations. [1]

An analysis from the Brookings Institution titled Defending American Arts, Culture, and Democracy offers a critical review of recent cultural policy shifts. [1]

The commentary examines how federal administrative actions alter the creative landscape and affect the broader democratic framework.

The Role of Arts in a Democracy

• Preserving Freedoms: The analysis highlights that independent cultural and artistic institutions—such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Kennedy Center, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH)—play an essential role in safeguarding critical freedoms and maintaining a functioning democracy. [1]

• Cultural Tightening: Brookings notes that tightening control over these platforms often coincides with other democratic pressures, such as restrictions on independent media and book bans in federally operated systems. [1]

The “Chilling Effect” on Communities

• Trickle-Down Funding: The study explains that federal arts restrictions create a severe “chilling effect” that reaches far beyond Washington, D.C.. Because federal funding structures are highly decentralized, changes at the top rapidly impact local communities. [1]

• State Impact: By law, 40% of all annual NEA and NEH funding is distributed directly through a network of state, jurisdictional, and regional arts organizations. Consequently, federal spending cuts or content restrictions immediately destabilize the 56 humanities councils and local arts groups that rely on those public grants to survive. [1]

See a running account of the damage at The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council

Read Trump’s Executive Order 14253: RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY

Be sure to VOTE!

The Artist as an Expeditionary Animal

We tend to imagine the artist in the studio.

I have spent most of my working life in studios and have always regarded the studio as one of the great inventions of civilization: a place specifically set aside for taking the time for paying attention to things. I really think of my studio as my hermitage.

But the studio is only half of the equation.

Before anything can be brought into the studio, something has to be encountered.

The collage artist is an expeditionary, hunter/gatherer animal by nature.

I use the word expeditionary deliberately. An expedition is different from a vacation and different from ordinary travel. An expedition sets out with an intention accepting that the territory itself will have something to say about what happens.

You know enough to begin. You do not know enough to know what you will find. That distinction seems fundamental to creative life.

Going Out to See What’s There

As a collage artist, I understand this quite literally.

I am constantly gathering things.

Printed fragments. Bits of typography. Packaging. Old books and magazines. Discarded papers. Photographs. Ephemera. Marks made for purposes having nothing to do with art. Pieces of the enormous visual conversation constantly taking place around us.

Most people walk past these things. I walk toward them.

I am not necessarily looking for anything in particular. In fact, looking for something too particular can be a disadvantage. If I decide beforehand what I am searching for, I become very good at overlooking everything else. Instead, I try to remain open and available.

Something catches my attention.

I pick it up.
I photograph it.
I put it in a folder.
I tear something out.
I make a note.
I carry it home.

Often I have no idea what I am going to do with it. That comes later. The gathering and the making are related activities, but they are not the same activity. Gathering requires a different state of mind. It asks me to suspend judgment long enough to recognize possibility before I know its use.

A fragment enters the studio because something about it attracted my attention enogugh to pick it up.

The Portable Studio

Years ago when we first moved to Cuernavaca in Central Mexico in 1998, not realizing it, I began thinking as an expeditionary collage artist. That is where I first began harvesting the city walls. It was also when I started observing and thinking of the local - to me foreign - environment. I began seeing new materials to work with, a new atmosphere to capture and new palettes, textures and compositional ideas to explore.

I went out on daily walks around the city and collected photographs, poster papers and antique papers at flea markets. I examined archetecture, walls, doors and pavement. All of it became new ways to work and eventually lead to the idea of turning the collages into compositions for paintings. I developed a method.

Over time the street became part of the studio. Railway stations became part of it. Museums, bookstores, cafés, flea markets and hotel rooms became temporary extensions of it. Conversations became part of the material. So did photographs, overheard language, printed matter, maps, tickets, packaging and whatever else crossed my path.

Once I began traveling more frequently I figured out how to make the studio mobile - something that would fit in a suitcase and set up temporarily in a hotel room.

On a recent 49-day collage expedition through Europe and the UK, for example, I could begin a day knowing where I was sleeping that night and perhaps whom I intended to meet, but I could not possibly know what I would encounter or what the actual material of the day would be.

That was the point.

There is a particular quality of attention that develops when you travel this way. You aren’t merely passing through a place taking selfies in tourist locations. You are ‘at work’ in it.

The distinction has very little to do with whether you produce an artwork that day.

The work may simply be looking.
And collecting.
And having a conversation.
And getting lost.
May be sitting somewhere for an hour watching people pass by.
May be noticing one peculiar piece of typography painted on the side of a delivery truck.

You don’t necessarily know which experiences matter while you are having them. But it creates a texture or an insight that you carry with you and synthesize.

Every Artist Is a Collector

Collage makes this gathering process unusually visible because the physical fragments eventually appear in the work. But I suspect almost every artist operates this way.

Writers collect language.
Musicians collect sounds.
Photographers collect moments.
Painters collect relationships of color and form.
Filmmakers collect gestures, faces, locations and situations.
Poets collect peculiar conjunctions of words.

We collect conversations, mistakes, disappointments, jokes, memories, arguments, dreams, accidents and things somebody said twenty years ago that suddenly become useful this afternoon.

The artist is continually converting experience into material.

This does not mean that everything must immediately become art. That would be exhausting. It means that creative people develop a peculiar permeability to experience. The world gets in.

An Expedition Does Not Require an Airplane

There is a danger in talking about artistic expeditions because the word immediately conjures distant places.

Paris.
Berlin.
Bangkok.
Rome.

Some romantic landscape involving a notebook, an old Land Rover and an unreasonable quantity of dust.

But distance has almost nothing to do with it.

An expedition can begin when you walk out your front door.

You could spend an afternoon exploring three streets in your own city that you have never walked before. You could visit the industrial district instead of the museum. You could walk along an arroyo and collect visual forms. You could spend two hours photographing hand-painted signs or graffiti. You could ride a city bus to the end of its route simply because you have never been there.

An expedition is not defined by mileage but rather by intention and defined by attention.

This may be one reason artists sometimes discover extraordinary things in places other people describe as boring. The artist isn’t necessarily experiencing a more interesting world. The artist may simply be cultivating a relationship with the world by paying attention and taking interest in it.

Curiosity changes the experience of reality. The more closely you look, the more there is.

Bringing Something Back

Historically, expeditions were expected to return with something.

Specimens.
Maps.
Drawings.
Measurements.
Stories.
Objects.
Information about the territory.

The artistic expedition has its own version of this.

We return with evidence.

A folder of paper.
A notebook filled with phrases.
Five hundred photographs.
A recording. (for instance of the subway to Heathrow in London)

A sketch.
An introduction to someone we didn’t know before.
A new question.
A changed opinion.

Sometimes we return with almost nothing tangible and discover months later that the expedition altered the direction of the work.

Leaving Room for the Territory

There is another reason I like the idea of the expedition.

An expedition requires a certain amount of preparation.

You need equipment. You need provisions. You need some idea where you are going. You need enough organization to keep practical problems from consuming all your attention.

But at the same time if everything has already been determined, there isn’t much left to discover. The creative expedition therefore occupies an interesting territory between intention and uncertainty. You prepare yourself thoroughly enough to participate and remain open enough to be surprised.

This is also how I think about making art.

A blank canvas contains infinite possibilities, which is another way of saying that it contains no particular possibility or direction. The work begins by making the first move. That move changes the situation. The changed situation suggests another move and the conversation begins.

Eventually something appears that could not have been completely envisioned at the beginning.

An expedition works much the same way. You begin somewhere.
You encounter something. That encounter changes what is possible.

You proceed from there. One step after the other.

The World as Studio

The home studio is a base camp. It is where we return.

We spread our findings across the tables. We look at the photographs. We reread the notes. We sort the fragments. We remember the conversations. We discover relationships between things that seemed unrelated when we first encountered them.

Then the transformation begins.

Something picked up on a sidewalk becomes part of a collage.
The collage becomes the basis for a painting.
A conversation becomes an essay.
An observation becomes a story.
A photograph becomes evidence of something we didn’t realize we were investigating.

And eventually the studio fills again with work derived from encounters that could never have happened inside it. Then, sooner or later, we have to go back out.

This rhythm seems increasingly important to me:

Go out. Pay attention. Gather. Return. Make. Go out again.

The studio gives us concentration.
The expedition gives us collision.
We need both.

Because the artist’s raw material is never merely paint, paper, words, photographs, sounds or objects. Ultimately, the raw material is direct experience. And experience has to be encountered.

By traveling now and then to ‘parts unknown’ an artist gets the experience of seeing the world in a fresh way over and over again and an opportuity be surprised and to bring that adventure back to the studio.

So the next time you go on a trip make it into an expedition.

The Contrast Trap:

Why Modern Politics is Thwarting the Creative Mind

We live in an era of cultural and political reductionism, where the expansive, multi-angle, full-color spectrum of human experience is systematically flattened. To understand why public discourse feels so exhausting - and why meaningful debate has largely vanished - we have to look at the conflict through the lens of art.

Consider the Mona Lisa.

When you stand before Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, (assuming you could get that close) you are looking at an intricate web of sfumato - deliberate, hazy layers of color, light, and shadow that blend seamlessly into one another. It is an exercise in subtlety. Leonardo da Vinci started the painting in 1503 and worked on it, off and on, till 1517. The human expression is notoriously ambiguous; the background shifts depending on your perspective. The artist thinks in multi-angle full color.

Now, imagine that image violently reduced. Strip away the rich pigments. Strip away the delicate brushwork. In fact, strip away the entire grayscale entirely. Do not allow for charcoal tones, soft shadows, or muted silver mid-tones. Reduce the Mona Lisa to a binary image: stark, harsh black and white.

The nuance is gone. The enigmatic smile becomes a jagged silhouette. The depth disappears.

Then, imagine two factions standing in front of this ruined canvas, arguing over its meaning from fierce political stances. That is our current political landscape.

The Geometry of a Two-Tone Mind

This is the exact crisis of modern debate. The political apparatus functions as a binary compressor. It takes the infinite, colorful complexities of human society - economics, culture, ethics, psychology - and forces them through a scanner that only registers two outputs - highly simplified black and white.

For the person trapped in this binary mindset, there is no gray area. There are no gradients. There is only the stark contrast of absolute black and absolute white to defend or attack.

When a person who thinks only in binary terms enters a debate, their entire rhetorical strategy is dictated by the limitations of their palette:

• Subtlety becomes invisible: Because their worldview doesn’t possess the vocabulary for nuance, any attempt to introduce context, history, or mixed motives is viewed as a threat or a distraction.

• Defense becomes aggressive: Without the cushioning mid-tones of compromise, every disagreement feels like an existential battle. If you aren’t completely ‘with us’, you must be entirely ‘against us’.

• The landscape is flattened: Complex systemic issues are reduced to simple, rigid dichotomies: Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Absolute Freedom vs. Total Control. President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress on 20 September 2001 said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

The tragedy of this dynamic is that it forces the artist and the creative into a defensive crouch. Creatives natively operate in the spaces between these lines. They understand that two opposing truths can exist in the same frame, that human beings are deeply flawed but capable of grace, and that the beauty of life lies entirely in the details that cannot be easily categorized.

The Art of Political Flattening

When politics dominates a culture, it demands that we abandon our full-color palette and enlist in the binary army. We see this when books, movies, and paintings are judged purely by their ideological alignment rather than their aesthetic or emotional truth.

The binary debater looks at a full-color painting and asks only one question: Which side does this support?

If the art contains subtlety, the binary mind becomes suspicious. It demands clear, distinct outlines. It demands to know exactly where the black ends and the white begins. It demands an immediate YES or a NO, a FOR or AGAINST. But the world is much more nuanced and subtle than that for any intellegent thinker.

And now is the time for intellegent thoughtful consideration not quick to the draw, shoot from the hip bravado as we currently see happening.

True debate - the kind that moves societies forward rather than locking them in permanent, gridlocked warfare - requires us to step back from this false binary stance. It requires us to look at the canvas of public life and recognize that the vast majority of human existence takes place in the rich, messy, full-color space between the extremes. In fact, it could be said that to think in black and white terms defines you as an extremist.

Until we reject the stark, low-resolution contrast of modern political rhetoric, we will keep shouting at a ruined distorted image, completely blind to the masterpiece that is right in front of us.

De-escalating the Contrast: A Guide for the Individual Citizen

The binary scanner of modern politics is an intentional structural trap, but it is not an inevitability. While we cannot single-handedly rewrite the algorithms of social media platforms or retrain political strategists to embrace nuance, we can inoculate our own minds against the flattening effect.

To preserve the multi-angle, full-color capacity of our thinking, we must intentionally adopt a set of deliberate intellectual habits. Here is how the individual citizen can step away from the stark black-and-white canvas and reclaim the mid-tones and the hues of American life.

1. Audit Your Semantic Intake

If you feed your mind exclusively on a diet of political one-liners, you will eventually lose the capacity to process complex thoughts. Slogans act like intellectual fast food—highly compressed, heavily processed, and designed to trigger an immediate, unthinking reaction.

• The Fix: Force yourself to consume long-form, deeply reported material that intentionally refuses to offer easy answers. Read histories, dense policy analyses, and biographies where characters are messy and outcomes are mixed. If an article can be entirely summarized by its headline, it is likely reinforcing the binary trap. Seek out writing that leaves you sitting in the discomfort of unresolved questions.

2. Reclaim the Grayscale Vocabulary

The binary mind relies on a limited vocabulary of absolute terms: always, never, traitor, patriot, pure, corrupt. When we use these words, we actively strip the gray tones out of our own reality.

• The Fix: Introduce conditional language back into your speech and thought patterns. Practice using phrases like: “To a certain extent...”, “In this specific context...”, or “I agree with the general premise, but the implementation needs some rethinking.” By refusing to grant blanket statements absolute authority, you force your brain to evaluate the specific gradients of a given situation rather than sorting it instantly into a binary bucket.

3. Cultivate Cognitive Hospitality

The black-and-white debater views an opposing viewpoint as a hostile invasion that must be immediately repelled with a pre-packaged counter-slogan. Reclaiming full-color thinking requires a willingness to host an idea temporarily without immediately adopting it or attacking it.

• The Fix: Practice the art of “steel-manning” - the exact opposite of straw-manning. When confronted with an ideological opponent, try to articulate their argument so clearly and fairly that they would say, “Yes, that is exactly what I mean.” Only after you have accurately mapped their perspective in its full complexity can you meaningfully evaluate where it fails or succeeds. This doesn’t mean you must change your values; it means you refuse to fight a caricature of the issue.

4. Disconnect from the Audience Matrix

Performative debate thrives on the presence of an audience. When we post on social media, we are rarely engaged in an honest exchange of ideas; we are sending signals to show our tribe that we are defending the white and attacking the black. But everyone their’s their own side is the right side.

• The Fix: Move your most difficult conversations offline, away from the digital coliseums. Complex, nuanced human issues were never meant to be adjudicated in the public comments sections or via brief text threads. A face-to-face conversation over coffee reintroduces the visual and vocal mid-tones—tone of voice, facial expressions, and hesitation—that humanize the speaker and dismantle the binary illusion.

5. Protect the Creative Sector of Your Life

Ultimately, the most effective antidote to political reductionism is art itself. Creative expression—whether reading fiction, viewing complex paintings, listening to intricate music, or engaging in your own creative projects—acts as resistance.

• The Fix: Dedicate time to spaces where politics is explicitly banned from being the sole metric of value. Immerse yourself in stories where the protagonist makes terrible mistakes but remains sympathetic, or where the “villain” acts out of deeply human, understandable motives.

By insisting on seeing the world in its original, high-resolution, full-color state, you perform a radical act of civic sanity.

I like to think I more or less keep up with the news but I heard the following post by Lucus Bean in which he mentioned that DOGE fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers. I knew there was a big shake up by DOGE but I had no idea of the scale. I decided to ask google about it.

Each of my questions are noted so you can see if Google gives you the same answers.

Lucas Bean Daily

Why MAGA Stupidity is Dangerous

In April of 1945, a German pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated days later…

Listen now

a month ago · 407 likes · 37 comments · Lucas Bean

Question to Google:
Did DOGE fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers?

Yes, initiatives driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resulted in over 300,000 federal workers and contractors losing or leaving their jobs. This mass reduction includes both direct firings and a high volume of voluntary separations incentivized by the administration. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Here is how the workforce reductions actually unfolded:

The “Deferred Resignation” Program

The vast majority of the departures came from a targeted buyout strategy modeled after Elon Musk’s corporate downsizing at Twitter. [1]

• The Offer: Under the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s deferred resignation program, more than 144,000 federal workers accepted packages allowing them to stop working while remaining on paid administrative leave through September. [1, 2]

• The Cost: A Government Accountability Office (GAO) review revealed that this program cost taxpayers $6.7 billion just to pay outgoing employees not to work. [1]

Mass Firings and Forced Cuts

In addition to buyouts, DOGE orchestrated direct terminations that primarily targeted probationary workers, inspectors general, and specific agency staff. [1, 2]

• Chaos & Legal Battles: More than a dozen lawsuits were filed challenging the legality of the rapid terminations. Federal judges frequently ruled parts of the layoff plans unlawful, such as an attempt to slash FEMA’s staffing by 50% and the unlawful firing of 17 inspectors general. [1, 2, 3]

• Rehiring Wave: Because the cuts were deep and erratic, many agencies suffered severe operational disruptions. Cabinet secretaries eventually had to rehire at least 20,000 to 25,000 essential personnel back into government roles to keep critical services functioning. [1, 2, 3]

Ultimately, labor unions like the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) and congressional watchdogs report that while DOGE has since shuttered, its initiatives left a net loss of 271,000 federal jobs - marking the largest peacetime federal workforce cut in U.S. history. [1, 2]

Question: What are the Ongoing Consequences of this Action?

The mass workforce reductions driven by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have triggered severe, ongoing consequences across the federal government. While intended to slash waste, the rapid downsizing has instead created unprecedented fiscal, operational, and legal fallout. [1, 2, 3]

1. Severe Operational Disruptions & “Brain Drain”

The sudden departure of nearly 140,000 experienced personnel through the deferred resignation program has stripped key agencies of institutional knowledge, crippling vital public operations: [1, 2, 3]

• Tax Compliance: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) saw massive staffing cuts, leading to the halting of large-scale corporate audits and unresolved tax cases, which experts warn could inadvertently expand the federal deficit. [1]

• Public Safety & Environment: At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), severe staffing shortages forced entities like the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory into an “indefinite hiatus,” halting critical water quality and invasive species monitoring. [1]

• Housing and Homelessness: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shuttered multiple field offices and cut up to 50% of its workforce, severely stalling policy development during a national homelessness crisis. [1]

• The Restaffing Scramble: To keep basic operations from completely collapsing, the government has already been forced to backfill over 20,000 vacated positions, focusing heavily on hiring lower-cost, early-career workers to replace the lost experts. [1]

2. Ballooning Financial Costs and Deficits

Despite a promised $1 trillion in savings, the short-term execution of the layoffs has actively worsened government spending: [1, 2]

• Paid Leave Skyrocketed: A September 2026 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed that the administration spent a staggering $9.5 billion in 2025 alone to pay federal employees on administrative leave. [1, 2]

• No Proven Savings: The massive upfront cost of paying people not to work - combined with the economic fallout of the war in Iran and sweeping tax cuts - has caused the federal deficit to shoot up rather than contract. The GAO explicitly noted that long-term savings from these job cuts remain entirely unproven. [1, 2]

3. A Mountain of Ongoing Legal Battles

The hyper-aggressive timeline and erratic nature of the terminations have resulted in a complex web of high-stakes lawsuits: [1, 2]

• Unlawful Agency Cuts: Federal judges continue to block several of DOGE’s sweeping blueprints. For example, a federal court ruled that a plan to arbitrarily cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workforce by 50% was entirely unlawful.

• The Privacy Act Breaches: Major legal battles are moving forward over claims that untrained DOGE representatives were illegally granted “full access” to sensitive government payroll and payment systems containing civilian Social Security numbers and tax data. Federal judges have greenlit class-action lawsuits against agencies like Health and Human Services (HHS) for these Privacy Act violations. [1, 2, 3, 4]

4. Long-Term Civil Service System Overhauls

To permanently cement these changes and prevent future legal roadblocks, the administration has begun rewriting the fundamental rules of federal employment: [1]

• Expedited Firings: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has enacted final regulatory changes that allow federal agencies to apply strict “suitability and fitness” standards to current employees. This effectively bypasses traditional civil service protections, allowing the government to rapidly fast-track the termination of remaining workers under the guise of fitness reviews. [1]

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Question: Wasn’t USAID part of this shake up? How about the State Department?

Yes, both the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department were central targets of the DOGE-driven reorganization, experiencing some of the most radical cuts and structural changes in modern civil service history. [1, 2]

While other departments faced phased downsizing, USAID was uniquely subject to a near-total operational dismantle, with the State Department ultimately taking over what remained. [1, 2]

The Gutting and Shuttering of USAID

USAID was arguably DOGE’s primary target early on. Elon Musk publicly criticized the agency, leading to an aggressive corporate-style purge that effectively paralyzed its operations: [1, 2, 3]

• Staff Slashed by 97%: In February 2025, DOGE abruptly placed the vast majority of USAID’s 10,000-person workforce on administrative leave and recalled all staff stationed abroad. Internal emails revealed the agency’s core team was brought down to under 300 people, leaving skeletal operations like just 12 people to manage the entire Africa bureau. [1, 2]

• Mass Contract Cancellations: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the cancellation of over 5,200 foreign aid contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. Humanitarian groups warned these freezes severely impacted global healthcare and education initiatives. [1, 2]

• The State Department Takeover: By March 2025, the administration officially bypassed Congress to sunset USAID as an independent agency. What remained of its mandatory or high-profile functions—such as U.S. emergency food aid, PEPFAR (HIV/AIDS relief), and malaria programs—were forcibly folded directly under the umbrella of the State Department. [1, 2, 3]

The State Department Purge

The State Department did not just absorb USAID; it faced its own internal workforce reduction, triggering heavy losses in diplomatic and foreign policy expertise: [1]

• The July 2025 RIF: In July 2025, the State Department executed a massive Reduction in Force (RIF) that abruptly laid off nearly 1,350 dedicated employees. [1]

• Targeting Civil Service: The layoffs primarily targeted long-term domestic civil service workers stationed in the U.S., alongside Foreign Service officers temporarily serving in domestic roles. [1]

• The Pushback: Lawmakers and employee unions have strongly condemned the purge. Critics and former diplomats argue that the simultaneous elimination of USAID’s independent status and the loss of over 1,300 State Department experts have drastically weakened American influence and diplomatic capabilities overseas. [1, 2, 3]

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Question: What have been or will be the long term consequences of these actions on the international community and on the United States?

The dismantling of USAID and the parallel purges at the State Department have fundamentally altered global geopolitics and domestic stability. Over the long term, these actions carry heavy humanitarian, economic, and strategic consequences for both the international community and the United States.

1. Long-Term Impact on the International Community

The abrupt cancellation of 83% of U.S. foreign aid projects has created a catastrophic “sudden shock” to global stability: [1, 2]

• A Growing Humanitarian Crisis: By cutting essential healthcare, water, and education initiatives that served over 60 countries, the international community faces staggering human losses. Public health experts publishing in The Lancet estimate that the withdrawal of U.S. health infrastructure could lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including millions of children losing access to basic medical care and vaccines. [1, 2, 3]

• Unchecked Disease Outbreaks: The elimination of USAID’s pre-outbreak infrastructural networks has left the global community highly vulnerable to pandemics. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, health experts blamed DOGE cuts for severely undermining the response to an intensifying Ebola outbreak, noting that critical virus samples were compromised due to a complete lack of trained operational oversight. [1]

• Surges in Violence and Exploitation: A study published in the journal Science identified a direct link between the sudden cancellation of U.S. local grants and a rise in violent regional conflicts. The rapid evaporation of economic development projects caused immediate localized chaos. For instance, the collapse of environmental oversight programs led to a doubling of illegal narco-mining landing strips in the Peruvian Amazon, while cutting aid programs in regions like Kenya eroded the economic counterweights that previously kept youth from being drawn into terrorist organizations. [1, 2]

2. Long-Term Impact on the United States

Domestically, the sweeping job cuts and foreign policy shifts are yielding severe long-term blowback:

• The Erosion of “Soft Power” and Influence: For over six decades, foreign aid served as one of America’s primary diplomatic tools to build alliances and advance commercial interests. By abandoning these partnerships, the U.S. has triggered a massive vacuum in global influence. National security experts warn this severely undermines long-term American global competitiveness, as rival nations rapidly step in to fill the structural and economic voids left by the U.S. [1, 2]

• Severe “Brain Drain” and Recruitment Crisis: Labor organizations like the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) emphasize that the mass, highly publicized firing of over 300,000 workers—including nearly 100,000 military veterans—has severely fractured trust in the civil service. Decades of highly specialized institutional knowledge in international diplomacy, cybersecurity, and public health have been permanently erased. Federal agencies face an unprecedented, multi-decade struggle to recruit and retain high-level talent to fulfill their core national missions. [1, 2]

• Permanent Domestic Operational Drag: Even though DOGE has shuttered, the operational damage persists. The simultaneous gutting of domestic agencies has left everyday Americans facing long-term structural backlogs - ranging from stalled corporate tax audits and uncollected revenue to delayed Social Security assistance - proving that the “failed experiment” will continue to carry significant financial and social costs for years to come. [1, 2, 3]

Question: What needs to happen in the future to correct this mayhem and how long will it take?

Correcting the operational, diplomatic, and fiscal disruption caused by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) mass downsizings will require a monumental, multi-phased effort. According to public administration experts, labor groups, and former diplomats, fixing this system demands both immediate legal corrections and long-term structural rebuilding. [1, 2]

Estimates suggest a full recovery of federal and diplomatic capabilities will take at least 5 to 10 years, with some diplomatic impacts remaining permanent. [1]

What Needs to Happen to Correct the Mayhem?

1. Legislative Safeguards & Structural Reversal

• Repealing Executive Reclassifications: Congress must pass pending legislation, such as the Saving the Civil Service Act, to strip the executive branch of the power to unilaterally classify civil servants into at-will categories like Schedule Policy/Career. Without this, future administrations could repeatedly clear out institutional experts. [1, 2]

• Re-establishing USAID: Bypassing Congress to shutter USAID left a complex web of broken humanitarian contracts. Congress would need to formally appropriate emergency funds to independently re-charter the agency, isolate it from State Department bureaucracy, and renegotiate thousands of terminated international grants. [1, 2]

2. Overhauling the Federal Hiring & Recruitment Engine

• The 10-Day Hiring Mandate: The federal government’s standard hiring timeline can drag on for months. To combat the massive brain drain, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) must adopt modern applicant tracking systems and fast-track pathways (aiming for under 10–14 days) to recruit specialized talent into decimated sectors. [1, 2]

• Targeted Incentives and Rehiring Pipelines: Agencies like the State Department must actively establish “welcome back” programs for the 1,350+ laid-off subject matter experts. Because many of these mid-and-upper-level specialists have already transitioned to the private sector or retired, the government will need to offer high-grade salary matching and expedited security clearance processes. [1, 2]

3. Resolving the Multi-Billion Dollar Legal Fallout

• Settling Class-Action Violations: The courts must finish adjudicating the dozens of active lawsuits regarding illegal mass firings and Privacy Act data breaches. Billions of dollars will likely need to be allocated in court-ordered back pay and settlement damages to wrongfully terminated workers. [1, 2]

How Long Will It Take?

Public administration experts break down the recovery timeline into three distinct horizons:

PhaseTimelineAnticipated ProgressPhase 1: Immediate Triage1 – 2 YearsSettling active back-pay lawsuits; stopping ongoing regulatory rule changes that weaken civil service protections; auditing backlogs at damaged agencies like the IRS and HUD.Phase 2: Operational Stabilization3 – 5 YearsRebuilding entry-level and mid-level staffing pools through aggressive hiring; physically setting up foreign aid field structures again; repairing fundamental domestic government functions.Phase 3: Restoring Soft Power5 – 10+ YearsRebuilding international trust and diplomatic networks. Experts from organizations like the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) emphasize that institutional memory and deep-rooted foreign relationships take decades to forge and cannot be simulated or bought overnight.

Question: Considering of all of this up to now, what is the estimated costs and the cost of repairation?

While the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) publicly claimed to have unlocked $160 billion to $215 billion in sweeping cuts, independent oversight and nonpartisan analyses reveal that the net financial ledger is heavily in the negative. The chaotic execution, lost productivity, and extensive legal violations have transformed a “money-saving” campaign into a highly expensive operational crisis. [1, 2]

The Estimated Costs (What Has Already Been Spent)

Instead of shrinking government costs, the short-term financial burden shifted directly onto taxpayers to pay for empty productivity, operational workarounds, and massive administrative overhead: [1]

• $9.5 Billion in “Paid Leave” Salaries: A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report confirmed that the federal government spent $9.5 billion in 2025 alone paying federal workers on administrative leave—a staggering 435% increase from previous years. [1, 2]

• $6.7 Billion for the “Fork in the Road” Exit Strategy: Out of that paid leave, $6.7 billion went strictly toward funding the OPM’s deferred resignation program. This money was paid to roughly 100,000 to 140,000 employees who were legally barred from working or performing their duties while they waited out their official separation dates. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• $135 Billion in Overall Macroeconomic Loss: An extensive fiscal analysis by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service (PSP) estimated that when factoring in the total value of paid leave, severe drops in agency productivity, the abrupt economic impact on communities reliant on federal jobs, and the cost of urgently rehiring essential personnel at premium rates, the total operational cost of the DOGE restructuring reached $135 billion. [1, 2]

• Unquantified Revenue Drain: This does not include the long-term wealth destruction from gutting the IRS, which halted major corporate audits and delayed tax collections, actively driving up the budget deficit. [1, 2]

The Cost of Reparation (What Rebuilding Will Cost)

Undoing the systemic damage and stabilizing the federal civil service carries an entirely separate, multi-billion-dollar price tag that will affect federal budgets for the next decade:

• Legal Settlements & Back-Pay Damage: Estimated $2 Billion – $5 Billion
  With over 18,000 individual appeals flooded into the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and dozens of class-action civil rights lawsuits moving through federal courts, the government faces massive liabilities. If judges rule the mass terminations or the State Department/Education Department Reductions in Force (RIFs) to be systematically unlawful, the court-mandated back pay, mandatory benefit restorations, and legal fees will cost billions. [1, 2, 3]

• Rehiring and Re-Clearing Specialized Talent: Estimated $1.5 Billion – $3 Billion
  Replacing decades of lost institutional memory requires more than just filling seats. Recruitment campaigns, salary matching to pull experts out of the private sector, and processing highly restricted security clearances for thousands of replacement diplomatic, cybersecurity, and scientific officers will cost hundreds of millions annually. [1]

• The Cost of “Re-Chartering” Global Aid: Estimated $10 Billion+
  Arbitrarily canceling over 5,200 international USAID contracts and folding the skeletal remains into the State Department created extensive international liabilities. Formally separating, re-establishing, and renegotiating broken treaties, public health networks, and humanitarian grants with foreign nations will take years of targeted, fresh congressional appropriations. [1]

Well folks, this leads to a hundred more questions in my mind but the main question I have for the reader is: Are you going to vote? I hope so. This is definately a ‘All hands on deck!’ moment.

Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam

My brother Dan says he’s trying to get famous and asks people to share his song. There is only one small problem: he posted it six years ago, and after all that time it currently has a grand total of 14 views and 13 subscribers.

Dan’s birthday is coming up on October 8, so I thought it might be fun to see if we could suddenly make his six-year-old dream come true.

Watch the video. Give him a like. Leave him a comment telling him how great the song is. Subscribe to his channel. And, most importantly, repost this and ask your friends to do the same.

I’m curious to see what might happen if a six-year-old video with 14 views suddenly starts getting hundreds, or maybe thousands, of views for no apparent reason.

Share

Dan Touchon and the Great American Pandemic Song

There are songs that capture their historical moment immediately. There are others whose importance becomes apparent only after the dust has settled and civilization has had sufficient time to recognize what happened to it.

Dan Touchon’s Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam belongs, I would suggest, to the latter category.

Created during the pandemic, the song initially appears to be a piece of cheerful nonsense, a homemade assemblage of percussive words, jokes, rhymes, social observations, whiskey, honey, bourgeois decadence, bathroom deals, theological reassurance and impending catastrophe.

This interpretation, while understandable, is inadequate.

What Touchon has actually given us is a compressed vernacular history of Western civilization at precisely the moment when Western civilization found itself sitting at home wondering whether it had remembered to wash its groceries.

Consider the opening:

Chop, chop, hammer, hammer, slam slam
Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham

Immediately we are placed in a world of labor.

Chop.

Hammer.

Slam.

These are among humanity’s oldest technological verbs. The axe, hammer and impact precede the computer, the corporation and the algorithm by millennia. Before Homo sapiens could develop derivatives markets, social media or customer-service telephone trees, somebody had to hit something with something else.

Touchon returns us to this primal condition.

But then, astonishingly, the human being becomes the product:

Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham.

The worker has become meat.

Marx would presumably have had something to say about this.

Yet Touchon refuses to remain inside the predictable confines of Marxist critique. No sooner has the Virginia ham appeared than someone politely asks whether mustard might be desired.

The answer is decisive:

No ma’am.

Whiskey, however, is acceptable.

Thus, within four lines, Touchon has moved from industrial labor to commodification, regional American foodways, hospitality and alcohol.

Bob Dylan might have required three verses.

Touchon needs four lines.

The Great Pandemic Dislocation

The historical circumstances matter.

During the pandemic, ordinary categories collapsed into one another. The office became the bedroom. The kitchen became the school. The dining table became the conference room. The computer became workplace, theater, pub, newsstand, marketplace, social club and nervous system.

Time itself became peculiar.

Tuesday became difficult to distinguish from Thursday.

Against this background, Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam makes remarkable sense.

The song does not proceed through conventional narrative because pandemic life did not proceed through conventional narrative. Instead, it advances through abrupt clusters of activity:

Chop. Hammer. Slam.
Wiggle. Giggle. Go.
Tinkle. Wink. Cha-cha.
Bam. Gitcha. Boom.

These are simultaneously words and sounds. More importantly, they are instructions. Touchon gives us a civilization reduced to verbs.

Do something.
Move.
Hit something.
Laugh.
Dance.
Explode.
Continue.

There is a long tradition behind this technique. Doo-wop famously turned apparently meaningless syllables into the structural substance of songs. The Rivingtons’ Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow made nonsense vocalization itself the central musical event, and the Trashmen transformed related material into the manic 1963 hit Surfin’ Bird.

Touchon belongs to this august lineage.

But where Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow gives us the exuberance of postwar popular culture, Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam gives us its exhausted descendant.

Papa oom mow mow.

Chop wiggle tinkle bam.

Sixty years of American civilization separate the two.

One can only speculate what happened.

The Four Movements

Formally, the composition might be understood as a miniature four-movement symphony.

The first movement is Chop.

Chop belongs to work, division and destruction. One chops wood. One chops food. One chops something larger into smaller pieces.

The second movement is Wiggle.

Here the body reappears. Wiggle is playful, erotic, childish and fundamentally unserious. Having established the world of labor, Touchon immediately destabilizes it through bodily movement.

Then comes Tinkle.

Tinkle is fascinating because it hovers between sound and action. Bells tinkle. Glass tinkles. A piano may be tinkled upon. The word also possesses a somewhat less elevated bodily meaning.

Touchon leaves the matter unresolved.

Finally comes Bam.

Bam requires no interpretation. Something has happened.

The architecture is therefore extraordinary:

Chop: civilization constructs.
Wiggle: civilization entertains itself.
Tinkle: civilization decorates itself.
Bam: civilization blows itself up.

One might reasonably ask whether Spengler could have improved upon this.

Enter the Bourgeoisie

Then, without warning, Touchon abandons Virginia ham and honey and enters political philosophy:

It’s a fine mess we created by the bourgeois.

The appearance of “bourgeois” is startling. Nothing has prepared us for it.

That is precisely why it works.

The bourgeoisie does not arrive accompanied by Marx, Engels or an explanatory footnote. It simply wanders into the song between “cha-cha” and “scrimshaw.”

This may be the most accurate representation of ideology in contemporary life ever written.

We encounter political ideas exactly this way: sandwiched between entertainment, consumer products, fragments of news, advertisements, jokes and somebody dancing.

And then comes one of the song’s great existential propositions:

Nothing lasts forever, not even a scrimshaw.

Here we must stop.

A scrimshaw is already an object haunted by time. Traditionally associated with sailors carving or engraving whale bone or teeth, it belongs to an older maritime culture of long voyages, handwork, waiting and storytelling.

Touchon could have written:

Nothing lasts forever, not even love.
Too easy.

Not empires.
Predictable.

Not mountains.
Sentimental.

Instead: Not even a scrimshaw.

The specificity makes the line strangely convincing.
Of course the scrimshaw will disappear.
Everything will.

The whale.
The sailor.
The ship.
The person who carved it.
The person who owned it.
The civilization that placed it in a museum.
The museum.
The label beside it.
Eventually the language in which the label was written.

Touchon has smuggled impermanence into a novelty song.

From Dada to Revolution 9

At this point we should acknowledge the avant-garde tradition.

Dada understood more than a century ago that when civilization becomes sufficiently absurd, a perfectly reasonable artistic response is to become more absurd than civilization.

Meaning can be dismantled.
Language can become material.
Words can become noises.
Noise can become composition.

This trajectory eventually passes through experimental music, musique concrète and sound collage. In popular music, one of the most famous examples remains the Beatles’ Revolution 9, assembled from tape loops, speech, sound effects and manipulated fragments to create what John Lennon conceived as a sonic picture of revolution.

Lennon had: Number nine. Number nine. Number nine.

Touchon answers: Chop chop. Hammer hammer. Slam slam.

The comparison is irresistible.

Both works recognize repetition as a device capable of transforming ordinary language into sonic material. Repeat a word enough times and its semantic function begins to weaken. Eventually we stop asking what the word means and begin hearing its shape.

Chop.
Chop.
Hammer.
Hammer.
Slam.
Slam.

Language becomes percussion.

Then Everything Goes Wrong

By the fourth section, the song has darkened considerably:

Bam, bam, gitcha, gitcha, boom, boom

The playful noises have become explosive. And now we encounter deals being made in bathrooms. It is an inspired image of institutional corruption because the bathroom is precisely where official architecture becomes unofficial.

The boardroom has minutes.
The bathroom does not.
History records the treaty.
History rarely records the conversation beside the urinal that made the treaty possible.
Touchon understands this.
Then comes catastrophe.
Stuff hits the fan.
It will consume.
And the resulting mess will require more than a broom.

We have moved from slapstick to apocalypse without changing vocabulary.

That movement is essential to understanding the song.

The pandemic itself had precisely this surreal quality. One moment people were discussing toilet paper and sourdough starters; the next they were discussing mortality statistics, supply chains, emergency powers and the possibility that normal life might not return for quite some time.

The ridiculous and terrifying occupied the same room.

So they do here.

The Final Turn: Theology

And then Touchon does something genuinely interesting.

After labor, appetite, alcohol, flirtation, class conflict, destruction, political deals and catastrophe, he suddenly gives us God:

The Lord is in heaven
He’s still on His throne.

The scale of the song abruptly expands.

We began with Virginia ham.

We have arrived at the architecture of the cosmos.

This is an old American songwriting maneuver. Folk, country, gospel and blues repeatedly allow the mundane and metaphysical to inhabit the same stanza. Trains become salvation. Rivers become death. Roads become destiny. Home becomes heaven.

Consider The Weight by The Band. Robbie Robertson constructed a landscape populated by Nazareth, Moses, Luke, the Devil, Miss Fanny, Crazy Chester, dogs, travelers and favors. Robertson later connected the song to Luis Buñuel and the “impossibility of sainthood”: the predicament of someone trying to do good while human circumstances continually complicate the attempt.

Touchon operates in similarly unstable territory, although his route to metaphysics passes through mustard. That distinction should not be underestimated.

Robertson gives us the burden: Take the load.

Touchon gives us the millstone. And the millstone is heavier.

The Millstone

The concluding image may be the key to the entire composition:

But the world’s still not home
It’s more like a, more like a millstone.

This is a far more complicated image than it first appears.

A millstone is certainly heavy. Indeed, “a millstone around one’s neck” has become proverbial for an inescapable problem, obligation or burden. The phrase carries particularly severe biblical associations with judgment and punishment. To compare the world itself to a millstone is therefore to imagine existence as something enormously heavy that we somehow find ourselves carrying.

This immediately places Touchon in conversation with The Weight.

The Band gives us the burden that one person takes from another. Touchon gives us the millstone. But a millstone is not simply a heavy object.

A millstone is a machine of transformation.

The grain comes from the harvest. The grain is placed beneath the stone. The stone crushes it. Through that crushing, grain becomes flour. Flour becomes dough. Dough becomes bread.

And bread changes the imagery again.

Bread is among the oldest symbols of human sustenance. It is the product of agriculture, labor, patience, technology and community. It is “daily bread.” In Christian symbolism it becomes something still greater: nourishment transformed into sacrament.

Suddenly the theological line immediately preceding the millstone becomes important:

The Lord is in heaven
He’s still on His throne.

Heaven.
Millstone.
Grain.
Flour.
Bread.

The sequence begins to acquire an almost biblical resonance. And yet the process depends upon crushing. The grain cannot remain grain if it is to become bread.

The millstone is therefore simultaneously burden and transformation.

This is particularly striking in a song created during the pandemic. The pandemic itself functioned as a kind of historical millstone. Ordinary life was placed under enormous pressure. Work, family, government, medicine, education, religion, entertainment, commerce and personal relationships were all subjected to stresses that exposed their structures.

People discovered what broke.
They also discovered what endured.
And some things were transformed.

The millstone therefore suggests something more interesting than simple catastrophe. The pressure that threatens to crush us may also be the pressure through which something becomes something else.

This brings us back to the strange sequence announced by the title:

Chop.
Wiggle.
Tinkle.
Bam.

Perhaps these are the noises of life beneath the millstone.

We work.
We dance.
We make things.
We drink.
We flirt.
We quarrel.
We construct systems.
We tear systems down.
We make questionable deals in bathrooms.
We create messes that cannot be cleaned up with brooms.
We pray.

And meanwhile the great stone keeps turning.

This is where Touchon unexpectedly enters one of the oldest human symbolic systems: the cycle of harvest, grinding, making and eating.

Seed.
Earth.
Grain.
Harvest.
Millstone.
Flour.
Bread.
Body.
Then seed again.

The millstone does not travel anywhere. It revolves.

That distinguishes it beautifully from another great image of American popular music: the train.

The train moves down the line. The millstone moves in circles.
The train promises escape.
The millstone promises recurrence.
The train takes the traveler somewhere else.
The millstone transforms whatever passes through it.
And perhaps this explains why the singer says:

The world’s still not home.

We are not home because we are still inside the process. We are simultaneously the farmer, the grain, the miller, the stone and the person waiting for bread.

Which makes Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam something considerably stranger than a pandemic novelty song.

It becomes, whether its author intended it or not, a little cosmology of work and transformation.

The world is a millstone.
It burdens us.
It judges us.
It crushes us.
It feeds us.

And it keeps turning.

And Then, the Masterstroke

After all of this, after the bourgeoisie, impermanence, corruption, catastrophe, theology and the crushing weight of existence, Touchon returns to the beginning:

Chop chop, hammer hammer, slam slam.

Nothing has been resolved.
The worker returns to work.
The rhythm resumes.
The ham remains hanging.
Someone once again offers mustard.
The singer once again refuses.
The whiskey remains acceptable.

And then Dan Touchon delivers what may be one of the most understated conclusions in the history of the protest song:

Goodbye for now. See you later.

Not farewell.
Not amen.
Not the end.
See you later.

Civilization, apparently, will continue.

Perhaps that is the ultimate pandemic message of Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam.

After isolation, fear, political absurdity, domestic confinement, economic uncertainty and the sudden awareness that the enormous machinery of modern civilization might be considerably more fragile than previously advertised, the appropriate response is neither despair nor triumph.

It is:

See you later.

And perhaps that is why, when the history of twenty-first-century American music is finally written, future scholars will place Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam somewhere between The Weight, Surfin’ Bird, Revolution 9, the Book of Ecclesiastes and a man standing in his garage hitting something repeatedly with a hammer.

Whether Dan Touchon intended any of this is beside the point.

Great works have never been entirely successful at controlling their critics.

Chop.
Wiggle.
Tinkle.
Bam.

"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

William Shakespeare