Vol. CCXII, No. 0 — Issued under Reluctant Protest
“No, and furthermore, No.”

On the Current Administration and the Fashion for No Kings

We of the Naysayers’ Society, who have survived monarchs, mobs, ideologues, and influencers, not to mention wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes, the rise and fall of empires, find ourselves once again compelled - against our better judgment - to address the present debacle of governance unfolding in the American theater.

The current administration, whose talent for spectacle surpasses its capacity for thought, has mistaken performance for policy, slogans for substance, and manipulated and cherry picked public sentiment as if truth. Its ministers of messaging trumpet each contradictory, self destructive nincompoopery as innovation, while the citizenry, caught between exhaustion and addiction, scrolls through the chaos in a failed quest for reassurance that their world isn’t collapsing into ruin before their eyes.

Were we less skeptical, we might call this chaos tyranny. But tyranny requires conviction, and conviction has long since been outsourced to algorithms.

As for the “No Kings” protests now filling the squares and feeds—ah, how the pendulum swings! Once we scorned the divine right of kings; now we endure the divine right of crowds. Both claim infallibility, both bristle at criticism, and both eventually crown their own idols. The chant of “No Kings” would be noble if it were not so quickly followed by “But make me one.”

We sympathize, of course, with any movement that rejects blind authority. Yet we cannot help noticing that the rebels have learned their manners from the very monarchs they denounce: grand gestures, ritual outrage, and a royal disdain for doubt. In their haste to dethrone the powerful, they have forgotten that power regenerates precisely where certainty is loudest.

Let us state, for the record, what every sober mind already knows:

There can be no republic without refusal.
No freedom without the right to doubt it.

We are not revolutionaries, nor royalists, nor nihilists. We are the quiet custodians of contradiction, the necessary discomfort in every age drunk on its own virtue. We ask no followers, demand no purity, and erect no statues. Our only decree is vigilance—directed first inward.

The Naysayers’ Society therefore extends its reluctant commendation to Her Majesty Queen Agnes of Elsewhere, whose declaration that “cynicism and skepticism are signs of vigilance every citizen must apply to themselves” has been misquoted, misunderstood, and therefore - by our measure - utterly perfect.

To the administration: govern, if you are capable, but spare us the moral pageantry as you go about immoral actions.
To the protestors: resist, but leave room for laughter and self-doubt (as many are).
To the citizen: practice sovereignty within before shouting for it without. Freedom is a laborious task and many are lazy.

And to all: remember that disbelief, properly exercised, is the truest act of faith remaining.

—The Committee of Persistent and Ongoing Dissent since 1729
Fleet Street, revived in digital exile, Year Three of the Reign of Elsewhere

The Naysayers Society is a marginally approved subsidiary of the International Post Dogmatist Group. Standard disclaimer invoked. Be peaceful out there.

Following up on the previous post from 1999…

So… For myself, I decided to start the Ontological Museum a few years prior to the 1999 post. I had been thinking about it, starting to set up a website and all of that kind of thing. The internet as we know it today was still in it’s infancy. It was a construction zone. I got my first computer in 1994 that I bought from my Aikijutzu sensei who wanted to upgrade from a 386 to a 486 personal desktop computer. I knew utterly nothing about computers. Everyone was still working with a dial up modem. It was brutally slow. But life was slow at the time so we all accepted that fact because it was new and mysterious and cool.

A few years earlier in 1987 a gang of us in the Art department at the University of Texas at Arlington founded the International Post Dogmatist Group as a response to Post Modernism. Post Dogmatism was a lot better idea in our opinion. Three of us were the actual founders and we worked out the general idea in March of 1987. All three of us were into the spiritual path and esotericism and Eastern spirituality mainly Taoism, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism and Sufism. We were all painters working in the painting studio but we also had diverse backgrounds in photography, theatre, film, construction, mechanics, etc. We were all three in our 30’s.

So our idea of Post Dogmatism had to do mainly with artists looking within more that without and developing intuition as their main path toward art making. This meant that every individual had to find their own unique inner way of working. Post dogmatism is about removing dogma rather than creating and maintaining dogma.

’Dogma, in its broadest sense, is any belief held unquestioningly and with undefended certainty.’

wikipedia.org

As artists, we consider it wise to question everything especially those things that seem so obvious that we would never think to question them, the hidden beliefs and cognitive biases. This is not to say beliefs are not useful and important in many ways. I don’t want to delve too deeply into this idea because the main thing I want to talk about is the idea of the museum.

Since we were thinking about all of these things in relation to the art world at large and the ecosystem of the art world we decided it might be a good idea to think of ourselves as an organization rather than individuals. But an organization that was a façade that mimicked the idea of a bureaucracy without any internal cohesion, regulation or restrictions. Every member of the group could form their own office, desk, research facility, laboratory, conservatory, department, etc. that expressed their own interest and we could communicate with each other through a moniker, sobriquet, nom de plume, pseudonym, or alias. One would still use their own name but attached to some sort of self created organizational title such as director, chief, field officer, supervisor, etc.

We thought of it from the beginning as a holographic bureaucracy - the Official Avant Garde - where each member is the entire organization from a particular point of view. (I think it was Patrick O’Kelly who envisioned the holographic bureaucracy idea.) Hence, we all benefit and support each other as the organization but without any restriction on anyone’s point of view or any need to hold any point of view or any particular philosophy or any jointly held belief other than each member’s personal freedom and autonomy to pursue their own internal trail. You could say a community of anarchists - ‘absence or denial of any authority or established order’ But in the sense of human authority or human established orders with the intent to follow a greater order, the order at the root of things, the natural, universal order. The order that is found inwardly - the Great Harmony, the Tao, the Kingdom of Heaven, or however you want to call it. In this regard we, as a group, are not for or against anything in particular. However, individually, each member is welcome to their own opinion and to think what they want and do as they please.

All of this is to say that I have developed a lot of different organizational aliases over the years with the most active being the Ontological Museum and the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction. Then there is the Archives of the Eternal Network, The Fluxmuseum, The Fluxnexus, Fluxus Laboratories, The Department of Photographic Records, the Department of Linguistic Records, etc. and so on.

In recent years I eventually just went with the Ontological Museum (the name originally dreamt up by Ed Benson who died in Hong Kong a few years back) as the umbrella organization in order to be able to inventory the things that come into the archives from all the different departments. A museum archive seemed to me to be the ultimate art object inside of which every imaginable thing and activity and experiment can be tested and played out and accumulated for the future.

I am an artist, not a trained museum professional, so how I am doing the museum archives is a self taught part time activity and hence quirky. It is an art project after all and the thing, in its totality, I regard as an art object. An assemblage of assembled things mostly centered around collage art.

As artists we become masterful at what we do through continuous self disciplined practice and immersion in our creative activity whatever medium it might be in. I approach the museum archives with the same effort up to the extent I am able. In order to be self sustaining I have to put most of my effort in my studio making art. So I came to think about the efforts in the Archives in ‘museum time’ which is to say thinking in decades and centuries instead of weeks and years. So this gives me a larger window of time to work at things in the archives so that I can be patient and open to the idea that it will never be finished. So I do what I can when I can do it, just plodding along. This helps me keep from being frustrated or overwhelmed by it. It will out live me. How? I don’t know. But now that I am starting to get old I am beginning to think about it as a puzzle that needs to be solved sometime fairly soon.

It is a small record of the last years of the 20th century and first quarter of the 21st century and my reach into the global art community via the use of the internet and international mail service. I think it is fascinating myself.

Ok, so there is some of the background and rational for the archives of the OM. In the next article I’ll try to explain some of the insights I have learned along the way.

I should finish with the disclaimer that I am speaking from my own perspective and must include the Standard Disclaimer…

THE STANDARD DISCLAIMER:

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

---

Read more about the Standard Disclaimer here

I was rereading the Fluxmanifesto. It seemed like a good idea, but as history has proven since then, anything is collectable and can become a commodity even things intentionally intended to thwart being commodified or institutionalized. Which is interesting.

The whole critique of the presumed strategy about ‘the artist doing art’ at the end of the manifesto is based on misguided and misunderstood assumptions and disparages the artists and draws illogical and demeaning conclusions and thus encouraging artists down a dead end trail that leads only to mediocrity. The aim of art is not to aspire to the commonplace or to consider Average as the summit.

Appreciating the commonplace, appreciating everything in fact, is a worthy goal. An artist should be able to gaze upon the entire world with wonder, amazement and sense of humor and not divide things into beautiful and ugly or worthy and unworthy.

There is water from a free drinking fountain on the one hand and water in a bottle for 3.00 bucks on the other hand. There is the public interest of the 'everyman' and there is the private interests of the individual - the collector and market, the artists and the free exchange of ideas among themselves. It all coexists together. A better strategy is to engage with the whole ecosystem.

Everything is actually free. It is just a matter of what it costs to get it in your hands.

Example: If I want a big boulder I saw in the mountains in my front yard, that is free if I can roll it from the mountain to my front yard by myself. But if I want a dude with a crane and a truck and a couple of helpers to get some gas and take the time to put wear and tear on their expensive equipment, use the road system to go and get it and then bring it and place it in my yard with the equipment and the very long chain of various other unaccounted for costs, taxes and whatnot, that project is going to cost a lot of money so the boulder in my front yard might end up costing a couple of thousand or more bucks. BUT the boulder itself was free. To go through all that trouble and expense is some version of the artist’s desire to fulfill his creative vision. I could have just been happy with my memory of the boulder or a photo of it. But that would not satisfy my creative desires.

Once in my yard, I might decide it could be cool to draw a shape suggested by the stone and then to hire a carver to come to my boulder and carve my sketch into the stone Isamu Noguchi style. That cost a bunch more money and on top of that, I am losing part of the stone by cutting it up but maybe, with a couple of adjustments those leftovers could be cool in my house as smaller sculptures.

I live with it a few years and it becomes famous to the neighbors and some rich dude comes to see it, loves it and wants to buy it for his yard. After all my time and effort, I figure it is worth at least $100,000 to me to give up my favorite thing and another $25,000 to move it and place it in the rich dude's yard. He says "Yeah! I love it!" and pays me the money but then I don't have my rock anymore. But wait…

Then I think "Hum... Now I can afford to take this money and go out and find another boulder that I like and start all over. Could be fun! I did see another boulder I liked and do have more design ideas inspired by my first effort. I can probably make an even bigger and better one."

And there you go - the artist and the collector market. They depend on each other. No reason to work against it. Just don't get confused. The main thing is being creative and making the art you want to see and having the time and means to do it. Simple.

I know George Maciunas is really reacting to the seemingly degenerate whoopla and glitz surrounding the high end of the art market and there are legitimate criticisms to be made about that exclusivity-oriented crème de la crème culture but that is really just the smoke, mirrors and klieg lights theater of the collector’s market and those who serve them, not the artists themselves. Some artists play into it and maybe even get lost in it. It is, however, just a slice of the whole ecosystem that is its own form of entertainment leaving most of the creative community to go quietly about its business.

The following is a 1999 email response to a conversation on the defunct Yahoo email group Fluxlist (now on facebook) that I wrote in my early 40s from Cuernavaca, Mexico containing some of my thoughts at that time about what became my long term (25+ years), overarching project: The Ontological Museum.
My thoughts on the topic have become more developed and more sophisticated over the years since the writing of the below musings and I intend to continue writing some articles to lay out my own thoughts on this subject as I contemplate the next steps in what to do with this massive accumulation of artifacts. More to follow…

Artists Should Be Their Own Museums - 1999

All of these curators are merely using artists' art as decorations of their own ideas. This is a complete subversion of their task and, in my opinion, represents a hostile take over of the public presentation of art. These institutions after all, are not what artists have come to assume that they are. We thought that they were places that advocate the arts and maintain a safe haven for the best works being created. This is wrong thinking.

Museums are the private endeavors of the wealthy that later, for a wide array of purposes, become 'open to the public' collections. The public then comes to assume that their holdings represent the best and finest examples of the periods that they cover but no, this is not the case. What they represent for the most part is whatever has come into their possession that they then promote. With enough promotion those works become widely known like pop music and are then assumed to be the crème de la crème. Not true ladies and gentlemen, just good advertising.

Additionally, all of these museum collections have generated a bunch of jobs that have become a profession, namely museum directors, writers, caretakers, publicists, archivists, curators, etc. These people are not artists but, due to a close proximity to art, have mistakenly come to think of themselves as arts professionals. They are not. A person has to actually be practicing some art form in order to regard himself or herself or be regarded by others as artists and the legacy of persons such as Duchamp (and his progeny) who have included comments and art on curation and archiving etc. have given an opening for these professionals to become confused and begin to regard their activity as art. You can't blame these youngsters for this as they don't know any better but we artists need to start thinking about how we are going to address these issues.

For one, I have been thinking to myself, "Why don't we artists just start establishing ourselves as museums. We don't run studios, we run self generating museums.”  Then we establish ourselves as such by building, buying or renting an appropriate 'public' space, dedicate a small part of it to exhibition space, a small museum store, a sign in front that says ‘museum’ on it, a couple of parking spaces and non-profit status so that we can apply for grants to archive and maintain and expand our collections of our own work and the documentation of our lives as artists or groups of artists.

What about that idea? I have been experimenting with this idea for the International Post-Dogmatist Group via the Ontological Museum pages on the ontologicalmuseum.org and collagemuseum.com websites and am currently about to move the museum into a building (next week) which will be the MUSEO ONTOLOGICO. It will also be my studio but that will be in the back rooms. I will have a sign made, I will hold public exhibitions, lectures and advertise it as the Ontological Museum of the International Post-Dogmatist Group.

From an email correspondence of Sat, 09 Jan 1999 to Aleksi Aaltonen

When it comes to the history of Fluxus it is best to think about and study it as little as possible. History has very little to do with Fluxus.

All products of Fluxus activity are intended to be forever present and should never be thought of as being a part of some historical moment. If a Fluxus product has a sense of being old or dated or historical it may be seen as a limitation in the design of that particular product. The design of a Fluxus object or a Fluxus score should always be seen in the context of timelessness and to some degree transcend any specific culture but be more aligned with pop culture on a global level.

If an artist spends enough time with an idea, he should be able to strip it of any sense of being of a certain time or place. Any Fluxus object designed with this thought in mind should have the feeling of being of the moment and in the present regardless of when that present moment is. Should a Fluxus object, product or score ever appear to be from the past or from some period other than the present, it should be recreated, repackaged, restated or re-performed by a current Fluxus artist as a completely contemporary work released from the fashions of time.

Surely some Fluxus products will one day fail to seem completely contemporary because the conditions or technology or cultural context has shifted. It will be up to the artists of the moment to restate, redesign, re-perform or repackage earlier Fluxus works to being them into the current moment so that, as much as possible, the exact effect of the product is as close to its original effect as possible. If the effect of a work is unclear, unknown or inconceivable for whatever reason, it will be up to the artist of the present moment to shelve such enigmatic works and focus on works whose clarity of intention continues to shine through.

A Fluxus artist should approach works by previous Fluxus artists with the thought that some will sing to the current moment and artist while other works will remain silent, Those that are silent should be thought of as works for another time, context or artist and should be left alone.

Over the years, as more and more works enter the Fluxus repertoire, each artist will have a vast amount of material to work with allowing any artist to design a unique exhibition or performance that will satisfy any audience. Brilliance and genius will, in the end always prevail leading to a broad spectrum of 'classic' works. Many of these preexisting classic works - due to their open ended and archetypical design are open to multiple interpretations and a wide variety of expressions.

Many preexisting Fluxus works will pass the test of time and scrutiny, others will not. However, even the silliest of scores will find a resonance at the right moment and with the right personality of artist for whom such works will seem as if written with him or her in mind.

Cecil Touchon Dec. 26 2006

What Constitutes a Massurreality?

Breaking it down into three components:

MASS:

This is a reference to mass media – Television, movies, electronic, digital, computer influence, ads, print, billboard & other means as art. A new generation of artists are living in the age of mass-media, the internet, nuclear devices, and genetic engineering and the perennial question of what does it all mean? The details of daily life.

SUR:

(Super) – Sur is interesting because it can have two meanings which are opposite of each other Transcendental / Superficial. If you combine these meanings you have the completion –

“Mind is Heaven and Hell. The akasha or accommodation is not so different from the sky. Sky we see at day or night: in the day there is a single torch yet all illumination; in the night there are many lamps, yet darkness. Sky at night is like the mind replete with knowledge of names and forms — it is still in darkness — while sky at day is like illuminated mind.” (Samuel Lewis)

In relation to the Massurreality we are mostly discussing night conditions – ‘many lights, yet darkness’.

REALITY:

This is a reference more to Consensus Reality than any other- the reality assumed to be experienced by all who use mass media – average, sensual reality, This is the one surrealism is ‘surring’ from.

Surrealism: of course, this is the original movement that is the basis of Massurrealism but taking into account the growth of advertising, mass media, widened perspective, Pop Art, capitalism, etc.

The Massurreality then, is an overarching surrogate humo-centric reality constructed by humanity which forms a part of and is intertwined within the Unified Field of Dogma.

The current modernist version is not unlike what Guy Debord calls the Society of the Spectacle. However, we shall refer here to the Massurreality in a more positive way than Debord’s more alienating and negative critique of modern society that he called the Society of the Spectacle.

The Massurreality is gradually growing into all economic and geographic sectors of humanity driven by the ubiquitous corporate desire for constant economic expansion. This expansion brings with it the program of the continuous, mantric repetition of positive advertising messages about the commodities that these corporate entities wish to sell to the general consumer population in order to inspire in it the sense of need for the commodities which are presented. A central theme of these laudatory messages is that through the purchase of these commodities the consumer not only receives the physical product itself but, by imbibing the product, is additionally imbued with all of the positive traits shown in the commercials and is tacitly accepted as a member of modern society.

But wait! That’s not all.

In order for corporations to manufacture a need for their products there must first be in place the instruments of communicating their persuasive arguments regarding those products which will bequeath the modern dream upon those who are assumed to so badly be in need of it and who, ironicly, come to regard themselves has having developed such a need.

These instruments of communication, in their most powerful form – television and radio – provide exciting and entertaining images that implant the dream of belonging in the mind of a receptive audience. This milieu of tele-visual mass media communication provides what has become the bi product of the corporate desire for expansion which is the knowledge of the cultural envelope – via news, entertainment and sporting events – that are provided as content between the central purpose of tele-visual media namely to transmit corporate advertising messages. Thus, the corporate process of manufacture, distribution and retail availability of the wide range of advertised products of modern society is the backbone of this spreading denatured, refined and enriched massurreality in which most are engulfed. The ‘content’ serving to flesh out the cultural context in which products may find their consumer base.

Through this massurreality we accept by default our individual identities chosen and built from a pre-established menu of dreams and social conventions at the center of which is our identity as a modern consumer of products. The messages within our massurreality are all orchestrated before us in a cacophony of seeming related information of various types.

However, upon analysis there is no relation between one message and the next other than the fact that they share the same form of media presentation giving a visual uniformity that we assume suggests an underlying unity of purpose.

What better symbol then, for this human condition than that of the empty shopping cart – an empty shopping cart on an empty parking lot at night with a waning moon. As a sign, this image carries the revolutionary message of the Massurrealist. There are a number of interpretations of this sign and all of them are equally valid within our Massurrealist Society. Let us survey some of the possibilities.

The first and most obvious corollary that may be made is the image of the empty shopping cart and that of the Ox herding pictures from the Zen tradition. In particular the 8th picture

http://www.jaysquare.com/ljohnson/ox-herding.html

Additionally we can think of the massurreality as a contemporary appearance of Maya as it is thought of in the Hindu tradition:

http://hinduwebsite.com/beliefinmaya.htm

The empty shopping cart in this instance also represents enlightenment and to empty one’s self of elusive and illusionary desires and concepts artificially implanted in our minds through the massurreality we are immersed in.

The empty shopping cart symbolizes the mind emptied of desire; the self emptied of identity and the futility of reliance on the emptiness and bankruptcy of the material consumer culture, the commodities of which act in general as the talismans and icons that give us comport in our Massurrealist identities.

The waning crescent moon supports this conclusion since it is a symbol of receptivity and turning within symbolizing our nearly coming full circle in our relationship with the world as consumer, as spectator and participant in the construction and maintenance of the massurreality we find our selves in and seeking to master.

This by no means exhausts the meanings of this sign but serves only as a beginning of the dialog on the topic.

Lanny is one of the OGs of the Post Dogmatist Group and has been doing some mind bending work with artificial intelligence artworks that he posts on his facebook page here facebook.com/lanny.quarles

Lanny Quarles is a multidisciplinary artist and writer living in Dallas, Texas. Over the past 35 years, he has written and published poetry, and used the digital medium for art making.

Quarles is also interested in painting, drawing and other kinds of traditional mark-making, including most recently, his own take on Japanese ink painting (Sumi-e), in which he combines asemic calligraphy with his own experimental abstractions.

His work has been shown at the Nisa Touchon Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico and at Cohn Drennan Contemporary Gallery in Dallas, TX, and even at the Tate, London.

He also curated a national show of digital work displaying the vibrant mixed community of academic and underground artists of which he is a part, and curated a film series highlighting the themes of art and madness at Cohn Drennan Contemporary.

Quarles studied art at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, OR. While at UTA, he studied under Jim Pomeroy in the original New Genre classes which combined video art, computer art, and performance art. During his time at UTA, he became a founding member of the Post-Dogmatist art movement.

Quarles’ writing has been published in numerous poetry journals including West Wind Review, Big Table, Shampoo, and publications by Xexoxial Press. His writing was included as the fictional screenplay for a character in film director Gus Van Sant’s only novel, Pink.

Lanny Quarles lives with his partner Kara Quarles and their two dogs Lucy and Molly.

The Verse of Uni

 I am going to do a bit of post-dogmatist messing around for a few minutes while I wait on some paint to dry. The post dogmatist group bills itself as

The Official Avant Garde. Accept no Substitutes!

“Therefore… the conception of the Avant Garde is discarded as a general movement forward toward a utopian external and is reoriented to a general movement inward…”

I have been a little slack on my journaling the last week or so. I am trying to average about 500 words a day this year in my journal and I need to make up a little bit and also come up with fresh material for the Touchonian. So let me pitch something to you related to ‘a general movement inward’ as stated above.

 I think I will start by talking about Uni and the problem of talking about Uni. Firstly who is Uni? Uni is the One, the Only, the Lonely, the Singular, the Unique, the only One here. The manifestation; the universe, all of the universes, all of the realms seen, and unseen is the endless, infinite verse of Uni. This means that I am talking to myself right now and that is the problem with talking. Language is based on delusion. The roots of language are based on you and me being two different distinct things which we are not. There is only Uni, not me, not you and yet I am talking and you are listening. All delusion.

“Delusion, illusion, hallucination, mirage mean something that is believed to be true or real but that is actually false or unreal.

Delusion implies an inability to distinguish between what is real and what only seems to be real, often as the result of a disordered state of mind. “

Merriam-Webster dictionary

Since language itself tells us in the above definition that we believe in language and we believe that it is true and real when it is actually false and unreal if what I am calling the Uni is, in fact, the actual reality. Hence, language itself is the source of our delusion since it is predicated on a foundation of misunderstanding of reality as it actually is.

Can I prove my argument about Uni? That is the problem. I would have to use language to convince you and we would both remain in a state of delusion by arguing over it with language since language is the very source of our delusion. It can’t be trusted and can only lead to more convincing delusions.

Still, a pretty good stab at the argument in language come from the opening of the Tao Te Ching which says:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

translation by Stephen Mitchell

Right from the beginning the Tao Te Ching sets out its disclaimer. Just the fact that the above is stated in language makes the whole statement spurious. Though it is pointing in the right direction, it is still delusional, originating in delusion, and only leading to delusion. The truth is somewhere out beyond the boundaries of what can be spoken – darkness within darkness or as Winston Churchill once said on a different subject “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”

The reality beyond our delusion is alluded to over and over again throughout all mystical traditions across time and all over the world. Some humans have awakened to it, or I should say Uni has awakened in them. But whatever I am saying, because I am saying it in language, it is all delusional because language itself is delusional to its core and in it’s very structure.

But wait! Don’t lose hope. Though we are all suffering from a seemingly insurmountable state of deep delusion and that everything I am telling you is delusional on my part, our joint delusion might be perfectly OK. Maybe Uni enjoys being self-deluded in the human state. As long as Uni is tricked into thinking It is you and me, then the One, the Only, the Lonely has company and companionship.

There is you and there is me and we get to pretend that we are two and are not just one of us talking to Itself. You could say that it is a kind of theatrical performance like Shakespeare has said:

“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”

from As You Like It: William Shakespeare

The temptation for me talking to you is to just shut up. Except for the desire on my part to continue to ride this train of thought, foolish as it is and describe the landscape going by in my mind and see if I can’t find a station up ahead where I can get off the train once the train comes to a stop instead of just jumping out the window.

So please forgive my continued pontifications. I will try to be as pauciloquent as possible with my preposterous postulations.

Here I will backtrack just a bit to my use of the word Uni. Uni is a prefix meaning single or one. I like this word as a name for the Divine without actually giving a name to the Divine although I have given It a name haven’t I? I guess I came up with it when thinking about the Universe. ‘Can I call the universe the divine?’ I wondered to myself but decided ‘No I can’t because the universe is a manifestation of something that preceded it’. Then it came to me to examine the word universe and that it is made of uni and verse. Verse means poetry or maybe written poetry and implies song and music and rhythmic patterns. If you think of the preexisting Divine Being creating the universe and that it is like living art, poetry and music then you have the Verse of Uni.

By referring to the divine as Uni it removes all of the baggage of religious dogmas and cultural differences and regional ethnicity and just leaves the divine universal artist/poet/composer/creator at play creating the Great Harmony and its beauty, magnificence and overwhelming wonder. I like that as I am the only one here just like you are. Each of us the epicenter of the universe from our own unique vantage point.

Uni the artful God of all, in all, from which all is made and to which all returns, omniscient, omnipresent, all-pervading, infinitely, eternally, constantly at the loom weaving everything together or at the potter’s wheel giving shape to the clay of life. Dwelling in all hearts, working through all hands, gazing through all eyes upon its work.

Scientists, priests and philosophers can go about their business of counting and naming the stars in the sky or pondering how many angels can stand on the head of a pin or mince words and their meanings till no one knows what they are saying but I’ll stick to the arts where the real mysteries of life are explored and expressed since the beginnings of humankind.

Ok, I am getting carried away. So, for now, I had better get off of my butt and get back to my studio and keep working… Till the next time Beloved One.

Standard Disclaimer invoked.

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In case you have forgotten or didn’t know, today is an international Post Dogmatist holiday commemorating the birthday of Cecil Touchon, one of the cofounders of the International Post Dogmatist Group established in 1987. We are currently in PDE 36 of the Post Dogmatist Era. The new year starts on the 3rd Thursday of March at 3:00pm which will be March 20, 2024. So you will want to get ready for that.

So be sure to take the day off and celebrate and insist on a paid holiday if you are stuck working somewhere and if you are working today insist on ‘quadruple time’ holiday pay for the day.

Above is a photo that sits on my nightstand. I decided to take it out of the old frame and scan it. This is probably the first time it has ever been out of the frame over the last 68 years. I discovered the photographer’s stamp on the back. I guess my parents paid for a professional photographer to commemorate my birth.

I was born in Austin, Texas at about 7:16pm. I know this because when I was a kid my dad would say ‘We are not celebrating your birthday until after 7:15 in the evening - that is when your birthday starts.’

A special shout out to my mom Carol Dacy Touchon Heck. Love you mom! Mom will be turning 90 this December 4th. I’ll remind everyone ahead of time in case you want to send her a birthday card.

To celebrate my having come into the world the first exhibition of concrete poetry was inaugurated later in the year at the: 1956 National Exhibition of Concrete Art at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil in December of 1956. How word spread of my birth all the way to Brazil I will never know. I have not come across any documents in which my name is specifically mentioned but I am pretty sure that exhibit was to celebrate my having come into the world.

Besides me here are some other amazing things from 1956.

So happy Post Dogmatist holiday!

The ‘Usual’ Lecture - 1994 

from the journals of Cecil Touchon

Usually, we look at a thing in the usual sort of way
which usually means that we usually don’t see it as it usually is
but rather, we see it as we usually see it.
The Post-Dogmatist however, decides to look at a thing in an unusual kind of way compared to how he would usually see it.
This usually gives him the unusual opportunity
to see the thing as it usually is rather than as he usually sees it.
The great advantage of this is that he is usually able,
through this unusual experience, to begin to change his usual way of seeing things in general toward being more in accord with the way things usually are and less in accord with how people usually see them.
This is considered, of course, to be of unusually great benefit.

You see, a thing is usually in its usual condition,
which is to say, it is usually existing in its true nature, its natural state.
In fact, it is very unusual for a thing not to be in its usual condition.
That is why it is usually best, when things seem to be unusually out of sorts,
to do something very unusual and change your usual way of seeing things.
Usually, things seem unusually out of sorts
because we are not looking at them in their usual condition
but rather, looking at them in our usual way
and because of this, we are usually confused.

You see, looking at things in the usual way
causes things to seem different that they usually are.
When this is the case,
we usually respond to things in a way that is unusual
to the nature of the thing we are looking at.
This usually causes a thing to respond back to us
in a way that is unusual to its nature.
For, it is usually the case, that a thing usually determines what its true nature is in accordance with how everything else around it usually responds to it.
Therefore, since we usually respond to a thing in a way that is unusual to the thing’s true nature, it usually responds back to us reciprocally,
based on how we usually respond to it.
This usually causes us to think that the way we usually look at a thing
is in accordance with the way a thing usually is and this is, as usual, the problem; that a person usually sees a thing as he usually sees it
and usually will not consider the possibility that his usual way of seeing a thing is unusual to the thing that he is seeing.

It is usually very difficult to get a person to look at a thing
in a way that is unusual to his usual way of seeing it.
Usually, unusual circumstances are required
so that the unusualness of his usual way of seeing
becomes unusually apparent to him, affording him the very unusual opportunity to see a thing as it usually is
without his usual problem of seeing it as he usually sees it.
Now, usually, this will be such an unusual experience
that he will usually try to revert to his usual way of seeing.
But, having had the unusual opportunity of seeing a thing as it usually is
rather than as he usually sees it, he will usually feel unusually uncomfortable trying to maintain his usual way of seeing.
However, because of this unusual experiences of having seen a thing as it usually is rather than the way he usually sees it, he has,
usually unwittingly, begun the unusual process
of questioning his usual way of seeing a thing
which, a person usually never ever does except under very unusual circumstances. 

Continued from the previous article by the same name.

…However, let us say that, as whisps of divine imagination, we are not entirely awakened from the delusion of our condition of being a lark of the Divine Mind but rather think of ourselves as separate autonomous beings with an individual identity. Yes we are.  After all, this appears to be exactly the point of our existence, to take respite from our aloneness as the one Entity and explore the infinite possibilities of being many. As many, we have the opportunity to experience the endless variety of the One Being from infinite vantage points. How amazing is that?

In the ancient Hindu texts, this ever-conscious spark/strand of the Entity existing in each of us is called the Atman or Self. If we accept that we are all only One dreaming of being many, and there are endless hints of this truth throughout world literature, then, how will this realization effect our approach to the world around us and to each other? How will it affect our own sense of ourselves and hence our approach to living?

How we choose to go about living on a day-to-day basis is the purpose of this philosophical inquiry. In one way of looking at things, we could say, that if the One Being is on vacation through each of us from the reality of Its endless aloneness, we should spend our time accepting this condition and just go about our lives however we wish to and that in itself would serve the greater purpose of Life. If that is the case what could be better than happily pursuing your creative life?

But, there are those who have thought deeply on this topic over the millennia and have come up with and practiced a variety of programs and possible goals of how we might live our lives and develop ourselves in a way that is in harmony with this deeper reality. As artists we can use all the help we can get and all the best ways to think about things.

In my own case I grew up from childhood as a Catholic. At the age of 14 I had a significant mystical experience which altered my understanding and my direction and when I was 21 years of age I had my deepest soul shaking mystical experience with the infinite which revealed the deeper bedrock of my being and, soon after, I was visited in a dream by the Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan. I didn’t know who he was at the time but I soon found myself in a home that had books of his lectures and each had a photo of him. I recognized him as the man in my dream some months earlier. Hence, I took initiation in the Inayati lineage of Sufism. I was later ordained by the head of the order; Pir Valayat, his son, as a cherag (which is a religious minister for conducting various services). This led to a deep, ongoing study of the sacred texts of the world to reveal and explore the unity of religious ideals. As mentioned, I am an artist not a scholar, but my adult life has been spent in contemplating our place in the universe.

Over the years I have developed a variety of strategies for myself of how to go about the day-to-day existence of life as a personage in a physical body that needs to eat, sleep, take shelter, occupy oneself and get along with other instances of Ourself. In many ways it is an ongoing theatrical production of which none of us are aware of the vastness of its scope nor need to be. But it would be best if we take notice of our own part in the whole thing and where we fit into the grand production.

From a Post Dogmatist point of view, each of us is a fraction of the totality but inwardly, at our depth, open out into the Totality whether we are aware of it or not and seemingly almost none of us are. However, the Entity is ever aware through all of us. Cognizant or not, all of us are unique expressions of that Entity, have arisen from it, are immersed in it, sustained by it and will return to it.

There are various opinions around the world and across time how we return to it when we die either through dissolution after death or some form of reincarnation, transformation, or transmigration. Maybe being a physical person is an unusual condition for us and what we were previously or what we will be afterward is our natural state that we return to which is likely more familiar to us than being in our present condition – a mind in a physical embodiment.

Since nobody knows for sure, it is not worth thinking about too hard except to know that birth is a terminal condition. We are all on the way to dead. This being a known certainty, we all need to accept it and plan on it. But, we are alive at this moment so let’s make the best of it.

We are all on a big camping adventure. At some point we all have to put out the campfire, fold up our tent, pick up our trash and leave no trace behind except our footprints so the next campers can enjoy our spot.

Something in us assumes we will live forever so probably we do in some way or other or some part of us does. We have always been here, and we will always be here. So, what are the implications of that? Does that change one’s approach to how to go about living? It does for me.

Let us assume (I do anyway) that everything up to this point is as reasonable a view of the universe as any: there is one Entity of which we are a part. That Entity is living through each of us whether we know it or not. We are It, It is us and it is beyond any of us. We are all one thing together. Unless we have a direct encounter with our foundational state of being that gives us a direct personal mind-blowing experience, whatever we know is all speculation, hearsay and assumption. This being the case for most of us, then to make the above assumptions are as reasonable a way to look at ourselves and the world around us as any other and maybe a lot better than most.

So this is my personal basis of how I think about Post Dogmatism - at least for myself. Every other post dogmatist will have a completely different view based on their own experiences in life and this is based on our general idea of a holographic bureaucracy where each member is the whole group from a specific viewpoint. Hence, the Standard Disclaimer.

Thanks for reading. This is a completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books and/or become a paid subscriber

Please leave a comment.

For a general introduction to the International Post Dogmatist Group see: postdogmatist.com

The fact that my title includes ‘Post Dogmatist’, I am required here to first include the Post Dogmatist Standard Disclaimer

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

As with all philosophers throughout history, everything I am about to say is speculative tarradiddle. I am going to say all these things in language which, by its very nature is a completely unsuitable way to explore the issue at hand. I am an artist and do have a Ph. D in philosophy, but it is self-conferred from Fluxus Institute since I am the founder so take that for what it is worth.  I also have a widely unrecognized, self-conferred PDPhD in Post Dogmatism. So, you can call me Doc Touchon if you like.

First off, I have no recollection of having been born. I accept that the woman who raised me is my mother and her assertion that she is. I did meet a Sufi one time at a retreat who remembers not only being born but also of being conscious while in the womb. She had a photographic memory and remembered every detail of her life. I found this to be quite astounding as I cannot remember most of yesterday. I am not sure I would want to recall such things so, that is possibly why I don’t. Perhaps this is a sign of lacking internal fortitude on my part or perhaps she was a buddha.

I have had several internal experiences that are at the root of my philosophical point of view. I will begin with the most basic insight. The universe is a single living Entity and/or a living expression of a single living Entity. This Entity may or may not live within and beyond the observable universe, but I would also say we humans, looking outwardly, have no idea what the universe is or what it consists of nor whether there is one universe or many. If many, there are infinite numbers of them. Everything that exists does so as a part of an infinite expanse. Infinitely small, infinitely large, infinitely inward, infinitely outward and is beyond the capacity of human imagination.

This one Entity has expressed itself through all things in the only way that it can, as infinitely unique things. This uniqueness of all things is the stamp of authenticity; the proof of the singularity of being. Further, all things are a part of this one Entity and hence only identifiable as the one thing itself. Yet neither is any one thing the one Entity except for itself nor are all things together the one Entity. Should all things perish the one Entity remains Itself just as it was prior to anything having come to be or after all has passed away. It could be said that the one Entity is alone, has always been alone and shall forever be alone and yet dreams of being many through the endless expanse of all things through all time and across all space. All time is one time, all space, one space. All moments in time and all points in space extend infinitely in all directions simultaneously and all is exactly right here and right now. There is nothing more ancient than the present moment which has existed since the beginning of time. Or perhaps there was no beginning, and perhaps there is no time or perhaps things are continually flickering in and out of existence.

The sense of uniqueness and individuality in beings, where that sense exists, is a reflection of the singleness and oneness of the one and only living Entity. Nothing can escape it, there is nothing outside of it. It alone exists and there is nothing else. To the extent that any of us exists, we exist only as an ephemeral figment of imagination of this one Entity.

Quite possibly the One Being is selfless and, without self, cannot be self-aware yet is aware, is consciousness. It could be said that the manifest universe as we experience it is a process of creating endless individuated, localized points of self-consciousness – apparatus for the creation and apprehension of phenomena.

This is a brief and incomplete explanation of the foundation upon which my further philosophical thoughts are based. Given what I have said so far, it is obviously complete folly to bother with continuing as anyone who reads this is, like me, the Entity dreaming it is you. So I am just talking to myself in the end.

Thanks for reading. This is a completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books and/or become a paid subscriber

Let me know what you think, comment below.

I am creating a separate section for paid subscribers of the Touchonian dedicated to Post-Dogmatism. I hope you enjoy.

Post-Dogmatism, as an art movement has no official art style, all art styles are appendages of Post-Dogmatist expression. Post-Dogmatism is all-inclusive, self-validating, and profound beyond definition. Post-Dogmatism stands at the threshold between the infinite potential of reality and the expressions of human consciousness. As such, it is continually self-generating, self-harmonizing, self affirming, self-expressing, self-defining and self-evident. 

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