Letter to a Mentor

Well, well, well – so you reappear. A voice from the wilderness, replete with quotes and references, interspersed with personal observation and gentle rebuttals. Reminds me of . . . myself! Except for the “gentle” part, of course.
My grandmother, rest her soul, used to refer to me as an “againster.” And so I am – and I will, once again, aspire to this designation in this, my response to your most recent response to my work.
From the top:
I was honored that you would think I might enclose a singular body part in my packet, which would be, given the size of the shipping tube that I sent you, something of a size between the forearm and a penis. Needless to say, I enclosed no such thing – simply an installation version of my current painting series. Let me add that including a body part in this submission might be shocking to you, but artistically it would be trite. And I do my best to stay away from being “trite.” So, no need to worry – maybe a dildo or a rubber chicken, but no live body parts on the way. (Not to say that dildos and rubber chickens aren’t trite, just that they are a lot less painful. And I am a coward when it comes to physical pain . . .)
Now, ritual. Here is what I think of ritual, which makes it difficult for me to think in terms of using it for artistic purposes:

“When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.” (Lao Tzu)

Of course, when your friend says, “Desire for ritual comes with the absence of moral guidance,” he is just paraphrasing my dear old friend, Lao. The thing about ritual is that it offers the participant the opportunity to shut off their highest sentient aspects – and dissolve themselves into the known. For personal, meditative transformation, this might have real meaning. The chanting of a mantra; the sense of belonging when participating in religious ritual, the feeling of solidity that one gets from participating in the known, over and over again. But for the majority of people, ritual just represents another manner of abdicating personal responsibility, sinking from realm of possibility into normalcy.
Ultimately, ritual allows people not to think, but to become part of Kierkegaard’s process of “leveling,” which, as Thomas Merton noted:

“is that by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind. Because he identifies with this abstractions with objective reality, or simply with the ‘Truth,’ he abdicates his own experience and intuition.”

Ritual is the very manifestation of this “vast emptiness of a public mind,” and the surest way to achieve it. Ritual, you see, draws the individual into a public agreement, and this is diametrically (and diabolically) opposed to individual realization, transformation and the severing of the personal from the public mind.
I believe more in the words of Simone Weil, who said:

“If our present suffering ever leads to a revival, this will not be brought about by slogans (or imposition), but in silence and moral loneliness, through pain, misery and terror, in the profoundest depths of each man’s spirit.”

See? Do you get it?

"Into the Singularity" (installation view). acrylic, ink & collage on canvas, 6' x 72', 2006

I want an art that will not only inspire “silence and moral loneliness,” the real land of transformation, but also inspire in the viewer, the courage to face this desolate horror. With a series of paintings like those of which we are talking, the black and white “In the Garden of the Mystical Redoubt” pieces, I am trying to ally myself philosophically with the sense of terror that a true mystical path engenders in most people – and point a way out, back to a profound belief not in ritual, but in personal action pointed towards making the world a better place, towards transformation of our public square.
How this all jibes with my Christmas homeless project, I can’t really say. Each individual undertaking of mine, from the homeless project to the Human Rights Painting Project to Shalom/Salaam has a different set of demands, expectations and limits as to what it can and cannot do, as far as the creator (moi) is concerned. I could devote my life to any one of these projects, but I find the place where the most is squeezed out of the project for the least amount of energy (though this might be quite a bit of energy, it is the least necessary for the particular project) and then leave it at that. To transform the homeless project would be to make of myself a social worker, and I will not do that. Nor will I devote my creative abilities to solving the homeless problem in the United States. Mitch Snyder already tried that and he is now dead and gone because of it.
You go on to propose that ritual can help “re-order” the status – but this doesn’t represent “transformation” for me. It is just a reshuffling of the cards – and let’s not forget the end of Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” when the more things had changed, the more they stayed the same.
We are all – all 6 billion of us – susceptible to the very same need for power, hence “reordering the status” of earth’s inhabitants will do nothing to stem the noxious tide of our collective illness. Transformation through ritual is impossible; my role, as a shamanic priest, is to reach into the society not with an “us and them” proposition, but simply an “us” response, not standing in opposition to anything, nor utilizing the horrors of ritual towards any “end,” but simply to stand for peace and understanding, in specific manners, addressing particular aspects of the manifestation of human illness (i.e., human rights violations, Jewish/Muslim hatred, the lie that sits like a black hole at the core of every religion etc.)
That’s it. I’m out --