Artists and Lovers

Are you ready to try a little leap?

All the writing in the world is probably to prevent us going insane from all that wind, thoses waves, the rain. They say that when a person is ready for a relationship that is only about love (not life) and they meet another complete person, the “talking to” will cease, and become a talking “with”. You are synched up by the wind, the rain, the sun, the moon, the stars. Or so they should say.

So little needs to be said if you ask yourself.

Carl Gustav Carus, Tintern Abbey.

All that painting that is done prooves time and again to be only about extending your life before the insanity catches up with you.
Whether you shoot yourself or are pestered to death: it comes down to the same end of the chase. You may live it up, but then you die anyway in the arms of fear. I've studied it in hundreds of cases.

A surprising number of great and very robust and resourceful painters died, terrified of dying, a laboured death. Their art prooved to be therapy. Their anxieties were little abated, but their legacy is there to help us become more complete. If we let artists become extinct before they have evolved us into the next species, we have a problem, Houston.

Carl Gustav Carus - Blick auf Dresden bei Sonnenuntergang

As we are born, so we are born into life after death. You only have a short life time to change anything about that.

The life-artists who labour for love lie few and far between. They might be dock-workers or miners. They might hunt witchetty grubs or keep bees. They could be amongst our librarians or any of our libraries’ members. They could have their work hanging or shining (Eliasson’s Weather Project) in the Tate Modern.

Eliasson, 2003

Most of us are Hamparte (get to know Antonio García Villarán– and his other-worldly cats – if you want to freshen up your look on art).

Hamparte: El arte de no tener talento.

. . . la conjunción de Hampa – conjunto de maleantes, especialmente de los organizados en bandas y con normas de conductas particulares – y Arte. más aqui

Mind: this Weather Project above is NOT an example of Hamparte, but it is sublime.

Carl Gustav Carus - Stone Age Mound

We seem to be under the false impression that we don’t need any talent for love. Practice, lessons, experience, maybe. But I say, no amount of trying is going to get you there. You always have to fall or step or sink into it and it will always depend on your talent for taking it from there. In that sense, one is a natural born lover or not. Of course, this being a god-made talent given to us all, we all are! (If it is not then at the same time impaired by some evil. . . .) But who believes any of that?

It is always a crater that you are asked to step up to and stand on the ledge of for a bit, to wait for that, yes, I do, before you take the leap of faith.

Caspar David Friedrich , Das Große Gehege, 1832

Love without commitment is a box of choclates. Love without faith a bunch of roses. Cheap talk. And this is not in the vein of romantic drivel. I mean love here in its broadest understanding, on your cabbage patch, in the laundrette, at the kitchen sink, in your milking shed, in your slaughter house (hmm…); as an intransitive but hyper-active verb. Like “to play tennis” or “to sit”, “to eat”, even “to fuck” (excusez le mot très necessaire); of which to sit is, perhaps, the most hyper verb, wilful over all other willing, ask any yogi. It is a doing that asks you to ramp up your will power into fifth or seventh or if you’re a cyclist 32x34th gear.

But then, this is more Good News?! (and what's so new that it is worth posting on that?) Am I underlining the realisation that we may have slackened a bit on the love-front, and have only 400 whales remaining to count for it, and we may have lost a few environmental activists in the Phillippines on the way (on average 35 murdered each year) but love soon may be trending and it will save the world just in time!? Ehm, no, I do not come bearing such tidy tidings.

It would be nice, if we could see, If only we looked a little more closely, how everybody is loving something or someone all the time. But it is not quite the case. Would it that it were, meine Freunde, that simple. Nope, that's basically all greed. In love we want nothing, which takes a lot of wanting. It is almost permanently nauseating, a continuous birthing. It wants no delivery: it is to be in the birth canal. But first you have to get there and endure the twangs to your gastrocnemius and the wobbles of your vastus medialis (that ledge, recall?). But getting there takes a lot of wanting to; and what do we know about wanting so far? Mummy may I have an ice cream, and can I have dat big elephant over dere?

Caspar David Friedrich, Junotempel in Agrigent,1830

Love is freedom in the making, so not granted but grasped by its horns or tail or whatever bit you can manage to grip in your lunge at that to which you hope to make it stick. Freedom has to be anchored, or it will float off like a little balloon …

If you are the more organised and planning type, I’m sorry to advise, you are going to have to learn to play, and tie yourself in elastic knots, first. You can’t expect to approach it with some thought and personal aspiration, not in the beginning. (That’s Master Plan Designer-level - available to all, but you're going to have to put the work in.) As a novice you won’t ever find it if you never take some leaps like a barmy cub.

Now, go out and play. Be off with you!

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• For a useful chronological overview of Friedrich's work.
  Now what are all these German Romantic works of art doing in this post? Ah. I am afraid I have happened to fall in love yesterday. Just the ordinary thrills and spills type. I discovered a novella by Rascha Peper.