Freud - Nietzsche - Beautiful Advice

Compassion counters cruelty, and both oppose indifference.


In this way, art, no matter its aesthetics, is opposed to indifference first. This is both the indifference of the depicted as it is the –potential –indifference of the audience.

Indifference regarding what? The “benign indifference of the universe” (Camus)?

Tan Lin once told me (while I was driving him to the Columbus airport) he was pursuing a poetics of boredom. I’ve been turning that over in my head for over a decade now, without much to show for it. Is boredom opposed to indifference? Is “boredom” something one can even work with? If one is productive in using boredom as a goal, is one then really using boredom? This continues to trouble and interest me.

Indifference to the collective, the condition of being with the world. For me, this is the primary indifference that art can address. To find meditative space within the inevitable.

“Desperate, but not serious,” as Adam Ant would have it.

Nietzsche was wrong in so many ways as to be nearly useless—most notably (outside of his use of masculine/feminine and Christian/Jewish dichotomies) is his view of the struggle of the artist in bending materials to his/her will. One can quickly see the implications of where this leads. Flip the idea though, and there’s a much more interesting, to me, economy: what of the conception of the artist as one who is in deep sympathy with her/his materials? Must it be a contest, or can it be affection? Of course it can, and Nietzsche was a political and sexual mess.

Imagism quickly found the limits of objectivity. Objectivism built an apartment complex there.

Art is the continual debate, the always opening question that cannot close, between certainty and doubt. They are the propelling forces through the work of art.

Art is a (not the) function of illusions. It becomes evidence in the series of monologues we have with ourselves and others. We place art on book jackets, we play it at occasions, we quote from it to give our ideas a push-off from shore.

As literary texts can be associated with the workings of the imagination and of dreams (Freud), so too, then, only the dreamer can illuminate the dream—creating an always receding “meaning” —but as an audience can always (in the present tense) participate with art, can be in sympathy with it, so too can this audience dream along and illuminate the artwork.

Art is only communal in this secondary way. A “talking about.”

Where art manifests as communal at the outset, as its primary instance, it is propagandistic.

I blame Freud, first, for the idea so many have that art is performed like a puzzle, and that through interpretation lies the puzzle’s “solution.” This is just another version of “The Will to Power” that leads to a (wherein I get to blame Nietzsche, again) retreat from sympathy.

A compassion, rather than a cruelty, that counters indifference.

Or, here’s another way of saying it (as an email that sympathetically avoided my junk folder):


-----Forwarded Message-----


From: nkjtomo@hotmail.com
To: jjgalgo@hotmail.com
Subject: Re:
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:12:18 +0000

hi, i saw your photo on that site.. ( i think your cute) anyhow id love to chat with you sometime on windows live messenger my name there is madison20lix@hotmail.com add me i'll be online for most of the holidays.. talk to you soon

Madison xoxo

with all the curiosities I observed, being studious of brevity.
praise the Lord!!

master, assists in teaching him. The language described. all which acquirements, I should be a living treasure of then turned the light on the derelict and kept it there.


-----Original Message-----


From: Madison
To: You
Sent: Wed, Dec 8, 2010 4:55 pm
Subject: Fw: Fwd: Fw: Fwd: Fw: Beautiful Advice


We must keep one another strong for what is before us. We have a cruel contemptible, and helpless an animal was man in his own nature; worth, and their bodies left to be devoured by dogs and birds of And often, I've been told, not even to her. I felt it very improper, for you can't go on for some years