Half a Fish in Oil, w. Thoughts

I am back into painting oils, knock wood, after a five year hiatus from the sticky yucky slimy slowy-as-snails progress. It is a way to restore your humanity (or at least to see if there’s anything left).

While painting on this, I made a little note:

How different isn’t the trad. painter’s mindset from the industrial one! “We have All Day and we’ll go on ‘til this is looking Good.”

One can hardly imagine a sentiment less compatible with the world that we live in.

If you really want to enslave a people, kill their imagination, remove their leisure calm and creativity. They will then always regress into what was before, tyrannise themselves.

Parenthesis: Involuntarily, my mind returns to this poor little country where actual work, meaningful and fulfilling, might even get regarded with suspicion due to those qualities. (The psychology behind this is all too easy to unmask.) This is what comes of freeing slaves but letting the chains in their minds remain. I am now referring to the main colony that Sweden ever had: Sweden itself. But I digress. Go out and enjoy the summer, stop thinking. End.

Is there any way out? Asking not only for Sweden: Can we all rise? I don’t think that an elite of intellectuals or certain workers or whatevers will do; not in a society that hitherto has made a habit of elevating the least original, the trite, the worst…

This time, there can be no castes. *
With this, I’ll go back to my sticky yucky slimy slowy-as-snails progress, not feeling as industrious as my friendly companions in the garden; the happily buzzing bees.

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*It’s something that one can hear during certain demos; “Nobody is Free Until Everybody’s Free”, but if you then look behind and see who is allowed to be “everybody” and who isn’t, you realise…

Post Turtle

My favourite English proverb: “When you see a turtle balanced on a fence post,
you know that it didn’t get there by itself.”

I made the mistake of watching two documentaries yesterday (or “yesternight”; couldn’t sleep) and both were about musicians/artists that made it very well in this world. As it would happen, these very two cases deserved all success that they could get… but that’s not quite the point! Correlation does not imply causation. Not even deserved correlation. These two people were humble enough to be forgiven; one tries to hate the system rather than people. They’re such fine turtles!
(Cont. below)

But now, if we’re not to hate people with the “unearned luck” (as Puch put it) (the success was earned, the luck to succeed was not! See the difference?) who are we then to blame?

“Perhaps genius is by no means so rare: but rather the five hundred hands which it requires in order to tyrannize over the ‘the right time’ —in order to seize the moment!” --- quoth the philosopher.* Or in other words, as they say in movies:
“Make it look like an accident.”
The victorious just happened to fall downstairs into fame…
It would be funny someday to see those who arrange such little neat accidents, the professional turtle posters worldwide. See how they reason, how they decide who ‘s to elevate and who ‘s to fail. By what means they justify playing God together.
Not that it would change things in the slightest - - -

The other day I had the opportunity to talk to a fellow cultural worker in even greater despair than me. He does not understand why he isn’t getting anywhere with his poetry (which is at best average, but that’s still not the point!) won’t get that the world is inherently unfair.

Every day when we creatives manage to be creative despite the lay of the land is a victory!
- - - That was all that I could give him as an answer.
And I realised: There is but one thing worse than understanding how terrible this world is. And that is, not understanding it… but suffering in it anyway.
There truly are degrees in Hell.

---

*Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §274.

PS. I didn’t get anything posted at the end of last month, as I wanted. Boohoo. It was quite exhausting. I made two CD-jackets, taxation (end report for 2023, building on debit and credit down to the last comma) and dealing with the abyss of life in general… I hope that May will be nicer to me. But now I thought that I had rather wait until I actually had something to say. Peace.