The Politics of Joy
This image is stolen from the playlist “Dog Days Miasma” which can be found here: https://8tracks.com/al-dla/dog-day-miasma.
I always loved the word miasma, it reminds me of the swirling rainbows created when the light hits a puddle of oil on pavement, a specific sort of unnatural and common beauty. Just think of all the steps humanity has taken to create the abject horror that is a petroleum puddle on blacktop, and how exquisite that the sun collaborates with the child to reveal that even here, magic can be found.
“Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ ”
— Toni Morrison
The process of making art is essentially the process of making a series of decisions.
What size will the piece be? What materials? What colors? What is the content of the image, will it be recognizable or open to interpretation?
Sometimes you start out with a clear vision, and your role as the artist is to clear away everything that is not the piece, as though it already existed, and you are an archaeologist who has come back across it, abandoned to the forces of time and the material world, reclaiming it and giving it a new home in this current moment.
Sometimes you just have an impulse to make, so you start making and you keep making until the impulse is gone, like a 3D printer possessed by a mystic, or an errant current: the process additive, generative, but rudderless. Or perhaps the rudder is just hidden, unknown even to the boat itself.
A love of, or even a tolerance for, the status quo breeds inaction. We humans are not standing on solid ground, but floating in a stream. To pause is to drift, to let yourself be led, and fighting that current is exhausting, and so most do not. Anyone who is capable of floating tends to do so.
Why create? The criticism is rooted in the same faulty logic as the pet argument “who would bring a new person into this world, full as it is of suffering and man’s inhumanity to man?” As though children, even the very best ones, won’t be little shits sometimes. As though villains, even the worst ones, contain no potential for redemption, perform no accidental kindness, have no favorites, protect nothing, hold not even at the very least themselves sacred.
It supposes inaction to be a safe, neutral space. As though there was an “outside.” The truth is that inaction is itself an action, a decision, a vote for normalcy.
And what has been revealed most to me throughout this pandemic is just who was most comfortable floating, because they are screaming loudest, they are insisting that we must maintain the illusion of the world we had before. But those who had trained for the speeding current by swimming even before they had to are able now to choose their direction. To recognize that they have a choice.
I keep thinking that all visions are delusions until they are made manifest. To this end, I want to reaffirm my commitment to multiplying joy, to producing and even commodifying it (as that is what makes the process sustainable: the pulling in of resources and the pushing out, money like water, like breath) to crafting desirable images and objects, both physical and virtual, to building a life that is fractal: self similar at every scale. I want each moment to be filled with the awe of true beauty, not some soft, fluffy, fake quaint stuff, but the hard-wrought and sought after kind, the kind that rises like smoke from the rubble of our suffering and reveals the air to be a psychedelic miasma, the kind that, when you grasp it, cracks over your head like stubborn, glaring sunshine at a funeral. True, incomprehensible, almost cruel beauty that insists on itself, dispelling arguments that conscious living is an impossible endeavor by merely continuing to exist.
Warhol said a good business is the best art, and I think about that now as I approach this overwhelming set of tasks the way I would approach my artistic processes: with my focus fixed on manifesting my vision, with ears, eyes, and heart open to receive challenges to my thinking, and with the exuberance of a human realizing her dreams, daring to speak about them in the middle of our collective nightmare.
Art is never its own end; it does not come from nowhere, it does not stay where you leave it. Your decisions do not exist in a void, you are impacted by your context, and you shape the landscape of those around you by your mere existence. But responsibility is not a lamentable predicament; it is yours even if you shun it, even if you close your eyes tight against it, even if you see a swirling rainbow and think about oil and decide you are powerless. However, you have the choice to see it as a rainbow, to shudder at the heartbreak of the situations you have been presented with, and still choose to embrace the awe-inspiring beauty.
*Note to the reader: I wrote the first draft of this post in August 2020, when I registered happywonderfool as a business, and have returned to it over and over the past 2 years, especially as I made the decision to further codify my design knowledge with a degree in User Experience Design. Every time I read it I’m left feeling a little more bold, and I publish it now in the hope that you, too, might read it and feel that boldness too, to pursue your own delusions and to make them manifest.