Semi-Conscience

Semi-Conscience

All art is collaborative, even when it doesn’t seem so….

Often, if not necessarily always, in artistic collaboration,

There is a struggle of temperaments, visions or ideologies.

Sometimes it comes as anger, other times as music.

May you have a moment of ideological clarity

And fall back into the reality of the private ghetto

Of the bourgeois creations your editors shaped for you?

And not merely in writing, or performing

The Apollonian fetish, the stoic creation of sublime objects?

There is more of a glut of that than ever

And it’s not beautiful to you

Because it has the wrong politics, and vice versa

And beauty is never a purely aesthetic issue.

True. Some say, “It’s bad for my soul, my health, my survival,

But it’ beautiful!” Or, “Okay, it’s ugly. But I love it

And get along better with it than all your so-called beauty.”

And have you accomplished anything of lasting,

Useful, collective (even revolutionary) value in your “art identity?”