[The Exterminating Dream IV] The Starving Artist

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]



A pen, a pad and a dream; that's all the starving artist truly has, colossal haunting, evaporation into reality. Malevolent lassitude are frequent, sporadic bouts of nostalgia; they want to reconcile, they want reckonings, but art has become their predominant, has become predominant, superimposed itself as the vessel in which to channel their self-loathing, they, the vassal to shifting identity. Art is the thing of immortality, the road to immortality, time seems limited, because when one charts their inner darkness, they become not only aware of their impending demise, they can feel it.

They cannot create if they don't eat, or they don't eat if they don't create. Money is borrowed, then given away, always on the verge of utter collapse, their soul is a devouring force inasmuch it cannot devour itself- it burrows, deeper into the abyss of the body, refuses to resurfaces and enrages every sense without fail.

Their life has nothing to do with the scientific method; there is no controlled variables, more over, there is no control. Chaos is so frequent that in time, it becomes mastered, expected, commonplace, a tantamount, their equal. Lovers are transitory in their transitory homes. A few books, a desk, a pen, a pad and a dream- that is what makes it a home and if they fail to feel the comforts of homes, it is when the dream has called upon them to move, to another flat, into the arms of another lover, closer to an immuno-compromised fiction; there is not only a refusal to live anyway else, it is the incapability. Text is started, then abandoned, volumes of poetry are composed, then burned; the philosophical means to become a victim has thus far failed to rear its decapitated head; the void has become immense, vast, finite, a desert's sandstorm that continues its migration over the lush Savannah. Everything alive becomes endangered, Autumn is the only season that becomes the death of things, of all, the earth will soon become a desolate world, a fiber, a fabric of evolution brought to a standstill.

The horizon never stops receding and pain is forever unraveling in the disposition, the inherent, as the dream they dream is the same as when they were fetuses in utero; the juxtaposition to nothing, to no other man, in the sense of a scattered intellect, asymmetrically astute. The only genius is the possession of genius, an unmastered essential that drives man first to success, then infamy, then an indigent death.

There is a pen, a pad, a dream; religion is partially abandoned, if not, completely, family has fled and if they are still present, they are gone. Medicinal cures, psychiatric wards, sanatoriums have been built to house this askew visionary, yet chased to the ends of the earth, launching their words and art into the wind just before the plunge off the edges.

[Woman of the Earth] a prose

If woman is not on this earth, then it will be no more and every woman after, will be lost, find herself afloat, aghast, marooned and never find herself, even that woman who has left the earth.

In the body's space, time is inalienable, even frightening; her eyes will open to desolation, see nothing and feel joy, joy to have come into a new age, build a tower identical to Babel and see the vastness of the emptied world. It is then she'll begin her descent from the tower, open her womb to repopulate the earth with the asexual fissures negated by the push/pull of gravity, allow her hand to move in great gesture, in great length without broken sequence. She will dance in a motion unbroken by the interruption. The distance between herself and ignorance will never exist.

And in this new land, she will exit by desire, a virtuous will be  and not become, falter and fix herself only on self-titillation and orgasmic birth. The tale then would be never-ending, the gesture finite, the loins regenerated.

In her singularity, a single constant will persevere, only a single, and in that constant, with her eyes to the new world, she stands, high and tall, in a terrain invented by her mind, a landscape not of abstract but of nowhere. Time passes alongside her, the flare of life subsides in that life and if not, it is because she has become unwilling to risk her life.

In the beginning of nothing, there is too a mind apart from this new world, given only over to the presence, the future may never come to pass but it isn't a thought that occupies her, only fruitful reproduction of the likeness of her, created in her image, from her rib, her flesh, her mind, her heart. She is privy not to the limits which the mythical man has succumb to, she concerns herself not  with his past, nor consorts with time in the sense that it is her deity..

The only limit she may find is the limitations of self- with discomfort, discombobulation, comes again the earth anew. With each phenomena, there comes void, a break in time, in space, where the will of things may arrive timely, fashionably lethal and if the world is to end, it ends because it has in her.

There is then immobility, a reckoning of what is and an ignorance of what is not until it in itself occurs naturally from the kernel of the earth itself. She may wander of the spring and wander onto the equator, lose the northern lights and great northern brights and come into the southern hemisphere and as she roams, the world inside of her begins to renew itself in lapse and cycle.

She finds the end of the earth but there is no leap into darkness; light is much too alluring for her, more than coexistence that bolts the door to the new world she is bound to discover.

But she moves against gravity, in alacrity- to be, she must seek what she knows is something that is unknown to her and in that process, she finds the fever to be, finds that she is the epicenter of the process of becoming, that she exists.

Her portrait painted, masterpiece before there was perspective- she is born as a woman and births woman. There lives no period of the infantile for she was set on the earth already upright and all beneath her feet on unbroken realm of latitudes stretching deep into the oasis, deep into the abysmal space.

The sojourn, however fruitful, is fruitless, in paradox of her body that sees vision inasmuch limit has and cannot be reached. Only within her can she meet such limits and if she does, she'll walk till she is again anew. Death comes not. The end comes not.

Within the womb is she , inside of her womb, the woman, in amniotic stroke, moves with purpose through a stagnant Lethe, quieted for her very endeavor.

Understand that she is the world, the earth anew, the world in her womb creates a depth that lives, there and as apart of her, knows no limits.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The Predominance of Art] a byline

It is not necessary for someone to have to know all of the world to despise it. All the entirety of the world can never be fully known by a single individual; it is with academics, travel, empirical research, all fiber-optically connected and thus the world seems to come into focus. The focus is but a caricature; one has to see every space of the world in time space to fully and truly know it- anything less, distaste or love for the world is all distortion predicated on a fragile strand of knowledge.

The world I know is the one inside of me and the one I wish to embrace. Along every shore of Madison lives the fossil of my footsteps, where Otis Redding once plunged to his death, swept away only by immense pressure of carbon. Only from a crisp and deep breeze that seems to dissect my bare skin is my presence reassured; I too am here.

The origin of the world is the origin of the individual, and lost upon the world which is split wide by the individual, is individuation. Becoming, I make of the world a smaller place, by shrinking it, it will someday be fully in my hands, as clay to mold, "the thinker" of Rodin. The ghost is given to uncertainty and an uncertain world, the haunt to the dream that never comes when I am asleep but only when I am awake, my eyes open, rational. Love is temporary derangement; I am always in love.

Of this love, of this infatuation, that is not of bodily form, is the only, for the love in human form has come long ago and gone long before and art, that decay that will dissect the cerebral formation of logic, bares itself down in haven to never again be removed.

Art is a constant; it lives when all else dies, it remains when everyone has left, it reciprocates when it knows it has complete devotion as a jealous god. Prayer is knowledge, prayer is lyrical formation, linguistic variation, self-expression, artistic absorption, and when all is said and one, art gives you a legacy of a thousand years and a death of a thousand occurrences.

Locking oneself up away from the world doesn't mean its cruelties have subsided, just that it has created another guise to hurt you. By forcing one into silence, into seclusion, it builds the walls that one believes they have chosen to hide in, it beats on the walls in the nights as a demonic presence and soon, it creates the doppelganger outside of the mirror and the omen that is insanity cradles you until that final sleep is about. Emily Dickinson accomplished nothing from seclusion, only the lost days that Walden found. His seclusion was bliss, Dickinson's despair, Chagall's prayer, St. Vincent Millay's seduction. One can only delay their deterioration by refusing to "go quietly into that good night," with seclusion comes defeat, with the artist, seclusion brings one to be twice defeated inasmuch art, there lives no triumph of the individual over art, for the individual is a byproduct of art as sulfites from fermentation.

If there is anything of self that is lost, it is only lost because it has been given up freely, without the battle to possess. The celebrity who hires the ghost writer to produce art in silence cheapens art, the ghost writer, by becoming and accepting the fate of the "ghost," cheapens themselves, the plagiaristic possess no genius nor is possessed by it and therefore must heist art, the singer whose songs are written in their stead is only a marionette on strings being pulled, toggled and turned to a virtue to be forgotten upon their fading. Art is only obtainable by suffering, not by pure fantasy or ideal, not by networking or collaboration, but by the broken body in the dungeon with only a spec of light invading the darkness. That single being of light causes the mock-artist to scream for others to aid them up; the artist writes of its being in poetry, in prose, in essay, in pamplistic novellas, paint its caricature on the walls. That light is what the artist has to hold on to, more would only expose wounds long before they are ready to be exposed to the thin air, to the awaiting pathogens.

Something awaits to be released in the aura of creativity, a story held from humanity far too long. A story is told behind "Saturn" devouring his child, Eiffel's rise over Paris and the Seine, the Golden Gate and its tomb of fallen steelmasters, the improvisation that iconolized Isadora Duncan and Miles Davis, the longings in the songs of Edith Piaf, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Saisons of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The story is the appalling spectre, the allure of this spectre where one takes upon themselves at the tomb of the fallen before them. The decadence of the artist is the likeness of the decay of their person; the two can only coexists so long before one is led to the plunge of death. Because art is timeless, limitless, finite, its immortalization is predominant as opposed to the human body that eventually, even at the lifelong absence of putrefaction, meets the Hayflick Limit.

I submit that for every Picasso that has lived, so has there been a Fante, for every Hemingway, a Kerouac, for every Fontaine, a Segarre, for every Frost, a Celan, for every Portman there is a Huppert, every Formiga, a Sedgewick. Art advertised only brings more fame, more fortune but art in itself is, it is dispassionate, one study no more suffered than another. The art thief is the only one seems to be getting out of his obsession what he has put it, by stealing art and laundering it through the black market, he makes it accessible to anyone with the currency or inclination to purchase it. By doing so, and only by this, art truly gains value, recognition, mysterious allure. By leaving its mainstream, visual accessibility from the curators aegis, it becomes bygone and in art, more often then not, posthumous recognition follows.

In the pertinence of the absentee father and the derelict mother, the artist is then an artist, for discordancy may hold importance but it must, in the  face of the embrace of new ideal, be relinquished without caution. The only descendants of the artist is art itself, the dominant gene that imbues the self-destructive mechanism. This self-destruction is measured only by the activity of the artist. Publish or perish, produce or be reduced; the moment the unknown artist sits idle, they are forgotten, the moment they naively choose to separate themselves from art, they descend into madness and narcissism.

Take the 1904 Opera version of [Madama Butterfly] by Giacomo Puccini that saw the tragic suicide of the heroine "butterfly" at her own hands for the love of a man, Pinkerton. From the beginning, butterfly, a 15 year old Japanese bride married by a lonely American Naval officer newly arrived in Japan, was a convenience until a proper American wife was found. In Japan at that time, a woman could be divorced if she was left-handed so it is not beyond any man's deceit to concoct reasoning for separation. Upon converting to Christianity and marrying Pinkerton, she is disowned by her family. After their wedding, Pinkerton departs for a length of three years. Everyone close to butterfly attempts to convince her that Pinkerton was never again to return, but because of her love, her devotion to him, she continues to wait, still sure of his eventual arrival. His return means more to her than just a wife awaiting a husband but of a mother awaiting the father of her child. Butterfly had become pregnant after their first night together and gave birth to a son while Pinkerton had been away. Butterfly awakes in an impossible position; Pinkerton has returned with his new American wife, Kate, who has agreed to raise the child. Butterfly agrees to give up her child if Pinkerton is to come and see her himself. Recognizing her ancestral gods in prayer, she puts the American flag into the hands of her son, blindfolds him and commits suicide. When Pinkerton runs in, he knows that he is much too late.

[Madama Butterfly] ends tragically, but only in the tragic predisposition. To me, the act of self-murder was the act of beauty, as Juliet for Romeo, as Abelard sacrifice for Heloise. Puccini's contribution was a magnanimous contribution to human glee. By recreating the tale of the greatest sacrifice for love, one's own life, there is a greatness engirdled in the marvel, and at time, tragic coexistence when love is a weak bond creating a carbon copy. Art by the production of Puccini is the sacrifice for love, in the harmonious chord of life, ended by the sword of that same volition to exist but not live.

Art creates the individual, decays the individual, else art decays.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The Film & its Double II]

 Mainstream film today can be said to have hit an impasse; that is, the cheap, careless, profit-hungry recreations overwhelmed with special effects and graphics as opposed to the depth of story and creation. A film loses its soul when an artless suit ahead of a studio company has the ability to alter a story line and thus spit in the face of art. A solid mainstream film is a far and between phenomena to encounter nowadays but in independent film, much is underrated and that much makes all the difference between a film and an imitation of it.

  To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it. This invention, as something viable, something effectively and vitally mechanically fixed, because ineffectual if tampered with, a liability bound to backfire and injure its user. It seems the art critic is the only species of humans aware of most of this, printing reviews that seemingly go unread, spouting monologues to closed ears in awe of diluted tales in which are not privy to the originals. It has be theorized that sequels endanger originals but it is only in modern film, where the sequels are forfeited their origin in place of blood, gore and predictable outrage and disaster, that originals are truly endangered of poor rewrites. It is not the filmmaker who must remain true to a promising tale but the audience must become more keen to demand that that very tale is given wholly, not just breadcrumbs swept to the floor.

An example of how the tale losses its purpose can be seen in the Grimm's tales; where Cinderella is seen as a beauty becoming, Snow White a woman waking to her dream, and Hansel and Gretel beating the odds through a dark, perilous and enchanted forest; Cinderella's sisters had their feet cut off to feet properly into set-sized shoes, Snow White was raped in her sleep by her royal lover and Hansel and Gretel were held captive by blind cannibals. In dilution we find treason, a mutiny, a lie served on a hot platter with cheap wine that gives us momentary thrills and blinding, regrettable headaches the morning after.

There most respectable thing about Rotten Tomatoes is their ranking of audience approval, giving voice to not only the film critic but the people, the consumers, the many who are pulled up by film trailers of upcoming major films, planning their lives around it. It is then recognized that if life is about seeking a happiness with the likeness of the womb, or effectively a "paper womb," they deserve to walk into a theatre and be pulled from reality, into art, return to reality with a greater idea of their life.

A film is meant to bring one closer to oneself, even in spite of self

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

[The Film & its Double] The Auteur + Truffaut's [The 400 Blows]

[The Film & its Double] The Auteur + Truffaut's "The 400 Blows"

 A film must be a balanced creation as the mind of the filmmaker/writer must be a terrible thing. Art is inspired by life all around us, by the very horrendous truth in dead sight in front of our eyes that we refused to see. It is those dreads, those joys, those dramatics that the filmmaker must exploit in a phosororescent manner, they must be willing to release all things that have found the charter outwards unafraid, apologize to none and leave an audience in utter awe.

The desires, the very fantasies of the filmmaker must not be purposely latent else to leave critics conflicted as to which face is the true. Aronfosky displayed his very fearlessness with the unfettered approach to his 2010 film "Black Swan," which was followed by controversy, and even though obscenity laws have been repelled in this country for over 40 years, "Black Swan" was released only in select theatres. But this modern-day obscenity end run did not dilute what Aronofsky wished to display, the tale he wished to tell. Aronfosky, after the release of "Black Swan" was no longer a filmmaker but an Auteur.

In the 1940's Francois Truffuat devised the "Auteur Theory" a theory in filmmaking in which the filmmaker is seen as the creative force in a motion picture. Jean Luc-Godard, along with Truffaut, followed the notion of the Auteur Theory, which in turn made them the greatest momentum of the French New Wave era. Because they were experimenting with a new art form and dismantling the art of their time to allow rebirth, obscure literature little known by the world or banned by the conservative suits of the modern nations, became their inspiration. In Truffaut's 1959 debut film "The 400 Blows," we saw the troubled adolescent Antoine Doinel (portrayed by Jean-Pierre Leaud) whose parents believed him to be atypical as does his schoolmaster. This leads to all odds against the youth, forcing him into a youthful rebellion of fleeing both home and school. After plagarizing Balzac, he is finally expelled from school for good. His theft of a typewriter and his guilt in trying to return it leads his stepfather to throw him to the police, where he is held in confinement with criminals elements of the Parisianne sort. While in custody, it comes to light that Antoine's father isn't his biological one, turning a tide of rebellion even further. When he is released, he plays football with a group of boys until he sees his opportunity to flee once again. Antoine makes his way to the ocean, where in the end, the camera catching his run and probably plunge into it.

The "400 Blows" was one of five semi-autobiographical films based on the life of Truffaut himself; troubled youth, kick out of school, his father not his biological, a known runaway. Truffaut drove the cadence of the film so much so he begin to relive the life he once lives as that youth portrayed by Jean Pierre Leaud, who Truffaut chose to continue to portray him in the following films.

There may have been a deep desire within Aronfsky, tragedy and brilliance meshed with beauty, to illicit not only an adaption of Tchaikovsky's "White Swan" but to bring to cinema a fundamental article of blood that made the fallen swan her hideous yet genius self. There were conflicts during the filming of "Black Swan" that Aronfosky himself resolved with his own resolve; he was incorrigible, refused to stray from a narrow path constructed by something he himself may not have know, or may never.

Films built from blood are rare in the mainstream; we see scenes wholly dramatic and the overcompensation of special effects as opposed to wholly psychological ones designed to not cater to an audience, or vaguely speak to an audience, but those meant to bring the audience to themselves.

May the Auteur's courage and wanderlust live forever

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[Synthesis of the Naked Body] a short story

Synthesis of the Naked Body

Nothing becomes unless it holds an underlining substance, marvel. A story that holds no moral, a novel with no plot; all predicates itself, its being and becoming on the subsidy of exhumation.

This occurs to me after I encounter by incidence a woman who comes simply to gratify her hunger. I dream then, dream instantly, fall back onto a solid cloud and take form of it.

-but even in this enchanted age, when we know the cruelties of love, it is sought as the darkness that conceals a hideous imp awaiting pounce. The temporary derangement of deep abysmal burrowing, I take to, without a moment's doubt, the bottom holds the hoard of impalement.

Her name was Alexie.

She has an inherent tan to her skin, a texture of exotic tint, her eyes were that of the most feminine feline, dark and haunting, piercing even, as though they could know sadness and glee interchangeable in one bat of the eye to the next. Her smile one must admit is a disarming one, becalming even the most raging sea. I could not recollect nor reckon in that moment, as I could not remember anything, as to when the last time a smile possessed me into reverie.

Who was this quintessential being of feminine being? Where had she derived and who was the man calm at rest every night who held her tightly?

She became the muse to a day that was museless, scarce and snowy and this man who spoke for her had suddenly become my arch nemesis who I'd gladly skin alive to be in his place next to her.

This is the subversive action, the opiate inhalation, laudanum ingestion, irrational deafness upon deft monotones, the laudatory monograph features upon the tongue ring for oral stimulus. The turn and smile as she walks away says that she too has taken on the rhythm of mystery, of curious arousal. The trial and error of which I desire to embark is the same odyssey undertaken by Miller and Nin, by Abelard and Heloise, a pretentious coitus interruptus upon the curvature of her spine.

Let it be known that this world is the womb and I, a fetus that must grow and develop gradually, consistently, else be engirdled in calcification as the lithopedian. Gladly I will surrender my growth in the Euclidean for the growth upon her flesh. Let it be known that I will rise upon her as the braille that will rise when first my fingertips sweeps against her skin as the sprinkle to the rising tide. Let it be known that I am another phalanges upon her, a parasitic twin with whom nourishes from the arteries, the veins, the capillaries, the sinuses of what she is to the dream. And of this dream, the unparalleled, asymmetric, askew, malformed, abstruse and obtuse meridian, she flutters with the black canaries into a desolate, glowing winter night where the trees lean wearily in their decrepit condemnation, their branches chafing broken sonnets, fallen hymns from bygone song. Therein obsession is a delirium of transitory genius, a beggar quoted by no one upon the abandoned and poverty-stricken earth. Let this dream relapse, reenact itself in a broken language, a cipher, trick of mind and light, a polyp in the fascia only removed upon the full step from this life. Let translation between she and I coexist with a vast electricity, until such times the lights burn bright, then out and all that is left is the synthesis of our naked body.

Dontrell Lovet't

The Triumph of the Individual Over Art

            Art exists only if one is not afraid to bleed for it; it’s a selfish devourer, as love. Photography, film, literature, sculpting all hold within its history artists who have seen only triumph in their careers, never over art itself. Modigliani asphyxiated, Tchaikovsky drank his own fate contaminated with cholera while Dylan Thomas just drank himself to death. Art is not a rival to one’s personal life because it is greater than one life.

            Even after life is over, an artists life is an unstable one, still haunting the pages of their last works carried on into the future by the stream of parallel inertia.  To all things outward, art will reign dominant, the ruins will outlive us all, the crater of our fall will remain stamped in the earth as monuments that will be visited and revisited for centuries to come.

            Death is no more the moment when one’s life comes to an end, one single moment. That one moment is feared by those held in captivity, fearful of what lies behind what is not seen, inasmuch the theory of what is not seen could bring about that moment. Art gives us the chance to live for the moment, to chance the height we can soar before we fall again back to the earth into our original chalked outlines. The fall is no merely a dispassionate accumulation, it is a gradual process; it takes its stand in space and budges only when we have tasted the earth. That taste, the clays of the earth, will be the end of all biographies and autobiographies.

Is it truly trivial that artists of today and of the past saw their deaths? Predicted their deaths? Saw the impending swing of the pendulum and refused to dodge it in a space so narrow that breathing itself had begun its inward decompression? Only those pierced by art will die of art, those bled dry of its prophecy, its proverbs, its poetics, its madness, only those who have gone around the world only to arrive at its tarmac. Man can be judged by his character, his momentum towards his own true disposition, his own reflection; if he chooses to ignore it, he only ignores what is viable, what is pivotal for him to survive his next endeavor to survive. Tortured self-doubt is the central image of one at their bare humanness and even in this humanness, art can derive from a molar pregnancy.

In the very search for self, the inward charter to truth, we can find an artist broken only by a self-imposing state of fragility.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[Where All the World Can be Witnessed] on van Gogh's [Cafe Terrace at Night]

Take this as an advisory note;
wake one morning, make no plans, gather only a pen and pad, walk outside, follow the crowds until you come to the first cafe you can find. Order yourself a Latte, or an Ice Coffee, or a Mocha Cappuccino whatever your fix of caffeine may be. Forfeit the inside seating and find yourself a nice comfortable table outside, pull out that pen and pad, allow your eyes to fix and adapt to the passing crowd and after a day's time, you'll see how sharpened yours senses become, how much more, or how much rather less, this human existence makes more, whilst simultaneously, makes less sense all the while.

Van Gogh, in all his terrible aloneness, sought nothing more beyond that moment where you are sitting. His mind riddled with an almost debilitating shyness, tertiary Syphilis and a cataclysmic mind feeding on itself as a cannibal, brush to canvas, view inside of eye, words only filtering within the conflict and confines of mind, the renown 20th century painter came of age truly when his shadow had become and would be the last company to truly know how the simple act of painting a Cafe Terrace, a place where the people who were always estranged to him gathered for small talk, the goings on about the town, speaking too, of the latest artist to drift into town, and the last one claimed by yesterday.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The City] Life & Identity

 A city is the reflection of the life it holds; Paris, New York City, Rome, Rio de Janiero, Chicago; denizens walking with manifest destinies, wandering, having spent their entire lives there still exploring roads they've been oblivious to.

The architecture is a direct result of the perspective of the artist who has come to the city, observed the intricacies of lifestyle, the influences and have built upon that very nature. Oswald Spengler once said that "The town that once upon a time humbly accommodated itself to that picture now insists that it shall be the same itself." The mirror of the city is provided by the poetics of the city, the tandem steps it takes to revolution, de-revolution, de-evolution and reconstruction. As the people evolve, the city evolves, new ideal painstakingly flickering with the induction of new denizens, new citizens, political, a-political, anti-political, the aspiring, the inspiring, the academics, autodidacts, the tradesmen, the broken, the flagellates, those looking to be redeem from what was lost before the efforts to flee.

The city is a poem; fragments of broken literature, animated words and schematics fluctuating bliss, joys, sadness and melancholy simultaneously. It's genetic code is not one known by man's applied science nor can it be predicted or predicated on theory alone, but waywardness, existentialism, nihilism and absurdism. The city only sacrifices those who have long before sacrificed themselves

Dontrell Lovet't

[The Seduction of Modigliani]

In a syphilitic night, where clouds erode the sky and opens it in a French fashion, nothing much is left to seize other than the thought. The stillness is a remnant of the erosion, all are temporarily dead to the world, or temporarily dying at the spearhead of coitus; in continuum, coitus is the formula that expressed the finite of the body, the gesture of the painter to imitate.

In every epoch, there is one who is determined to attain that prime existence of wander; it is in that, where he detaches himself from any culture, brings limit to that culture and attribute to its eventual decay, whilst still holding on to his forbearance as an heirloom. This brings us to the numbered days of Amedeo Modigliani, the conundrum of Leghorn devoured by the lights of Paris. An artist who immortalized Rapheal, it was in the language of art expression itself that gave outrage to the being of Modiglianni.

Rapheal divided mankind into three genres; those who suffer helplessly, those that dream confusedly and those that are entranced by supernatural things; but there is another, a fourth I believe, and that is the one who scours the dream only to squander it. Descartes was unknown to Modigliani and thus art was not the only that needed to be when all is forgotten and discarded for its sake. And on his death bed, he still proclaimed in the words "Cara, Cara Italia," his love for Italy and its entirety in his heart. Though  he left Italy, he was never a motherless child or one illegitimately concealed.

To live amongst the likes of Jacob, of Picasso, to survive the fledgling flourish of Parisienne aura, Modigliani arrived with Italy inside of him as a woman who carries the whole of the world within her. It was of the most pristine, the most Florentine Italy that the Italian-Jewish painter represented, the Venician Republic before it had been plundered and fallen under his fellow Italian countryman Napoleon in 1797, after one thousand years of independence. It was not the Italy brought by Chirico, nurtured by Greek myth and German philosophy, it was a portraiture of his own reflection.

The cubist were intent, driven to reduce the human and its form to a simple structure. When in all regards art was accumulated in Paris, its accumulation meant the burial of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, of Russia. When the artist arrived in Paris, they soon became expatriots with no true nation of origin, for it was buried in them long before their arrival. It is in the portrait of Lunia Czechowska that Modigliani makes an endeavor to paint the way he breathes, resurrect and save his nationalism in the Levant, picturesque display in the form of the woman.

It is in woman that Modigliani expresses his anti-Descartes, anti-cubists forum. It is the symmetry of woman that seduces man one moment and renders him powerless the next. To indulge in the cubists notion that aimed to distort the human, in lieu the woman, would pull Modigliani not from his scouring of the dream but from his native Italy, which to him was the woman all together. The woman wasn't the vice it was for Picasso, Rodin, Simenon and Miller, it wasn't the vice alcohol and drugs were for him; woman was the means to his end, the art that would become an obsession, a harbinger behind their nude bodies, his eventual decay.

As poets of the 18th and 19th centuries demand much of the readers, Modigliani demanded nothing of the one who took into their eyes his caricatures but demanded more of himself. His posthumous fame, which came at the cost of his self-destruction and the self-murder of his wife and artist Jeanne Hebuterne, who threw herself from a fifth floor window from the grief of Amedeo's passing, taking the life of their unborn child with her. The stylist harmony in which he approached the female body, capturing in large part the seduction and charm that has long made men captives in their own creation, came with the cost it would for the old man who saves a city and in turn, is resented for it.

` Everything was deliberate in the work of Modigliani, even that of his own self-destruction. The incidence of woman becoming on his canvas or be it the coincidence of the much admired 1906 death of Paul Cezanne that coincides with the year Modigliani arrived in Paris, the true subject, the naked body, never eluded him. He was a born portrait-painter and what he saw in flesh was all the deliberation he took upon his gesture to recreate it as best any man who is a devout student of the female form could ever, or will ever again.

It was the naked form of the world that Modigliani wanted to truly capture, a world that no one man can ever fully see for himself, but borrow visions that sketches the world out into display. The nakedness of woman before his eyes gave Modigliani that complete vision of the world, authenticity, a rationality so painful he took to alcohol and drug abuse to self-medicate and dilute the weight of it all and if given the chance to breath again, to be resurrected, I do believe he would again inject the opiate of woman, the scent of her skin, the texture of her light and being, and self-destruct all over again.

In the nights, during the long walks deep in the winter of Madison, along Lake Menona, I visualize the portraits of Modigliani, a man after my own, who knew he owed the world a price and dealt with it best the way he could to pay it in full. The chaste brilliance that has become the memory of Modigliani itself is the stigma of the woman of then, the woman of now, that in their very birth, with their very becoming, is the homunculus of the world that unvarying demands in cruelty, if not in subtlety.

-Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[Death of a Star] on Life, Death & Individuality

When Albert Einstein presented his theory of General Relativity, he did so without knowing that he was not only explaining the death of a star under overwhelming gravity, but dissecting the human who, in his principle, resembles the stars, as we do this world.

Einstein stated that when a star dies, it leaves behind a small remnant core. In his equation, if the star's mass is more than three times the mass of the sun, the force of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces what the Princeton physics John Wheeler coined "a black hole." Most black holes are formed from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion. A larger star upon explosion, holds the light while smaller, dense neutron stars aren't massive enough to hold light.

If we, individually, are stars, nearing the sun, which represents time, we degrade and diminish without restraint. As we consistently near the sun (time), our mass (what we do in this life) when we succumb to that single moment (death), it is light that we leave in this life, that natural agent that stimulates sight and makes all visible, the electromagnetic radiation whose wavelengths falls within the range to which the human retina responds, that lives on, throughout time, in immortality. The intense interest of the labyrinth of human nature may have been pinpointed in 1915, when space-time was first described by the solo physicist.

Death is one moment, one single moment, never drawn out, delayed as a hesitancy- it is one moment. To all it has come to be feared, it is nothing more than the moment of our physical demise. That single moment, hidden away from us in utter and terrifying mystery dictates, as it should not,  the way we live. But preceding that single moment, are moments available for many to thrive, to liberate and liberate thyself, moments to love, flutter, attempt the flutter and make haste of the deepest of all desires. If one capitalize on those moments, capitalize to the fullest, then that single moment held by death is no longer grandiose, it survives because man survives and must die, yet it is outweighed by the moments we choose to live. Mankind should not be a breathing stone but a shifting mountain that shape-shifts the wind, causes the wind to circumvent, the waters to part, the trees to grow elsewhere. Say nothing of what is to come but only what is, what can be, and what was that is no more.

We are all nevertheless together at the end, separated truly, finely by the way we choose to live in the interstitial between birth and death. We can and cannot, can depending on our strength and our will to soldier on past obstacles guaranteed to us in this life. We can-not from the unanimous defeat at the hands of these beatings, refusal to rise and present another knockdown to follow. In this refusal to rise is the forfeiture of the possibility of a birth of courage, a possibility of will to go the distance, battle this life to the very last breathe. There is the mind and there is the body, one indivisible, if can surpass all, each on its own separate entity, falters and becomes nothing and learn that it is of nothing.

A sense of beginning, one of the end, that is the art of living on one's own terms, dream of a life and toil to create it. And to create this life, everything outside of its realm must become peripheral, else an ephemeral feather drifting bound to depart, or bound, by the life imagined, created and exiled.

Dontrell Lovet't

-from [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The Fallen Swan] A Discourse on Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film, [Black Swan]

The Fallen Swan [A Discourse of Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film Black Swan]

No one can make a true and strong argument that German classical composition didn't dominated the 18th and 19th centuries in such a fashion as to leave its lasting echo upon the world today. Johannes Brahms, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Clara Schumann alone levitated the composite that would be immortal the world over. Other names have also existed before (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn), during (Joseph Joachim), and after (Wladyslaw Szpilman, Henryk Gorecki, Philip Glass) but none who challenge the German classical dominance than Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Russian composer, known in American culture more famously for his plays "The Nutcracker" and "Sleeping Beauty," his spatial depth of sequence and genius made no greater impact than that of "Swan Lake."
Obscure in its origins and today still obscure on the American theatrical stage, wedged between its near mythical becoming and the flora of its altercations and variations, it is perhaps the most underrated and unknown to the American eye and thus, in 2010, when Darren Aronofsky released the most famous of variations in his film [Black Swan], it was a cinematic marvel and a cinematic failure.

To clarify, "failure" is chosen and founded on the peripheral of the film pundits, even the greatest of them all in the history of film critics, the posthumous, Roger Ebert, in the suddenness of shockwaves it caused in film festivals and its "limited" releases that discombobulated the minds of the majority dense American public stripped historical of aesthetics and thus remains dwarfed by the Occident. Controversy rather than a much deserved genius is stigmatized to [Black Swan] and to its auteur Aronofsky, who despite much more success in his following films, remains under castigation for his refusal to dilute the truth. It is in Aronofsky, in Portman, in Mila Kunis, that the integrity cell of film, of theatre, finds its ideal of equilibrium, faces its fear of physical detriment and unleashes it.


[Swan Lake] origins are heavily influenced by Russian folklore along with remnants of German literature, add to it the tragic life of Bavarian King Ludwig II, the body of a great poetic eulogy is set forth in an impetuous, impetus vacuum of vast space. It is Aronofsky's variation in his film, and the double within it, the theatre, in auteur theory, that births his fetiche artiste for Natalie Portman (in a trimension that portrays a devout prima ballerina, Nina, Odette in a visceral variations of [Swan Lake] and the unnamed evil double of Odette, as a split personality aware of one another.)

It is first to note that Nina [Portman] is not only a most devout second generation ballerina, she is kind, gentle, malleable in a way identical to Odette in the original version of Tchaikovsky's [Swan Lake]. It is not known if Odette displays much cowardice as Nina does but in [Black Swan], it consistently gives over to her being underrated by most in the company, verbally bullied by other dancers and characteristically labeled 'frigid." Ballet is Nina's life, the entirety of it, an obsession that even invades her dreams. This obsession is fed when Nina returns home to her mother, a failed former ballerina whose obsession is also her daughter; in the eyes of her mother, Nina is ballet, one indivisible. Despite having the longest stent with her company, Nina yet remains transparent as a transient who have just wondered into a large metropolitan. The owner of the company Thomas (portrayed by the Parisienne actor Vincent Cassel) has recognized a beautiful and talented dancer within Nina but believes that her seduction cannot be translated as her unvarying disregard for brash behavior is the key to her inability to ever become a prima ballerina. It is with the arrival of another dancer, Lily (Kunis) that Nina is finally, gradually exposed to the subterranean of misadventure.

Afronovsky again must be credited with recruiting Kunis; the Ukranian-born actress, well aware and culturally close to Russian folklore,who waltz onto the set as she did in the film with a breeze undeterred by any metaphysical force. Kunis represents a modest freedom that Nina both fears and envies, a brash deceptiveness. Nina's life resembles that of the white swan (Odette) and in her similar light, dances the part of Odette in principle with a flawless form, perfect line. The struggle comes to Nina when she attempts to dance the evil double of Odette, the black swan, a tedious role in which the greater control comes with losing control, letting go, living. Nina's entire life is about control (the white swan) so much so living the life of misadventure (the black swan) is unknowingly terrifying; she has never been allowed nor allowed herself to wander beyond the avenues set forth by her mother. It is the very fear that illcits Nina's incability to commit to the role of the black swan though once announce, she affronts any obstacle that prevents so.

But the confrontation comes not of her very own volition, it is committed by her doppelganger, the double of herself that she encounters in the most fearsome of ways. The harbinger, which is the omen of one's impending death, is encountered in its physical identical appearance but of a woman who lives opposed to the control of Nina. She wears her hair freely loose, she walks with a confidence that may even be perceived as conceited, alone, possession no fear of anyone or anything around her. Nina's double is the subconscious yearn, as the dream may impend, to be, to become, a Socratic awareness of what she must become if she is to dance both the white and the black swan.

It is also of note that Nina's haunts also come with the figurative and physical fall of the former prima ballerina Beth Macintyre (portrayed by Winona Ryder), whose relationship with Thomas ends as she is forced to retire and thus become the fallen swan. In a last great endeavor, a tragic effort, Beth throws herself in front of a car and is wounded into a critical condition state.

Nina, as all artists, undergoes a gradual growth as child in the womb of the world, a decadent movement to the seduction, autoeroticism. The Swan represents most things of Russian history, even the Swan itself is known to spend its entire life with one partner once their necks are crossed. The erotic, too, in the formula of the swan queen role. Masturbation is only a means to release the black swan, a dark impulse that is beyond the mere physical cathartic release humanity is privy to; it is cajoled from an internal force, a poltergeist, a demonic possession. The act of Nina and Lily in frottage and cunnilingus itself is the manifestation of the black swan seduction of the white, itself, autoeroticism.

And in spectating the intellectual egg breaking open for the first time, as a spectacle of the third fate cutting the thread to bring this life to its end, motion in perfect line, the greatest firmament in which we'll ever see the human body at its most perfect line, its most eloquent movement, grandiloquent as it was before the fall of Eve, the perpetual interplay between character, doppelganger, the straight from reality that is only accompanied when Nina begins to live the swans, becomes the swans; the white as she began, the black as she becomes, the fallen as she is bound to become.

With the white swan there is a malleable, linear, transparent innocence, with the black, there is seductive, brashness, erotic malevolence that forms the mirage of murdering the lover, with the fallen, comes the failure of a lifted curse, self-murder in the most tragic of ultimatums; love or death. Veronica (portrayed by Ksenia Solo, another actress born in a former Russian dominated nation, Latvia) as Lily (Kunis) neither could be the swan queen, for to be the white swan, there is love, sacrifice, unconditional devotion to eternal bliss; neither have this, only the genome of the black swan and thus they could never be the swan queen, for with the white, there is a devolving, or evolving to the black swan (which all humans have within them) and only with the characteristic of love, can one become the fallen swan. Nina's gene expression throughout the film, throughout the theatrics, throughout her physical motion, obtains and exposes the markers of all the swans.

The physical moreso the psychic impression of Nina is the myth that survives Odette, her love for ballet is then synonymous with the love for Prince Siegfried and the sensation is reminiscent of something else, a sort of magic conjured from the stage and the frequented praise accompanied by roses at the foot of the black swan, whose seduction is as pretentious as the theatrical performance in itself. What leads to what becomes of the "controversial," underrated film and underrated play, a sound and harmonious notion only survived in the Balinese theatre and remorsefully nostalgic in the occident. By reacquainting the American eye with this lost treasure, reconciliation itself becomes amalgamated fragments made by the decades of dismantling at the hands of cultural artifice, a cultural decay. If artifice is found in Aronofsky's film, it is only in the form the of the black swan and the competitive nature of ballerinas, namely Lily, who resorts to numerous wiles to expose the few but drastic flaws of Nina and thus capitalize on Thomas's preference perhaps gathered from his love and relationship with Beth.

In the most derelict way as one who takes no interest in their own self-destruction, Nina is catapulted into a controlled chaos, where chaos in the predominant language, martyrdom the patois, an umbilical direction beyond the line as a mere remark to extravagance, to the extraordinary. The acts and segments are broken in a way to disconnect and once again connect as a defunct geometry made possible by abstract variation, a formula incomplete and still somehow brings about an exact scientific sum. The direction is a division of the same mirror image twins separated at birth, reunited through an inherent resurrection. The adopted miscarriage, tatters made into whole cloth, prolong flights in an unforeseen gesture in the incapability to descend to the earth.

I dare say that the ballerina encompasses more of the faults, pains, pledges and physical defaults as no other visual or motion artist. Because she is born as a woman at the foot of man, she has been taught to believe that she has limitations. When she is first deflowered by ballet, she revolts to overthrow limit through a most painful and precise art; if limitation is found, it only survives in her fragile mind, for her body, if her mind allows, has becomes superhuman and her revolt decimates limits in order for her to dance freely, precisely, flawlessly in spatial space and time. [Black Swan] has brought to film the toils of the ballerina in beautiful revolt as never before, perhaps for the last time in our human history. And in theatre within the film, their revolt is one in which demands years of unconditional, devout diligence, an interior walk within that is per contra to the human.

The ballerina is the central theme of the human endeavor, of the great human plight to live out accidental existence, naked ambition in transgression of its own said rights, misery's illegitimate child disfigured in embryonic misshapen, menacing the day they'll have their death to this world. This artist is the ideal of this marauding species, the human miasma to become something existential, concerned not with destruction and self-destruction but with electricity, an alternating current between being and falling, for with great height and depth comes an inevitable fall; this fall is reminiscence, a representation of one having taken flight, wings at some point bloomed, unfolded and fluttered into a maddening lift from the earth. If one is to see what has become of art, which is the wavelength between this life and the next, they only have to look upon Javier Perez's film [En Puntas] to witness this immediate, this sudden plummet from self-righteousness to self-flagellation.

In the abandoned aura of a theatre of bygone ornament, a single man is seated in view of an empty stage, lined with velvet curtains. With the winding of an antique music box, which creates in its simplistic mechanics a floating tune, the curtain is lifted to a small grand piano being approached by a ballerina. Amelie Segarra is the woman who approaches, mounting to be met with a pair of pointe shoes modified with stainless steel knives attached. Hanging from above is a rope, used to aid her to a most extreme position of uprightness once she has secured her perilous motifs.

Once she is upright, in a most learned and superhuman balance, she must rely solely on her years of discipline and equilibrium, a tedious bravery that comes with a second thought inherently to the human mind, to keep her balance; one fall and she will meet a most sudden blunt trauma to render her unconscious. Pivots en pointe, she simultaneously dances on the very tip of the blades whilst in a frenzy of frustration. Her discipline has become her as it was innate yet she  reveals that she still reserves that bits and pieces of human frailty. Even on the very edge, millimeters from a fall forward to a frontal injury, this discipline is set. Segarra en pointe, on an empty stage, in an abandoned theatre, wrought with the paradox of discipline and weakness is Perez's critique on the whole of the human race.

Aronofsky and Perez has made of the theatre and the film, its modern double, a setting of both transcendence and tragedy, of massive misadventure to not suppress reality with abstract but to bring into abstract a reality itself. Segarra, as Nina, both are burdened with doubles, doppelgangers which exposes their vulnerabilities one moment and make possible what is out of their grasp the next. Nina possess genius while Segarra is possessed by genius but even in genius, a markable, remarkable, rare, naked-eye meteor, a domain abject on the contrast obscured by its own sense of threat, reliance upon its sphere is one of fragile, dissimulated constrain. What may be enticed metaphysically may not follow over into the thoughts, but expressed nonetheless. However this is not the trademark of multiple personalities; each is both aware of the other, yes, but each is one in the same, in pursuit of the same transcendence, one through naive modesty, the other through relentless decadence.

What more can be more dear than the nakedness of the visceral mind embracing the light of a beautiful ideal, the haunted incandescence capture without mercy, construct a character from the very expression of light and life itself.  We speak of the arrival of a moon full inasmuch its wholeness removes us momentarily from the difficulties of man against man, its lunar lapse falls upon the earth as torn into the atmosphere with magnetic response. It is beautiful to us because its death, its nothingness, its lapse of nevermore, removes us from ourselves. To be moved, to forget the world in which we inhabit, its monotonous coarseness and enter into an unknown dimension, one borrowed from the mysticism of this world and the unknown of the next, is why the metaphysics of the ballerina, of the ballet, is beloved, its fall upon us is invited as a warm blanket on a frigid night imprisoned by a polar vortex.

Humanity needs these reminders of dimensions, restricted districts beyond that demand great depth and great substance, sustainable lore that makes of the mind a cathedral non-transparent through the stained glass. When first I rose to my feet at the conclusion of [Black Swan], something anew had become in me, of me. I had become disengaged, dis-enraged with the past, with the sterility that left distorted dreams within my mind unfertilized. It might be said that for the mind to illuminate, it must first show its own shadow, its own double, the opposing hemisphere that the sun never sees. The mind must rotate if light is to ever traverse the meridian, bring forth an efficacy against its own animated suspension, attain another kind of being. No other film has given more to the mind, brought forth the power to cause thinking as opposed to a passing thought during a viewing moment, than [Black Swan]. Its efficacy that has aggregated from an underrated ballet and an underrated film to an underrated immortality. In this asphyxiating age in which we survive, an ancient language that is misunderstood and difficult to learn, it dies due to our inability to understand its complexities. To survive on our ignorance is not survival at all but merely equivalent to saying what has already been said, not what needs to be said, what most fear to say, fear to tread.

And after all the audible mannerism of composed murmurs has been lifted as a foster into the air to fly in space and the noises from within the earth become deafening in the backdrop of a mutinous night, I know it was I who was speaking. The artist from clay had become a stratified, an ossified immortal from this theatric vaccination. In the midst of all meteors and spells, I had understood nothing in that nothingness of a desolate town, only wiles to offer a shifting perspective of those bygone and failed to transpire.