Road to Peace
I've been thinking a lot lately about the impetus to be part of the conversation. I am maybe older than many contemporary internet users, and sometimes need to sit with how I'm thinking. Its a privilege, my lacking of the need to share all my thoughts, but it doesn't always feel like one. Whilst I lack this instinct to share everything, I have developed, or maybe lost, the need to hear the noise of others.
Its something I realised during the early days of Covid: the listening and the watching and the deciphering of all the opinions, the parsing of statements and suspicions and counter theories, the literal sound of everybody’s competing voices, was somehow making me a worse human being. I could be a better person when I just switched it all off, listened to music, read what I could stomach, tried to draw sometimes. My islands, the ruralidylls, searching for that platonic ideal, developed during this time.
After a decade or two as a fairly staunch audiobook advocate, I tanked all my podcasts overnight, just as they were widely adopted as the prevalent medium of the age, never to listen to any of it ever again. I am starting to go deaf, and think this must be contributing, metaphorically or literally, to my withdrawing inwards, the need for peace.
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I saw the other day a placard saying Silence is Violence, and part of me felt like I don't buy this. A lifelong pacifist, my parents card carrying CND members, my mum camped at Greenham; the digital nativist notion that my verbose inarticulacy and unwillingness to share anonymous videos or flex like I’ve schooled up on Zionism overnight, somehow equates to my tacit complicity in Netanyahu’s war crimes.
That I am somehow waving through the vilest actions of the Israeli military industrial complex, by not sharing my own takes on my big tech approved personalised social media feed™. I found this quite a leap, that seems to say more about the complete normalisation of these centralised communication systems in our lives, and their ability to both harness and weaponise our own latent anger and sadness, than anything real about tens of thousands of murdered human lives.
No war is a just war, and this one is a genocide.
As a thinking feeling person who’s been around a bit longer than the internet, and with a little luck, may live to see a time after it, I need to read, I need to think, I need to feel things. Some of us need deeper connections than bouncing from heartrending video to call to action memes and back again.
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Before I began to feel this external pressure, to share what I was feeling, I posted a drawing about manifestation. I have mixed feelings on manifestation. I love the idea that the universe is a living feeling oneness that we are all a tiny part of, that our actions can somehow be reflected back at us. At times in my life I’ve felt that Pantheism or Panpsychism in my soul, my heart, my bones. But it must be hard to believe in that stuff when an occupying power is systematically obliterating everything and everyone you’ve ever loved.
In its modern western iteration of get whatever you want and all your dreams can come true instagram exceptionalism, the idea of manifestation makes my skin crawl. So I minted a drawing of some white stuccoed houses, a bit modernist, waves lapping in Ibiza blue, in some hope or wish that we may have our own home some day, and we won’t need to live in damp and rented flats until we die.
As soon as I had minted this drawing, I felt ashamed, at my privilege; another western exceptionalist, glibly dreaming my home owning dreams into capitalist reality.
And I realised the houses in the drawing felt like they were drowning maybe, or being submerged, or even being obliterated in some way, and decided to send anything they made to Unicef. Almost in reparations somehow, at how bad I felt, guilty at my dumbfuck luck and selfish culpability, to be daydreaming of my own sanctuary as innocent children are bombed to smithereens. I don’t need to see your messages about my lack of performativity to feel ashamed for my existence. I got this.
So I managed to raise a little money with a friend, just pushing our art for a week or two. It wasn’t a big effort just a couple of sad people trying to help, or maybe just feel like we were helping, in a tangible way. No-one seems to buy our NFTs much anymore so we didn’t really sell many. We made a hundred and fifty quid or so and sent it to Unicef, only days later reading that the CEO of Unicef is married to the Chairman of Blackrock … I mean Jesus Christ, it makes you think doesn’t it, if there’s any point.
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I’ve helped out in small ways with various charitable endeavours on tezos. Sometimes sharing money from my own art sales, helping with copy editing, tweeting, bits and bobs where and when I can. This time feels louder and sadder and quieter, than all of them. The sobs and the silence of equal power, cancelling each other out.
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Somethings I’ve read or felt or thought over these past 6 weeks.
Interesting article from Dougald Hine concerning John Berger's Words in Wartime.
Heartbreaking piece from Sarah Aziza
Why the Artworld Must Stand with Palestine
Here is a recent article I wrote for The Tickle, about my experiences trying to help tezquake aid. This is my first piece of crypto adjacent writing beside this substack and typed art, maybe we’ll see more soon …
If you have anything you can spare, please send it to MAP. I def would have done that instead of Unicef given another chance.
And the Tom Waits song I keep thinking about x