Anyway. Yeah. Sure. I personally consider the material world a veil. It is a very compelling veil, but a veil nevertheless. My biggest nightmare are suburban houses with kitchens where people sit around surrounded by unnecessary things, staring at objects like televisions. It is the most unfun thing.
My purpose as an artist is to bring into the material world things from the ideal world. Ideas are the most enduring thing in the history of humankind. Everything else has crumbled except maybe the pyramids.
We are living in a place with a giant black hole in the middle of our galaxy, and we are surrounded by places with black holes in them. There is this anxiety in us humans about the material world, and it is totally understandable. We operate in the material world, but I am not sure our brains are firmly in the material. Maybe they hold little bridges to what lies beyond. At least this is my experience as an artist.
Usually when I crave material things I try to obtain cash in some way, and I try to have it be a fun way. Recently I worked for the Census and got a chance to interview people in 30 million dollar condos in Chelsea, and across the street in the public housing where on the corner stand the lookouts for the drug lords. I interviewed people in trailer parks and people in mansions, people in Park Avenue apartments and people in rural Georgia. They put me in a tiny Toyota and sent me down dirt roads to knock on doors. I interviewed homeless people at soup kitchens, wealthy donors to the president, and everybody in between.
I have zero respect for wealth and big houses, but tremendous respect for the human experience.
When I was in Silicon Valley I spent a lot of time learning technology and making money. The last ten years I spent a lot of time developing my own ideas and philosophy. I spent a lot of time thinking, so I have some clarity now. I think it was Rockefeller who decided he would spend the first half of his life making money and the second half giving it away. I did not have a plan when I divested myself of money and properties, so I kind of ran into trouble in that department. I am still working on it.
What I have worked out is a philosophy of what I think is necessary for us to become a great civilization. We have to use all human resources in their entirety. When I was teaching I had kids who were supposed to be autistic, who were actually oppressed by their parents and their environment. One of the kids was not even allowed to sit on chairs at home and had to sit on the floor. She was removed from the home. She was very smart, with a lot of attitude and confusion. Imagine if all the resources of all the oppressed kids in the world are spent toward advancing our civilization. We could literally conquer the galaxy in a few generations. So we need to learn how to utilize human resources wisely.
The most interesting thing to me is the fact that there is a black hole at the center of our small part of the universe. This simple fact does not change anything for me or how I see the world. It only reinforces my view that the material world is a veil, a very compelling one.
If you have any doubts about what you do in the world, or where you are going, or the general confusion of things, refer to the black hole.
And do not worry about me not having fun on Friday night. Maybe not this past winter but the winter before I literally lived several lifetimes worth of gallery openings, drinking wine with my artist friends in and around Chelsea, sometimes getting blackout drunk. I definitely do not miss alcohol.
Going back to black holes, it goes back to all my grumbles against handbags. I think handbags are just too little a task for humanity, yet we spend so much time and so many resources on handbags. Whole industries. Whole lives.
From the lectures I watched it was not very clear to me if matter shoots out of the black hole or simply streams into it or both. I will rewatch the lectures when I have a little more time.
Reality check. It is not that when I drink coffee in the morning I think about supernovas, or that I dislike wealth or money or material things per se. I used to love going into Victoria’s Secret stores, for example, and checking out all the fragrances. It was an experience like in a Salvador Dali world with lingerie.
I love the small pleasures. They have just become part of a really large world.
I like physics and astronomy because they keep me grounded in a reality that is much larger than the small world we live in. I do not want to be a worm with my nose down in the dirt. I want to be a pair of eyes fixed on the stars.
I grew up with the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov. I recently even re-listened to all seven books in the series, although I have to say that some of the gender stuff is a little bit dated.
But I dream of the day when our descendants are going to cover the stars the way we hop between continents today. They will think nothing of passing by a planet or a supernova.
In order for this day to come we need to utilize the resources of our civilization, and that means all human beings, the greatest resource of our planet. Unfortunately a lot of kids grow up in terror and darkness, the way I grew up. If it was not for a little computer lab that gave me extensive free time with computers so I could realize my potential, I would have been stuck cooking for some dumbass somewhere. Sorry, but that is the reality for a lot of creatures on this Earth. If you notice, many Hollywood movies show a female human with an apron doing dishes near a sink, usually in a kitchen, in the first five minutes.
So we have to change the reality for huge segments of humanity. First and most important are kids who are currently stuck and unable to contribute and grow because of their environment. And of course we have to free the brains of women to be used and to work for the betterment of humanity.
Knowing physics and astronomy grows my world to include the entire universe and its entire lifespan, so I can measure my little life here against the entire reality of our world. When I get up in the morning I want to know that everything I do is part of a very large universe. I want to worry about the little things very little.
I want my work not to be just objects, but to answer the biggest questions. What is it like to be a human being. What is a beautiful thing that a human being can do in their day. How many walls and barriers can we break down without demolishing anything at all.
We live in a world with a Moon and many stars. A can of paint is just a single wavelength of light entering our brains. Why do we like color. I do not know, but I would like to give it to you freely.
We humans often underestimate ourselves, what we can do. We forget we built a civilization out of mud and gravel and rotting dinosaurs. We need to make sure we utilize every human being well. We want to make sure our brothers and sisters are not murdered on the streets, that no child is tormented at home and kept without access to the knowledge of humankind, and that every human is sheltered, especially when we have so much empty real estate sitting around. We cannot have stuff in stores and humans on the streets. We cannot have children in abuse and on the streets and without the best education, and humans murdered.
A few weeks before what I call memory replacement I worked for the Census Bureau and was sent to the richest neighborhoods in Manhattan as well as to the housing towers. Then I was sent to rural Georgia. I spoke to the richest and the poorest. People in 30 million dollar condos and penthouses with self cleaning nanotechnology on the elevator buttons. People in trailer parks. People in mansions on the Upper East Side and apartments on Park Avenue. People in beautiful houses on the hills in rural Georgia. I interviewed the homeless at soup kitchens. I spoke to literally hundreds of fellow humans and discovered one great thing.
We are the same people.
The ones who were nice to me were rich in their demeanor. The ones who were not nice to me were poor in their behavior. That was the only way I could tell one person from another, from where I sat, on their doormats, on their porches, or with their doorman.