Why must art imitate reality?
By Jon Rappoport
August 17, 2013
Well, of course, it doesn’t have to, but that’s what most people are looking for. An imitation of reality.
Surrealism, for example, is crazy by conventional standards. Which is its whole point: who set up the conventional standards?
Once you open up that question, all bets are off.
What happens if I write a short play in which Edward Snowden is a dictator in a police state, and the NSA are revolutionaries battling for freedom?
Is that stage play “illegal?” Could reversing roles actually indict the NSA to a greater degree and make its crimes more vivid?
“No! You’re twisting everything! Stick to the facts! You’re soiling the reputation of Edward Snowden!”
Is that what I’m doing? Of course not. But “the reality people” are offended.
The notion that inversion or metaphor could be more powerful than fact is impossible for them to conceive.
Satire? Never heard of it.
The truth is, in every person there is a force of imagination waiting to make a prison break. That force feels great joy in overturning reality. But most people lock it up behind bars. And having locked it up, they don’t want to be reminded of it.
Art reminds them.
Art is a thorn.
“Don’t bother me. I’m accepting reality. I’m a loyal foot-soldier in the army of What Is.”
Such a person is conning himself, but he doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about it at all. But a child does. A child is ready to stage little improvisational plays at the drop of a hat. New roles, new stories. For him, reality is soft and elastic.
A child is prepared to torpedo any consensus in the service of inventing something spontaneous.
Eventually, he learns this a taboo. It isn’t part of the adult universe. If he’s going to use his imagination at all, it must be for the purpose of strengthening What Is.
His parents and teachers are there to help him with this effort.
But somewhere down deep, they all know this is collaborating with the enemy. It’s betraying the core of consciousness.
Awareness is only one part of consciousness. The greater part is imagination/creation. It needs no factual foundation. It needs no sanction.
Art makes realities, worlds, universes. In doing so, it jettisons rules. It makes up its own rules, or dispenses with rules altogether.
If more artists understood this, if more people became artists, society would undergo a remarkable transformation. It wouldn’t turn into a new consensus; it would evolve into millions of side-by-side original creations. What that would look like, how it would operate, is unknown. We’ve never seen a society like that on planet Earth.
But there would be no more need for war.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
There IS no actual contact with the universe except through Imagination. It is the bridge between electrons and quanta, without which there is absolutely no perception at all, and perception is Imagination’s doorway. And without that, there is nothing. Babies and children have it, yes, but it is paved over and forgotten by the machine inteligence that rules this planet and its zero tolerance of the free person who calls it what it is: android gulag.
Yes! How amazing it would be if we left behind “What Is” and took on the adventure of “What If?”
The beginning of your previous article (Washington Post) courageously exposes the trance that comes from a narrow focus on detail without context, thus “mind-blinding” the skill to see the woods for the trees, the trap surrounding the bait, and the cost hidden behind the seductive surface lie of the con. Narrow minds have no possibility of recognizing their own “matrix” as mind-prison within a manufactured virtual reality.
This is also a symptom of damage to the right side of the brain (eg. stroke), and of a culture that trains or “schools” inhibition of right brain function through demanding absolute left brain dominance in order to avoid punishment and succeed. Thanks BTW for turning me on to John T. Gatto on schooling vs education, yet another rare voice of brilliant outspoken sanity much like your own.
I highly recommend a beautifully written exploration of this subject of our paired brain consciousness by Iain McGilchrist called: “The Master and his Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” I find his frame of right and left brain ways or methods of perceiving and doing the same things, of great help in learning to hold and balance multiple perspectives at once.
He also elucidates many of your recent comments about art (as distinct from split off, dissociated, schizophrenic, and non-contextual “modern art”), as well as only taking others and their communications literally rather than perceiving the many layers of nuance, metaphor, imagination, and thus of meaning. The introduction is downloadable from his website (his name.com) as well as some short videos of his talks. There is also a shorter 30 page eBook available.
As a psychotherapist, I also think this provides a frame for deeper insight into the current chemical, drug, and epigenetically induced upsurge in “autism spectrum disorders,” as well as ADD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and alexithymia.
This ultimately clarifies the reasons for corporate and institutional methods of artificially inducing mind-blindness in the masses and artificially selecting for sociopathic traits and antisocial personality disorder as the new keys to the kingdom of money, status, power, and the right to make the rules and thus to rule.
Thankfully not everyone takes the bait, and in my own work I find that including and balancing the many dualities of my own nature a necessary prerequisite to being of service to others. If I can’t build an actual free and sane society as a functioning ecosystem within my own consciousness, how could I assist others to engage their own diverse versions of that work? If I can’t build it inside first, no amount of effort, money, votes, or force will enable building it outside.
Thanks Jon – great post. I’m wearing my Mothers Of Invention – Freak Out! t-shirt this evening in honor of your post and imagination!
Proudly re-posted on The All-Seeing Eyebama! http://eyebama.onehumanbeing.com/2013/08/17/why-must-art-imitate-reality/
Yes, that might be the only thing that will save America. It’s wild, but if everyone could somehow become an artist, creative, and create to survive, not create for fashion and whim—that might save the world. It’s crazy, sure, but who knows? Could you have predicted this world we live in today—ten years ago? Twenty? No. So, stranger things have happened. Maybe some bug from an asteroid will infect the air and destroy all of The Fog synapses in what’s left of today’s “human” brain.
By the way, have you noticed the “delivery” of these news b$^%@rds? Their weird intonation, the alien rise and fall of their robust voices, the out-shot brreath at the ends of words-hhhhhh?
No?
They are incanting; it’s—to them—a magical incantation to take your humanity and re-engineer it into one of Jon’s stinking androids. It’s machine-code, to program you, to make you hang upon their every rhythmic breath and word. I bet it’s taught in dark cellars at “J” school. I bet it’s a secret. I bet anyone who challenges it will be located, isolated, pinned down, and blow-torched with ridicule and hatred into oblivion.
It would make a great movie: “Monsters in the House.” Whatever you do, don’t go into the living room alone….
I was a punk rocker in the late 70’s. Talk about jettisoning rules. Punk created it’s own music and fashion rules that defied all stereotypical musical genres. Some of the music from that time period, and a lot of what is known as “post-punk,” was some of the most inventive, revelatory, and just plain fun music ever created in the history of the world. And so, so far away from anything created today. Real music (and art) transcends logic and personal barriers. It speaks to the innermost voice. It’s the one that they will never take away from me no matter what.
Jon Rappoport,
Let me say you are one of the precious few people who publicly accept the natural connection between the evils global and the lives innermost. And let me add I’m grateful for the regularity of your output, which provides support to many people like me (and which I slightly envy).
Now, to the matter at hand: You wrote:
………Art makes realities, worlds, universes. In doing so, it jettisons rules. It makes up its own rules, or dispenses with rules altogether. If more artists understood this, if more people became artists, society would undergo a remarkable transformation. […] What that would look like, how it would operate, is unknown. We’ve never seen a society like that on planet Earth………..
Given all of it, why don’t you as an artist make a reality, a world, a universe in which everyone is an artist that makes its own reality? Why do you instead bother with us, in this dark, narrow hole called “reality”? Do you need us to be really accomplished and free?
……[art] jettisons rules. It makes up its own rules, or dispenses with rules altogether…….
What’s a freedom worth if it’s based on whim, rather than a Will indistinguishable from Law?
Here is my personal feeling: What is usually called art these past few millennia – the paintings, the sculptures, writings, musical compositions and recordings – are mere fingerprints of the genius that individual humans utilise during hardship. In adversity one is usually alone, art serves to express what unheard of, and perhaps unspeakable, troubles you had, and how you got out of them. As such, art is an integral part of technology, and every engineer worth its title would admit you that their engineering choices are as much a matter of calculation as they are a matter of personal style.
Art may be likened to a personal starship that can free a person from one world. But, think also of a heap of coal atop of which a group of hominids is freezing toward death, and a dark beast inside *us*, a bete noire for every lover of farce and accomplice to evil.
Ivan K.
SE Europe
Reblogged this on Lost In The Blue Rain and commented:
Please, read this.
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