Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: February 1, 2012

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Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows. 1890

Forty Illusions Before Midnight

Birds never fly away
    Fish never swim away
        The sun never sets
 
We are idiots of ego

The only rev­o­lu­tions
That mat­ter are the vio­lent ones
The ones that force us to cast off

Me mine me mine

The only rev­o­lu­tions that mat­ter
    Are those that reveal
        All is relative

All is con­tin­gent and evanes­cent
Like the leaf that falls because

    She says so

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Posted on: June 16, 2010

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Sunflowers. By Vincent Van Gogh. 1888

Nothing was as it seemed, when Van Gogh painted it. Roiling under­neath the sub­ject, fly­ing above it, sur­round­ing it, were his pas­sions, his inten­sity, his flights into realms most of us could only guess at, if we can match him for moral imag­i­na­tion, or imag­i­na­tion period. With Van Gogh, a rose was not a rose was not a rose.

Ray Succre writes poetry along these same lines, or con­junc­tions, or coin­ci­dences, with a mask or two thrown in for good mea­sure. Surreal, meant to be heard, meant to be spo­ken, they sing the uncanny.

Spinozablue presents two of his poems below.

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In honor of Bloomsday, I wanted to point you in the direc­tion of a fine lit­tle essay about the peo­ple, real peo­ple, and their descen­dants, who found their way into Joyce’s Ulysses.…

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Posted on: April 20, 2010

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The Chair, by Vincent Van Gogh. 1888

Norman Mailer wrote, in the pages of Dissent back in 1959, about the dif­fer­ence between 19th cen­tury cap­i­tal­ism and the 20th cen­tury ver­sion, pro­vok­ing much thought. Basically, in the 19th cen­tury, a worker would toil in hard­ship, for lit­tle pay, but when he went home, cap­i­tal­ism didn’t fol­low him there. His own indus­try didn’t fol­low him. He wasn’t besieged on all sides by mar­ket­ing and adver­tise­ments push­ing him to fill his home with scads of fads and end­less con­sumer goods. He could leave cap­i­tal­ism behind for the most part when he left his job each day.

The root of cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion has shifted from the proletariat-​​​​at-​​​​work to the mass-​​​​at-​​​​leisure who now may lose as much as four or five ideal hours of extra leisure a day.

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