Gyāna
Monologue
2021
I dread coming to this class, because I feel unwelcome. Do you want to know why I presented what I did? To show you your prejudice. And I succeeded. When you see me, you see a bigot. But I'm a mirror. I'm showing you yourself. You fear me, because I am you. I'm not allowed to have a voice, I'm not allowed to have a unique experience, because I'm an oppressor. I'm the reason you struggle in life. I'm hetero-normativity incarnate. That's the lie that's been spoon-fed to you by a bureaucratic system that has its own best interests at heart, not yours. It wants your money and compliance, not your spiritual growth.
White guilt, white privilege, white culture, white, white, white. It's funny, seems like white people can't shut up about themselves. Mastabatory, masochistic, self-abasement. Thrusting themselves center stage once again, how typical. And why? So they, and anyone else who preaches this sermon, can feel good, feel like moral crusaders in perfect rectitude, free of all the messy blemishes of human nature. Your ideology gives you such clean solutions. Clinical. All you need is to find an enemy, a force, a patriarchy; straight, white, males. Then throw on your fears, insecurities, and dissatisfactions with life. Dress up that scarecrow real nice. But I'm not going to let you turn me into an object for your use. I have a consciousness just like you. And my consciousness has no race, class, or creed. Does yours?
You've been lied to, friends. You're being deceived. They tell you to find your "identity", that will cure what ails you. Just find what group you belong to, then follow the party line. But think outside the box, and you won't fit the narrative anymore, you become an inconvenience to the movement. You better think how your skin color thinks, you better feel how your gender should feel. Sounds like bigotry to me. Racism and sexism obscured by a veneer of dogma and jargon. I wonder if humanity is just not comfortable yet without finding someone to hate.
If the self is anything, it is a mystery. You'll tie yourself into a knot if you try to pin it down. I'm sick and tired of hearing about all the things that separate us. Every class I'm in, every lecture, every critique, dialogue, speaker event, every movie screening on campus, is: race, gender, sexuality, race, gender, sexuality, race, gender, sexuality, race, gender, sexuality. What about humanity? Shared, universal, human connection. We all just want to be seen at the end of the day. And I don't want to be seen for the things that I didn't choose for myself, accidents of birth, that's not who I am...and it's not who you are.
Can't you see this Western method of putting everything neatly into its own little box. Categorizing, systematizing, dehumanizing. Divide and conquer. Keep the masses fighting about trivial things while the real machinations of power hang over our collective heads like the sword of Damocles. America is in its decadent decline, decades of stagflation resulting in a rise in the cost of living but no rise in wages. We have it harder than our parents. And as artists we have to rely on the good will of society to pay for us to spend our days playing with paint. Why are we only thinking about ourselves? We need to think about how our art can help them, the 9-to-5ers. The ones punching in, day in and day out, in their tedious, dead-end jobs. Art helps them feel alive, in communion with our shared struggle to survive. They need us, and we them.
Art that has a political agenda is propaganda. Propaganda does not feed the soul. There's a reason why the fine arts are the laughing stock of culture writ large. They see what we do as a farce; a fraudulent, elitist, enterprise—and they're right. We can't think our way to meaningful work, it takes the involvement of the whole nervous system, our complete organism. We have to be honest with ourselves, no more playing nice. There's no time. We urgently have to generate our authentic expressions of the human condition. And we have to help each other on that path. But the intellect will hamper us. We need gyāna, the sanskrit word for knowledge gained through experience. No teacher in the world can give you that, only you can with your attention and focus, which is what we must cultivate.
The desire to create comes from the need for connection. My last creation was seen as toxic by some of you. Many of you avert your eyes from mine. I know that you're scared. I am too... deathly afraid. I'm afraid I won't be able to complete my duty while I'm on this Earth. I want to free you from suffering. I want to free everyone. Help me do it. Help me. Help me. Will you help me?
White guilt, white privilege, white culture, white, white, white. It's funny, seems like white people can't shut up about themselves. Mastabatory, masochistic, self-abasement. Thrusting themselves center stage once again, how typical. And why? So they, and anyone else who preaches this sermon, can feel good, feel like moral crusaders in perfect rectitude, free of all the messy blemishes of human nature. Your ideology gives you such clean solutions. Clinical. All you need is to find an enemy, a force, a patriarchy; straight, white, males. Then throw on your fears, insecurities, and dissatisfactions with life. Dress up that scarecrow real nice. But I'm not going to let you turn me into an object for your use. I have a consciousness just like you. And my consciousness has no race, class, or creed. Does yours?
You've been lied to, friends. You're being deceived. They tell you to find your "identity", that will cure what ails you. Just find what group you belong to, then follow the party line. But think outside the box, and you won't fit the narrative anymore, you become an inconvenience to the movement. You better think how your skin color thinks, you better feel how your gender should feel. Sounds like bigotry to me. Racism and sexism obscured by a veneer of dogma and jargon. I wonder if humanity is just not comfortable yet without finding someone to hate.
If the self is anything, it is a mystery. You'll tie yourself into a knot if you try to pin it down. I'm sick and tired of hearing about all the things that separate us. Every class I'm in, every lecture, every critique, dialogue, speaker event, every movie screening on campus, is: race, gender, sexuality, race, gender, sexuality, race, gender, sexuality, race, gender, sexuality. What about humanity? Shared, universal, human connection. We all just want to be seen at the end of the day. And I don't want to be seen for the things that I didn't choose for myself, accidents of birth, that's not who I am...and it's not who you are.
Can't you see this Western method of putting everything neatly into its own little box. Categorizing, systematizing, dehumanizing. Divide and conquer. Keep the masses fighting about trivial things while the real machinations of power hang over our collective heads like the sword of Damocles. America is in its decadent decline, decades of stagflation resulting in a rise in the cost of living but no rise in wages. We have it harder than our parents. And as artists we have to rely on the good will of society to pay for us to spend our days playing with paint. Why are we only thinking about ourselves? We need to think about how our art can help them, the 9-to-5ers. The ones punching in, day in and day out, in their tedious, dead-end jobs. Art helps them feel alive, in communion with our shared struggle to survive. They need us, and we them.
Art that has a political agenda is propaganda. Propaganda does not feed the soul. There's a reason why the fine arts are the laughing stock of culture writ large. They see what we do as a farce; a fraudulent, elitist, enterprise—and they're right. We can't think our way to meaningful work, it takes the involvement of the whole nervous system, our complete organism. We have to be honest with ourselves, no more playing nice. There's no time. We urgently have to generate our authentic expressions of the human condition. And we have to help each other on that path. But the intellect will hamper us. We need gyāna, the sanskrit word for knowledge gained through experience. No teacher in the world can give you that, only you can with your attention and focus, which is what we must cultivate.
The desire to create comes from the need for connection. My last creation was seen as toxic by some of you. Many of you avert your eyes from mine. I know that you're scared. I am too... deathly afraid. I'm afraid I won't be able to complete my duty while I'm on this Earth. I want to free you from suffering. I want to free everyone. Help me do it. Help me. Help me. Will you help me?