She

You must read more before you choose to strike me down. Otherwise, I will exist, in corners of your mind, and in rooms of mine. It is the only weapon you have against me, to absorb whole length sentences like walls of the ocean bed, indescribably muted. The floor of the ocean is where I learnt to walk, a place where many seas met, merging amniotic fluids with memory, gene upon gene. That is the violence that bought me to you. The violence of birth and the greater violence of living it. I never wanted to live, to breathe, as insignificance does but I was born and hence, I must endure it.

Endurance is a complex word, it does not betray emotion, the only thing the word tells us that it exists to bring strength and despair together, I can endure life, perhaps even death, though I know not much of it; but you must remember me. Always, unfailingly, you must remember me and believe with all that you are, mind, body and soul, that I am there.

He looked up in the sky and saw her face in the white clouds above. She smiled and disappeared behind nothingness.And then it rained.

I look at the red lilacs strewn across the garden. They look oddly familiar. I pick one up and open its petals, revealing dark blue pollen stalks that taste like long lost honey bees. I toss it back and pick up a stalk of grass, crushing it with my forefinger. It allows me crush itself, giving up its sovereignty in the face of brute strength. We are all stalks of grass, our destinies limped by hands of  time. I crush some more of them.

I am awake for no particular reason. Our lives are fragile, we must end them in the arms of the one we love, before cracks invade everything we touch, including each other. Time takes away what never was overs, but was promised to us by genes and fables.

I think of her with my eyes closed. She comes to me instantly. I think of her smile and take in the silence that surrounds me. A brief painful terror holds me close. I open  my eyes and the world is new again.

A Study In The Life Of An Artist: Critical Perspectives From Marginalized Voices

There exists almost no distinction between critical postmodern art and the emergence of the neo-proletariat ideals that have begun to (re)populate the world in small measures. Both work on the singular premise of dismantling existing structures of form and power by subtle rearrangements in societal plateaus. For instance, we can observe non-linear ideological shifts in the way the West is engaging itself with the rest of the global community compared to the half a century back when capitalism as a tool of coercion had gained incredible universal momentum. Art and resistance evolve in similar ways, and share a common ground when to comes to (de) idealogizing the present. That is what art truly represents, resistance/persistence, and the Artist becomes the first and final martyr in the entire process. The Artist which indulges in postmodern art also willingly/unwillingly engages with the war of the neo-proletariat. Power is what the Artist despises and what he ironically comes to use when the dismantling of structures begins. Unlike a mythical context of literature or art, the Artist employs present day tools to create an alternate universe of possibilities, which in turn aims to depopulate the present world of stagnant ideas. This circle of reluctant but inevitable martyrdom repeats itself universally in both time and space. What is interesting to note is the demystifying effect of critical postmodern art on present day power mongers. I do not argue about the absolute possibility of artistic utopia but rather the changing nature of the Artist in today's time and age. An artist whose work I'm intimately familiar with argues that it is not possible to reconcile the difference between a falsified grandiose history and present day post critical nuances of art. A painting cannot be traditional when it comes to form and progressive when it comes to the object simultaneously, it must choose either of the two. Cubism and Dadaism were two such defined centers of artistic gravity, both existed only to inspire and recreate the circular representation of artistic utopia. But neither one of them 'began' with such specific goals, like most movements captured in homogenized nomenclature, these two were also results of pedantic and pedagogic classifications.

fig. 1. Roger Brown. Talk Show Addicts, 1993. Etching and aquatint, 22 1/4 x 29 ¾ in.

(Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

In the above picture, 'Talk Show Addicts' by Roger Brown, there is a frightening yet prophetic view of urban degeneration via the medium of television. Proximity among neighbors is only possible through a medium controlled by a select few. The dystopia of the Artist is the utopia of the Capitalist. The Artist of today's age has been entrusted with the humongous task of (re) creating 'Art' in a controlled environment of 'mass media', herein lies the ultimate contradiction, for the medium is both the 'enemy' and the 'tool'. This negotiation of being mesmerized and being disillusioned comes at a mental toll for the Artist whose purpose is validated by the very presence of what it seeks to 'destroy'. The products of coercive ideologies such as capitalism are puppets in response to an artistic vision that seeks universal fulfillment. The Marxist philosophy of socialist possibilities is mere lip service to any individual who seeks institutionalized anarchy, another contradiction that the Artist must deal with in order to create parallel self flagellating universes.