It was a magic 40 minutes, and it gave me time to digest some of the themes and thoughts of Ekelöfs poetry. The following is a sort of summary of my thoughts.

Ekelöf writes:

Seeking stable ground in life.
Everything is fluid. Everything deceives us. Everything lures us into traps. To misunderstandings. Misconceptions. The only thing that does not waver is death. To think of death. To see life through death is to provide a pedal point to the dizzying uncertain melody we live.

Elsewhere he writes something along the lines of:

She staggers to stay upright

I find that intensely poetic. A condensation of a greater truth: That to be in balance you are always moving towards a disequilibrium. Always compensating to stay upright. Staggering back and forth. Like a tree in the wind. Like a child learning to ride a bicycle. Whether it is staying put or moving forward, maintaining balance requires constant work. To remain flexible.

In the same way, a major theme in Ekelöf’s work is how the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful are intertwined. They depend on the juxtaposition, the contradiction. They can exist only through each other.

Nothing can exist by itself. Nothing is pure and clean. Everything is raw, mixed and implacably honest. Like punk.

We may try to ignore it. Filter out the ugly and inconvenient. But it will only make us less flexible. Less in balance.

Instead, we have to see the ways in which the ugly highlights the beauty.

At the concert, the clean, clear almost crystalline spirituality of the music was deflated by the laughter, conversation and clinking of plates and cutlery from the café outside.

At first it annoyed me. But then I realized that it was the very dissonance of the ambient sounds of the café that gave the music its depth. And the ethereal spirituality of the music was underlined by the mundane chatter from which it sought to escape.

The beautiful and ugly complemented each other. It resulted in a calm sense of wholeness. Of balance.

It is the unpredictable, the unfinished, which creates the magic of the moment. We are never ready. We are always caught by surprise. It forces us to recalibrate. To stagger or fall.

On Saturday, I went to see a play that revolved around stories of the sea. As the play ended, they projected big photo of the wide open blue sea onto the stage.

I looked out at the sea. Exploring my newfound sensibility of the imperfect, I sought out the unexpected. The ugly. That which is set apart and breaks the harmony. The crack in the mirror. The matter out of place. That which is not in balance.

At first I couldn’t see it.

The sea is quiet, mirroring the sky in a plethora of blue nuance.
So beautiful. So pure.

Then I realize that the thing that doesn’t belong is me. The man. The boat. The attempt at control.

A tiny speck of intent merely tolerated in this vast aimless flow.

It is the repressed that is expressed in art. In this way, art has the same function in society that dreams have for the individual — even though we don’t always remember or understand the symbols of our dreams.

- Niels I. Meyer, K. Helveg Petersen & Villy Sørensen: “Revolt From The Center” (1978)

Talking to a crowd of DIY artists, Rushkoff focuses on how art is changing in the 21st century. He argues that the classic male sexuality curve of narrative with which we’re so familiar (tension, climax, release), and which can be in just about any Hollywood film or thirty second tv advertisement, won’t be the only narrative in town.

Rushkoff argues that the new interactivity and active participation that the Internet and the computer offers us, will lead to new forms of narrative. And he ends his presentation highlighting 3 new roles for the artist to take on to explore these other forms of narrative:

1) Call and response
Open up your narrative for audience participation. The audience is still uncertain of their own abilities, and they don’t yet want complete freedom. Offer them some freedom to participate, but continue to lead the narrative – like classic oral storytelling or protestant preaching. Eventually, they will supply the best ideas for leading the narrative forward.

2) Make tools
Create the tools and means for the audience to tell their own story. Here, the artist’s role is more like the role of the Dungeon Master of old D&D games: He may have absolute power, but he is continually bending the rules and shaping the scenery to create those story moments where the audience, the players can interact and create their own story.
That story is not a matter of reaching the climax and going to sleep. The point of the game is to keep playing the game. To keep the game interesting. The art – the process of playing, of creating the story – is a goal unto itself.

3) Play spaces
This is the hardest part: Creating free spaces where the members of the former audience all participate on equal terms, creating play, art and magic together. Temporary Autonomous Zones without leaders, where everybody is an artist. I wonder whether story club be an example of this?

The world is fucked, kids. You know it. You’ve seen it. If you are basically anyone other than a thin able-bodied white dude who likes the ladies and makes truckloads of cash, a substantial portion of the world is convinced that you just do not matter. Wishing aloud that the world catered more specifically to your personal wishes and desires… well, that’s not how it works. It’s missing the point, actually. Because the point is not, and never has been, you. The point is everybody. So you get up every morning, and you put on your armor, and you make things change.

Yes!

Pictures for sad children is a quietly sad comic featuring simply drawn characters expressing very honest and simple desires that resonate deeply in a ever more complex world. There is no frustration in their contemplation of the world, only a wonderfully disarming honesty. Like this:

A softer world is not really a comic at all. Sure, it presents itself through a standard layout of three panels, each containing part of a photo. Together, the three photo panels frame the sordid, candid, and poetic prose that describe unexpected situations, recall sore memories, make bold manifestos – all sparkling in their brevity:

Another thing that I enjoy immensely about both comics is the facts they use the hidden picture “alt text” to add a little secret extra dimension to the comic, often twisting the words or pointing out hidden details in the art. Just hover your mouse cursor over the images to get the text (but note that the alt text on my blog is stuff that I have put in. To get the original comic alt text, you should go to the sites themselves).

Have fun.

I believe 2009 will be the year when the question of how society should be arranged will cease to be an idle, abstract topic, dwelt upon by ivory-tower-intellectuals after a few glasses of wine, and will instead enter the workday mainstream with a vengeance.

These discussions, de Botton predicts, will lead to the rediscovery of thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Ruskin. Most have heard of Marx, but I knew little of Ruskin. So, inspired by de Botton’s article, I read Ruskin’s essay Unto this last.

Written in 1860, “Unto this last” reads as the foundation of many of the tenets of the welfare state we know today: minimum wage, public health care and schools, unemployment benefits, and so on. The title is a reference to Christ’s parable of the vineyard, which Ruskin uses to support his argument that all workmen should receive equal pay, as they all have the same needs, even if they haven’t worked equally hard.

And that touches upon a central part of Ruskin’s argument: That merchants, manufacturers, capitalists have a social obligation above that of merely making a profit for themselves. Soldiers, teachers, doctors, and lawyers all have an honour code integral to their profession that are easily recognized as central to the well-being of their society:

The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.
The Pastor’s to teach it.
The Physician’s to keep it in health.
The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.
The Merchant’s to provide for it.
And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.
“On due occasion,” namely: -
The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle.
The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.
The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood.
The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.

Similarly, the merchant is obliged to ensure both the quality of the products he provides, as well as his word in his engagements with his customers and employees.

Basically, what Ruskin is advocating is a sort of primordial Corporate Social Responsibility: That corporate entities are obliged to focus on the needs of the people it interacts with above mere profit maximisation. Acquiring material wealth in its own right is of little value, it is only the life you lead, as he concludes, forcefully: “There is no wealth but life.”

I found a great introduction to Ruskin’s work in this documentary, which also explains in greater detail how he meant the above statement to be interpreted. It is also some of the best and most compelling art history I’ve ever seen:

Ruskin, a very conservative man in many regards, saw society like an organism or a natural habitat or an eco-system: all its parts completely interdependent, constantly striving to maintain equilibrium. Wealth, then, is our ability to help those around us, as well as being helped when we need it. But whenever this mutual aid ceases and parts of the system care only for their own self-interest, that is what Ruskin calls corruption.

Ruskin saw capitalist industrialization as such corruption – a disruption of interdependent equilibrium of old, where artisans infused their work with their individual creative soul, combining home life and work life in one harmonious whole (Ruskin had some fairly romantic ideas of what medieval life was like).

What I find so compelling is Ruskin’s insistence that mutual aid ought to be a matter of honour above petty personal concerns and ambitions. All professions should mind the well-being of society as a whole as well as their individual self-interest, for we are all dependent on one another. Doctors, teachers (well, pastors at Ruskin’s time), soldiers and lawyers all have clear honour codes, ritually established through oaths, pledges and creeds defining their professional obligations to society.

But merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and the like lack such an honour code. And in the past 40 years (or more), they have embraced the neo-liberal notion that the market – and individuals’ rational economic self-interest – would provide the necessary means to maintain society.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

And now more than ever, merchants and others providing goods and services to a society should be expected to be as honourable as every other professions. Especially in a globalised world where the consequences of one’s actions – both socially, economically and environmentally – might not be immediately evident.

What might such an honour code look like? Well, Ruskin offers a rough idea:

In all buying, consider,
first, what condition of existence you cause in the producers of what you buy;
secondly, whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer, and in due proportion, lodged in his hands;
thirdly, to how much clear use, for food, knowledge, or joy, this that you have bought can be put;
and fourthly, to whom and in what way it can be most speedily and serviceably distributed;
in all dealings whatsoever insisting on entire openness and stern fulfilment; and in all doings, on perfection and loveliness of accomplishment; especially on fineness and purity of all marketable commodity: watching at the same time for all ways of gaining, or teaching, powers of simple pleasure, and of showing in simple things which even the poor enjoy — the sum of enjoyment depending not on the quantity of things tasted, but on the vivacity and patience of taste.

Today, there several attempts at making such merchant honour codes. There is the UN Global Compact, the Fair Trade certification, even the International Co-operative Alliance’s statement of co-operative identity.

But I find that there are two problems with all of these:

One: There are very limited options for sanctions against any member who breaks the rules. They are not legally binding in any way. For such an honour code to work, it needs to have clear cultural, social and legal implications – similar to the pledges of other professions. Ideally, it would be something like a GPL license for ethical business conduct.

Two: They focus on companies, businesses or products, and not for individuals. Taking social responsibility is not something that an incorporated entity can do on behalf of its employees and shareholders. It is an ethical commitment that each individual must make and believe in. In a way, it is a return to the more spiritual meaning of Christ’s parable: Unto this last will be expected the same ethical commitment.

One way of doing this may be to return the ideas of the co-operative movement: Where each stakeholder – employee, customer, supplier – has an equal say as well as ethical commitment and responsibility for the conduct of the business as a whole. I find that the co-operative movement, anchored locally and centered around a shared code of conduct may well have a renaissance with the emergence of new digital social tools. But I’ll have to ponder this some more.

Input is welcome.

Now, consider Garfield. Probably the best-selling comic strip in the world. The basic premise is that you have a fat, ego-centric cat who enjoys annoying his lonely owner. The sarcastic drive of the cat dominates every other character in the strip. But what if Garfield was just a figment of poor Jon’s imagination?

Well, now, with Garfield minus Garfield, we can see what Jon’s life would be without Garfield. As the introduction reads:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Letâ??s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

You need to read a few pages to get the full desperation and crazed loneliness that the comic conveys. But then it’s downright startling.

Though there’s no real rhyme or rhythm to the links I receive, they’re always fascinating, and often do they expose surprising traits of modern society through what was once pop culture. Like this 1960s speculation of what USA of would be like if it was the USSA (aka the United Soviet States of America),
a comic book adaption of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Batman starring as Raskolnikov, or an archive of the instances of Superman being a dick to his friends:

I really can’t imagine how any publisher can justify printing something so bizarre. Contrasting this shameless appeal for attention is the work of Henry Darger, which, much like most of Kafka’s oeuvre, was never meant to be published or even shown to anybody. I cannot help but wonder how many people like him now use the Internet to publish their innermost thoughts anonymously, in that way multiplying the dark and wonderful corners of the Internet…

I continue to be amazed at the way the artists have used the eyes and glances of the people in each painting to give an immense sense of depth and drama. Confining entire stories to a single bat of an eye, forever captured on the canvas. Move the cursor over each image to get the title and artist – playful guessing at both before doing so is recommended.

I love this one. He looks so much like a gangsta rapper flaunting his gold. Compare.

It is simple and poetic insights in the everyday life of a man (drawn as an elf) and his family in Burlington, Vermont. I know this doesn’t sound like a thrill, but it grows on you. As you, in small inexplicable ways, come to recognize the rhythms and patterns, thus finding a picture of life itself. Not in the individual strips, but in the sense of whole that occurs when you feel intimately connected to those going-ons which you’ve never been part of.

And yes, I do have a favourite strip.