unfinished work

Tomorrow I start my new job at Laureate Inc. editing audio, creating Powerpoint/Keynote slides, doing AfterEffects work, and being an overall tech-grunt, yet thankfully with a payment. For a month I'll be working as something between an intern and a contractor to help offset the tuition increase at MICA. This will actually be the first 9 to 5 job I've ever held. I've worked as a freelancer, of course, but this'll be the first time that I'm stepping into an office to do my work.

I'm not very anxious about it. In some ways I'm looking forward to it. Mostly for the people that I'll meet—I've heard there's one interesting tech who works as a tech only to support his habit of being a painter. I'll probably be working in the same room as him. Maybe he'd be able to teach me more than just tech-related tricks, but also tricks on how to be a working, surviving artist in a fairly expensive world.

Of course, I've recently learned that it actually costs less, in terms of housing at the least, to live in Paris instead of Baltimore. This makes me want to jump on a ship and learn French, but I'll wait until my time at MICA is done.

In the meantime, however, I've been busy in other realms. I launched the latest version of my website, secondseraph, last night. There are a few pages that still need to be filled in, Writing sections mostly, but I've been needing a better and faster way to show my art and design work to prospective clients/galleries.

And speaking of galleries (I have clients), I might actually become a showing artist very, very soon. I hope to tag along with my mother in showing in downtown Silver Spring's local art gallery, Alchemy.

I've also had an interesting friendship and correspondence with a Uruguayan artist who happens to live in Maryland by the name of Luis Scotti (link lists him as a "master printer")—we hooked up only because we visit the same restauraunt, and I struck up conversation with him when I realized he was an artist.

Now he's considering looking at my work for an exhibition at American University sometime in September. The other artists are from everywhere—from the US to Portugal to Brazil. I'm awaiting a reply email from him after sending pictures of my latest pieces. I don't think I've ever been so nervous in my life.

But who knows? If I get in, maybe it'll be a break. But really, I'm more content to be painting more first. I've just started. I'm only a sophomore in art school. And the MICA professors, I'm sure, will lead me to the gates of the professional art world.

But I've had a habit of starting things young anyway. I shouldn't be surprised.

Otherwise, while trying to keep my head down and my thoughts coherent (scratch out that first part), I've finished an essay that I started about a month or two back, and it's since been playing into my theological/philosophical thinking ever since. After realizing how much this essay, languishing in its original form, was influencing my writing afterwards, I decided to go back and edit it—as well as flesh out the thoughts for both my sake and a reader who isn't inside my mind. It's called In Light of Eschaton, and that link should download a PDF of it from within your browser. Of course, that's if you want to read it.

But I am hoping that a certain person will read it. I want to send it to Jack Caputo, whom was one of the philosophers at the Emergent Philosophical conversation that I attended. I even had a short but good conversation with him during the conference lunch. I started reading, ernestly, his book The Weakness of God (check my reading list, there's a link to it there) and, lo and behold, found that his theology of the "event" and viewing the Kingdom of God in light of deconstruction was very similar to what I was trying to expound with my Eschaton essay. Of course, it's not like I came to this essay on my own, but I've been heavily influenced by what I learned at that conference—both from Caputo and Richard Kearney. Yet I didn't quite make the connection between Caputo's theology of the event and my fledgling attempts at something similar before reading the first chapter of his book.

So now I have my heart set on sending him a copy of the essay, wondering if he might read it, given that we already have a loose connection. If he does, maybe I'll just get some feedback from one of the leading philosophers of theology that's living today (if you look on his website, there's a picture in the leftmost corner of him having a lively discussion with a white-haired frenchman whose name is Jacques Derrida).

I'm not so nervous about that as I am about Luis Scotti. If Caputo replies, the worst of it will me having an email conversation with him—and what a wonderous thing that would be! I'd still have to face Luis Scotti in person, which is just as much a joy, and more, but I don't really consider myself someone who's good on their feet.

Nevertheless—forgive the philosophical sidetrack—but I do want to explore this, and these ideas, in further depth. In Light of Eschaton is just the beginning. It's more like the foundation of a series of ideas that I've had, which are now coming to fruit in various other writings—things like art as an organism, the aesthetic memory, and the place of poetry in art and literature as being the completion, or fruition, of philosophical (and perhaps theological!) thought. All of this based in a deconstructive framework that sees things as emergent, possible, and mysterious.

There's another essay that I'm working on that deals with philosophers, poets, and prophets as being the three main gaurdians of human thought and development. What I'm hoping to do, however, essentially, is to free myself from philosophy by using philosophy. Philosophy is a rational, almost scientific operation, but my love is in literature and poetry. I love philosophy too, but only to the point of where it informs the works of art, spirituality, and culture. After that, I really could care less. I'm interested in grounding philosophy into a way of life, and forgoing the contemplation of abstract properties that I truly will never know (although metaphysics still informs us). What I hope to do with these essays is provide a philosophical backend, almost justification, for a radical kind of poetic exegesis that is universal, in the sense that it is based upon a vision of the cosmos that is continually searching and evolving (it's almost cosmological), yet whose ultimate gain is the expounding, memorization, and re-recreation of the beautiful, spiritual experience.

For me, this is all about writing. And its all about painting. And it's all what writing and painting are about. If I can find a way to not contextualize my work, but to break it forth, I'll have a radical way of writing and seeing things where every moment that inspires, every thing that is beautiful, can be related to a deconstructed journey that searches for the divine—indeed, that makes up that very journey. I was doing this in high school by writing in my journals, but what I'm searching for now is much deeper and much more intense. From a purely artistic perspective, my doing of this is pointless, since art is for art's sake. But I'm not satisfied—both as an artist and a philosopher. Art, like philosophy, is not an independent entity, but a dependent entity—so dependent that I would call it symbiotic with humanity, which is my whole point in Art as an Organism. Similarly, with Eschaton, I'm applying an organic approach that I first did in art criticism, and artist criticism (ultimately concerned with the question: what is an artist, and what is their place in society?) to theology, which ultimately beckons us toward a mystical view (not an occultist view, which I actually save for a different philosophy) of the spiritual life that is impassioned, and no longer constricted to the categories of religion or anti-religion.

So I'm never short on ideas. And I'm not really short on ink either.

The only thing I'm short on is time.

If you feel brave enough, please consider reading my Eschaton essay. I'd love to hear some feedback on it.

I'm going to work tomorrow.