Can Art Matter?
Published In Heaven: Blood Filled Vessels 

Artist Statement by Ron Whitehead 


The older I get the more I realize I don't know anything, no one does. 
We're all guessing, feeling our way, grappling for answers. 
But every day I have encounters with the spirit world. We are all in perpetual motion, in transition, 
even when we are still, silent, listening. Listening is the greatest art of all. 
Not-knowing is the fundamental plowed earth of our being, not-knowing. It is our life source. 
Embrace the wind. Embrace my heart. Born to die, there is no safety, all is demanded. 
Expose yourself completely. Accept the consequences of your successes, 
and your failures, as no other dare. Enlightened mind is not special, it is natural. 
Present yourself as you are, wise fool. Don't hesitate, embrace mystery paradox uncertainty. 
Have courage. Through fear, and boredom, have faith. Be compassion. Embrace the wind. Embrace your heart. 
Not-knowing is the fundamental plowed earth of our being. It is our life source. Not-knowing. 

Can art matter? Why Published In Heaven? 

Today 'Specialization' is sold on every corner, fed in every home, brainwashed into every student, 
every young person. We are told that the only way to succeed, here at the beginning of the 
21st Century is to put all our time, energy, learning, and focus into one area, one field, one specialty 
(math, science, computer technology, business, government). If we don't we will fail. We are subtly and forcefully, 
implicitly and explicitly, encouraged to deny the rest of who we are, our total self, selves, our holistic being. 
The postmodern brave new world resides inside the computer via The Web with only faint peripheral recognition 
to the person, the individual (and by extension the real global community), the real human being operating 
the machine. The idea of and belief in specialization as the only path, only possibility, has sped up 
the fragmentation, the alienation which began to grow rapidly within the individual, radically reshaping 
culture, over a century ago with the birth of those Machiavellian revolutions in technology, industry, and war. 
And with the growing fracturing fragmentation and alienation comes the path - anger, fear, anxiety, angst, ennui, 
nihilism, depression, despiar - that, for the person of action, leads to suicide. Unless, through our paradoxical 
leap of creative faith we engage ourselves in the belief, which can become a life misssion that regardless of the 
consequences, we can, through our engagement, our actions, our loving life work, make the world a better, safer, 
friendlier place in which to live. Sound naive? What place does the Antinomian voice, the voice that, though 
trembling, speaks out against The Powers That Be, what place does this Visionary Outsider Voice have in the 
real violent world in which we are immersed? Are we too desensitized to the violence, to the fact that in the 
past Century alone we have murdered over 160 million people in one war after another, to even think it worthwhile 
to consider the possibility of a less violent world? Are we too small, too insignificant t o make any kind 
of difference? The power-mongers have control. What difference can one little individual life possibly make, 
possibly matter? 

Published In Heaven Titles make a difference. They are blood filled vessels racing to the heart. 

Today the X and microserf generations are swollen with young people yearning to express the creative energies 
buried in their hearts, seeping from every pore of their beings. They ache to change to heal the world. Is it 
still possible? Is it too late? Is there anyone (a group?) left to show the way to be an example? To be a guide? 
A mentor? James Joyce, King of Modernism, said the idea of the hero was nothing but a damn lie that the primary 
motivating forces are passion and compassion. As late as 1984 people were laughing at George Orwell. Today, as 
we finally move into an Orwellian culture of simulation life on the screen landscape, can we remember passion 
and compassion or has the postmodern ironic satyric deathinlifegame laugh killed both sperm and egg? Is there 
anywhere worth going from here? Is it any wonder that today's youth have adopted Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, 
William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, Robert 
Creeley, David Amram, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, The Clash, 
Sonic Youth and all the other Beat Generation and related poets, writers, artists, musicians as their 
inspirational, life-affirming antinomian ancestors? These are people who have stood and still stand up 
against unreasoning power/right/might, looked that power in the eyes and said NO I don't agree with you 
and this is why. And they have spoken these words, not for money or for fame, but out of life's deepest 
convictions, out of the belief that we, each one of us, no matter our skin color our economic status our 
political religious sexual preferences, all of us have the right to live to dream as we choose rather 
than as some supposed higher moral authority prescribes for us. 

I choose to be an antinomian warrior. 

Can art matter? Is it merely a gold exchange for the rich? The crucible of Published In Heaven alchemical 
art blends the terrible beauty of the natural world with questions of global social conscience. 
Published In Heaven poems stories songs art films photographs defy categorization. They are original. 

What is involved in the process of artistic creation? And how is that process related to space and time? 
What makes it possible for a handful of Nabi, of Druidhs, to maneuver in a molecular universe, 
where immersion at will into things and being other than self is readily accomplished, rather than 
the dreary chore of drudging through the thick cellular world? The answers are simply complex and like truth, 
time and water they constantly slip through fingers away, away but the past recalled becomes present again 
and in a sense when we look anywhere including back into the past we are looking with some form of 
anticipation which is an attribute of future time so where are we really? How do how will poets, writers, 
musicians, artists, filmmakers, photographers, inhabitors of the creative realms of the 21st Century 
respond to these questions? Some respond with ironic, comic faith, some with passion, with compassion, 
without which the intelligent sensitive creature will inevitably traverse the Valley of 
The Shadow of Death encountering Angst, Despair, Ennui, and possibly Suicide. 
The sensitive individual poet writer musician artist filmmaker photographer prophet, the empath 
whose natural ability is negative capability, ineluctably chooses the life-game quest of 
self-creation in the possibly infinite probability of possible realities in the self-contained 
inter-connected Ocean of Consciousness. 

So, where are you going? Please answer the question. Can art matter? 

There are no answers, only questions. 

My argument for The Ocean of Consciousness reaches back to the early experiential understanding 
of holy while reaching forward beyond the limits of dialectical gnosticism to an alchemy that 
also transcends divisions inherent in the alienation the fragmentation of Deep Modernism and 
the superficial chaos of postmodernism. I agree to a point with Turkle's argument that "The 
goal of healthy personality development is not to become a One, not become a unitary core, 
it's to have a flexible ability to negotiate the many - cycle through multiple identities." 
Having multiple identities, being legion, may lead to the apparent conclusion that we are 
walking on quicksand, that there is no solid ground that all is chaos. Even if you are a 
cryptanalyst and are able to turn into "plaintext the coded messages of Lacan but also the
 utterances of French existentialists, deconstructionists, poststructuralists, and all the 
other sibilant schools that flowed out of postwar France" (McCormick) what leads you to believe 
that the deadly serious egocentric humor of postmodernism where theory is lauded as more 
important than text (whatever text might be: book, song, painting, film, life, etc) can 
possibly be the final word? Deconstructing a text does not designify does not make the text 
less than what it was before you playfully surgically took it apart and, if you're a good 
mechanic, put it back together again even if you gave it new features. No matter how much 
taking apart deconstructing you do there will always remain something, a meaningful essence 
that cannot be destroyed. 

Passion compassion filled art matters. 

The poet writer musician artist filmmaker photographer prophet deconstructs realism.
 She employs the innovative technique of intercalation: the juxtaposition of scenes in time. 
She is Elus Cohen, Elect Priest of Expressionism, Cubism, Modernism, Dadaism, Surrealism, 
postmodernism but she is more. She is Master Alchemist, Master Magician. Her long slender 
hand reaches towards me, grabs my throat, and pulls me into the text, the book, the song, 
the art, the CD/DVD, the film, the photo. Manger du Livre indeed! I not only consume 
the book: the book consumes me. Now I, with her, am Elus Cohen juxtaposing scenes in time
 and space in her, in me, in the Published In Heaven Blood Filled Vessels Racing to 
The Heart Titles. Being Blood Filled my original perception, awareness, and senses are fractured, 
fractalled, and exiting the Blood Filled Heart Titles I find I am rearranged. I now have 
new perspective, awareness, senses. I look at others. Are their expressions different 
as they look at me? I must look different. I feel different. I am different. Me. And me now. I,I. 
Ha. Aha! Now as my hand moves this pen across this page I change. I am transformed.
 I am never the same. My molecules jump, sway, swoon, dance across the page, giggling, 
laughing, singing, happy to be new! It's spring again! They shout Yes Yes Yes!!! 

Mythopoetic Published In Heaven Titles create newly resonant myths. 

Knowledge, from the inception of Modernism and through postmodernism to The Ocean of Consciousness, 
is reorganized, redefined through literature, music, art, film, photography. The genres are changing, 
the canons are exploding, as is culture. The mythopoetics, the privileged sense of sight, of modern, 
contemporary, avant-garde poets, writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, photographers are 
examples of art forms of a society, a culture, a civilization, a world, in which humanity lives, 
not securely in cities nor innocently in the country, but on the acocalyptic, simultaneous edge
 of a new realm of being and understanding. The mythopoet, female and male, returns to the role 
of prophet-seer by creating myths that resonate in the minds of readers, myths that speak with 
the authority of the ancient myths, myths that are gifts from the creative realms of being, gifts 
from the shadow. 


- Ron Whitehead, poet/writer


copyright (c) Ron Whitehead 2005 & 2008 





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