Why can't I stop looking at you?
Cave walls, good rooms and the reason Plato loves social media
“So what.
I’m sat here, aren’t I?
Is there any more you need?
Attendance you can demand.
But attention.
Focus.
Those are mine to give.
Give my eyes and mind
something of value,
and I’ll give you their time.
Until then,
I’ll be here,
looking at what I want,
and seeing it
how I want.”
Something made me look…
Just one more time.
Barely a peek under the curtain
More a moment of hesitation
And now it has me.
I want to be free.
But it already has its teeth in my neck.
Whether I like it or not,
it has me.
Blood has been drawn,
and I’m using everything I can
to fight it.
I want to ignore it.
I want to pretend it’s irrelevant.
That the fireworks shooting through my veins,
from the wound it’s created
to the brain it’s corrupting,
don’t matter.
That they are shadowy blips
in my world of colour.
But they are not.
They are painful.
And I can’t see anything else.
It happened before the teeth broke the skin.
Something stopped me from running.
Something stopped me from thinking,
something was wrong.
Why did I let it get so close?
Did I think it was harmless?
That it was beneath me?
Easily avoided,
like a train down tracks?
Or worse,
maybe I wanted to see it closer.
I wanted the disgust.
I wanted to feel superior.
I wanted to feel wanted
and now here I am
Lost in it.
Is it the warmth
of the trickle down my neck,
or the false sweetness
on my tongue
that makes me think.
I’m tasting
what it tastes
in me.
whatever it is
I’m here
and all I can feel
is it stuck in me.
Draining me
of everything
I once was.
And whatever I do,
it won’t let go.
What am I even looking at?
“Where your focus goes,
your energy flows”
- Disclosure (and many others, obviously)
After watching Athens execute Socrates, the man he believed to be the wisest and most truthful of his time Plato wrote The Republic.
Ten books that I until recently, I misread as a manifesto for freedom.
It isn’t.
It’s a response to failure.
A failure of politics.
A failure of crowds.
A failure of truth surviving contact with opinion.
The Republic is a twofold instruction.
On one side, it shows how a person might become free.
How once can turn around.
How once can see differently.
On the other, it outlines how a system must be built so that not everyone turns around.
not at the same time
and for most
not at all.
His belief is simple,
not everyone is supposed to see the fire.
Plato’s cave is a governance model.
Some are meant to see.
Some are meant to live without needing to.
We’ve been building our reality around it ever since.
In the modern world,
most people,
don’t want to know what they are really looking at.
Rightfully so.
It’s scary.
“What if I cannot make it.”
“What if I am not part of it.”
“What if it hurts.”
There are a million ways that trying to understand reality can completely fail you.
After all
Ignorance is bliss.
But what’s hitting me now is how long we as a group have understood this idea.
As long as people have been writing things down.
From the many, to the few.
For the few, the many.
Initiation
I see it most clearly on my spiritual journey.
The veil drops.
The gap opens a little.
The doors of perception widen.
Sometimes through healthy means.
Sometimes through coercion.
Either way, the door is more open than it was a minute ago, and I can see something new.
And every time, two figures appear.
One faces me.
They offer gifts that turn out to be poison.
Ideas that sound like truth and slowly take me down a rabbit hole that doesn’t actually go anywhere but backwards.
They’re at every opening.
the ones that have seen something about us, and chosen to benefit from it.
The other figure never faces me.
They’re always turned away, going further.
Focused on the work.
Not hiding, not recruiting.
Over time, with all the little experiments on myself
I’ve managed to open some doors.
and over time I’ve realised I’m scared
That I become the first instead of the second.
Poets
Plato banned poets from the perfect city for a reason.
They unpick reality too early.
They show people things they are not ready to see.
They do it in forms that defy explanation.
That same feature of our freedom is appearing again now.
Poetry jailbreaks systems.
Unpredictable form confuses code.
Systems are built to recognise patterns.
Artists exist to become something that did not exist before.
It is almost impossible now to stand on a box
and say something novel
without submitting to an industry, market or algorithm.
To be heard,
we have been forced to create ideas
in a form that the system accepts.
Which is why the artists
who have something novel to say
are not looking to stand on boxes.
They are looking for places to stand
that don’t require one.
Le Marche
I have an unconventional opinion when it comes to the art market.
It is good form for artists to judge it.
To poke it.
To call out the pedlars and collectors in the audience.
I get it.
I have done it.
I will do it again.
But it is never the enemy.
It does something that is structurally rare.
It creates rooms.
Not metaphorical rooms.
Actual rooms.
Rooms with budgets, lighting, press, collectors, critics, and enough space for a work to say what it has to say.
And sometimes the room matters more than the work.
If a tree falls over in the woods…
Without the room, the work never meets the people it was made to change.
But here is where our art world conversations could change from where they are to somewhere that benefits the world.
This real conversations we shuold be having shouldn’t be about sales.
Nor aesthetics.
Or what is good art?
It’s about our Audience.
about our Conversations.
And who is actually listening?
We’ve been in such a long conversation with ourselves.
That we forgot to bring along our friends.
Maybe we were scared
or maybe we wanted to keep it to ourselves.
Rooms
We need rooms that hold the kinds of conversations people are avoiding everywhere else.
Conversations about what is happening to perception.
About what is shaping what people see, what we fear, what we want, and what we call true.
The old guard would be interested.
The collectors who built their taste and collections before reality became a feed.
They might be on the cap table of the new world.
They might even benefit from it.
But they are still the same humans who turned away from the cave wall to see the fire.
And they feel when something is missing.
They know the difference between seeing and being shown.
So I think they’d want to see.
A place where the people who turned around can speak plainly about what they see.
A room where you can admit that the cave wall has changed.
Curated shadows.
Algorithimcally personalised shadows.
Shadows tuned to change according to your nervous system.
And with a real conversation, the aesthetics will come.
They always do.
The form will emerge from the discourse.
The work will emerge from the pressure.
It may seem like a dark room at first,
maybe one that hasn’t got many people in it
but once the lights go out,
we begin to see the world how it really is
before we started making fires.
Poets Corner
III Remembering forgotten summer in a flicker of dead leaf, flying attachment to trees, life and warmth of sun in the distance. Remembered summer hot, but not, too hot. Sunburnt skin, smoke on the pike, California on fire – all forgot. Sinking into the sand of it, pretending away the freeze. - Thomas May IV Spring was there too, a world waking up. Seasons containing seasons themselves. Take me to winter’s winter, buckets empty of balloons, balloons empty of water on flesh. All will be filled and thrown: forgotten, remembered, forgotten again. - Thomas May
Final Words
I think I’m trying to name that feeling you get just before the weird thing we’re all looking at becomes normal.
Someone’s always making a new cave wall for us to look at.
You walk up a lot of hills in the army.
It’s safe to say it is always a false summit.
Love you loads
- R x
