by Jon Rappoport
When Walt Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric,” and when he wrote his long poems, he was doing a kind of art that also sustained his own physical form and made it more alive. He saw healing everywhere and he created it and he broadcast it. He projected, into the American dream, a lightning bolt of improvisation that carried energy right down into the cells of the body.
If you were to open his book of grace and read out loud, boldly, and with energy, Song of Myself, you would experience a piece of this great unknown territory. It would enter your blood and brain and taste buds and carry a new spring.
There are some people who hear the word CREATE and wake up, as if a new flashing music has begun.
This lone word makes them see something untamed and astonishing.
They feel the sound of a Niagara approaching.
They suddenly know why they are alive.
When people strip away all the hogwash that has been passed off as spiritual enlightenment for centuries, fire IS what they are left with. The creative fire IS the IT they’ve been after. IS the real thing. Finally.
Ninety-nine percent of the world has been trained like rats to adore systems. Give them a system and they’re ready to cuddle up and take it all in. If they have questions, or if they want to argue, it’s about how to tweak the system to make it a little better. And with every move they make, they put another blanket over the Fire Within.
You can’t make THE CREATIVE into a debating society, because people will turn that into another system. You have to go for actual experience.
Imagine you’re suddenly a singer in the middle of a choir. That’s your whole life. This choir has no sheet music and no plan. The choir just sings, all at once. There is no together and there is no leader and there is no imposed harmony. There is just the choir. Everyone sings. It makes no sense. But you do it anyway. It’s chaos. It’s titanic and bizarre. But eventually, out of the chaos and in the chaos you find a wild beauty no one has ever heard before. It happens. And it makes the whole body and the whole mind and the whole consciousness go into a state of ecstasy.
That would be a creative experience. No one would be able to walk away from it and analyze it or label it. No one would be able to devalue it by comparing it to something else. No one would be able to debate the fine points, because there were no fine points.
I’m always amused when people discuss art as if it’s some sort of perfumed and expensive turned-out fruitcake. As if art exists in a room where the initiated are permitted to make a few deft comments in a vacuum. As if art is a few dollars more for something that hangs on a wall.
Art is a word that should be oceanic. It should shake and blow apart the pillars of the foul smug boredom of the soul.
Art is about what the individual invents when he is on fire and doesn’t care about concealing it. It’s about what the individual invents when he has thrown off the false front that is slowly strangling him.
Art is about the end of mindless postponement. It’s about what happens when you burn up the pretty and petty little obsessions. It’s about emerging from the empty suit and empty machine of society that goes around and around and sucks away the vital bloodstream.
Art is about destroying the old order and the new order and the present order, with a glance.
It’s about spearing the old apple on the point of a glittering sword and opening up the whole rotting crust that has attached itself to the tree of life.
It’s about shrugging off the widely praised harmonies of the living dead.
If art is a garden, the garden grows like a hurricane. It fills the heart many times. It marches out to the trees at the edge of the forest and into the canopy. It brings out cactus and rose and iris and magnolia. It erupts and subsides. It explodes after the rain. Like the famous Simon Rhodia, who made serpentine towers in Watts, California, from glass and metal and ceramic castoffs, the author takes his garden into unknown territory.
Like Johnny Appleseed, he goes wherever he can, as far as he can, until whole hillsides and roadsides and riverbanks are absorbed. Re-making the world.
At night he dreams of new countries where he can lead the garden. Where chard and tomatoes and tulips and lilies and turnips and oak and maple and aspen and palm and plum and spinach and gardenias and goldenseal and lilacs and hydrangea and rhododendron and corn and flax and pine can sprint to the horizon.
He is the general of this army and the foot soldier and the drummer and the hero. Stroller in the wind. Engraver, muralist. Titan. A dozer in the desert flower, the sailor along banks of green saplings. The driving rain and the drying sun. A black leopard in miles of forest.
A maker of music who has simultaneously set a hundred orchestras in miles of red reflecting canyons playing a symphony that has no beginning and no end but only an endless middle.
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix
