House Of The Fisher King

House Of The Fisher King

House of the Fisher King.

Oils, 170×58 cm

Original Available For Sale (though I must restretch the canvas beforehand. I have never exhibited it)

This piece is about 10 years old. I did it while in first year university and it was one of the pieces that convinced me to study painting and not follow sculpture. The name is from Northern European mythology – the castle of the Fisher King was where the grail was kept according to some versions of the King Arthur myth.

I have been considering freedom. I… have been honest, I think, more honest than I have perhaps ever been.
The degree to which we are free. Oh… this… this thrills me and breaks my heart and encourages me to play and play and read into the empty sky. I am convinced that we rarely consider the extent of our freedom. And how central this is – how toxic and erotic.
We have choice – we all know we have choice.
Do I have porridge?
Corn flakes?

Do I ask my wife if I may drink her blood?

You see. Our constraints – they are almost completely self-imposed.
We have many that are utterly inescapable and they are real and should be understood and accepted. Fight them and we hurt ourselves. I am not espousing pain.
We have our morality. Morality in itself is a beautiful thing. It allows us to accept kindness as a part of our world – how our world would be were we to control it. We select our morality and it selects us as we grow. And it must rule us. This is one of the true and great things about ourselves, about man. Its bizarre form shapes our lives and holds the corners of the shadows of the world. It is innate to each of us and we should follow its commands.
And we have our physical limitations. We have, inescapably and mysteriously, the guides of our tastes.

Ah, yes. All these things hold us.
But sweet in the night and between our legs and in the hairy corners of our brains there are the things that exist in the cracks between these controls. What we must understand, what we CAN understand is that everything between the dictates that we know is within our hands.
We OWN IT.
This is fucking
OURS.

I think that we forget that we have such choice. And I know that very few people will ever realise what they can do. Consider. Think. What tastes have you wondered about? What heat have you never touched? What sun have you never seen that you could choose to see… How have you wanted to fuck but have never fucked?
Your belief is also yours – it is liquid.
LIQUID.

Christian – then believe that majick walks the earth – pagan – believe for a day that Christ was God’s son and that you may eat his body. For a day. Choose it.
Don’t be fooled. This is your choice. There
IS NO TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL

T.

No-one
Fucking

Knows

Here have this:
In the fifties there was a group of people in France who called themselves the “situationalists international.” And though I am quite sure it has been done since, they came up with the first reasonably realistic critique of capitalist society.
The fundamental point that they called attention to is something that is really obvious to everyone but rarely actually SAID.
The idea of capitalist society is this –
You will spend your life doing something that you do not want to do. You will do this in order to acquire things that you do not need.

Which is of course not only basically irrational and absurd, but when taken into the extremity of suffering that we go through, I think it is actually pretty much classifiable as well, HAH

Insane.

I feel this around me – it is all some great masque, the most accomplished and shared masque humanity has ever worn. Look around you at your desk, your clothes, the complexity and precision of each of your

Cleaning products

We must be aware of absurdity. I think that perhaps embracing it is the ultimate act of absolution.
“I forgive you.

“I do.

“You are absurd.”
If we can know it, just know this continually… more than that though. It is not capitalism that I abhor that drives me wild in the night. This is the joker’s face, but we are the skeins of wicker in this wicker-man (obscure reference perhaps. A wicker-man was, apparently, a form of Celtic sacrifice en masse. They would build a giant from wicker. They would fill it with people. And then they would burn it.) We bind ourselves and each other. We are, each of us, each step and breath living absurdity defying reason to apply meaning and importance to meaninglessness and impotence.
I don’t think this is wrong. We have no other choice. But we must, we should, we shall, we can, we could, we will, we may, we might, if we can if we can
We should KNOW this.
That this is what we are. Beautiful, impotent and meaningless. Absurd and completely free. Dipped in genius and majick each cell a miracle in its massive unlikelihood.
Awareness gives us power. It gives us choice. Ask, always.

Love to all

Paul

House Of The Fisher King belongs to the following groups:

All Things Poetic, Artistic, Philosophical, Practising the Dark Arts, Remodernist Painters' Group, Ruins, Ancient and Derelict Buildings and Spiritual Art Available for sale as

Greeting Cards and Matted Prints