‘Cant’ see’

Post no.5

It is very often ‘I can’t see’.

I can’t see the wind turbines today. I can’t really see what the point of being an artist is sometimes? I can’t see what this residency is doing, what is it about?

The only thing I can see is that the mirror or internal parts of my camera needs cleaning. I have tried to clean it before, those dark spots remain still! ‘Lens signature’, that’s a good one I think I’ll leave them there.

I am sitting here thinking about why I like these wind mills that are not there? But instead I’m remembering the fall of communism in the USSR. The fall of the Berlin Wall and how all those East European countries were exposed as having terribly corrupt communist leaders, who hoarded the countries wealth for themselves, almost like the Tsar’s that I suppose communism was reacting against. Then I was thinking about the capitalist system and how the banks collapsed through the greed of a money and profit, MP’s expenses, boosting there income, tax avoidance and the abuse of our welfare state. Housing benefit, tax credits unemployment benefit, national health and sick pay a list of great well intentioned things that are totally misused. The crime, the antisocial behaviour, the lost generations that some commentators are predicting all add together to make a gloomy picture of our modern technological society.

Then I forget what I’m thinking because I have been watching a small flock of sea gulls fly from Herne Bay all the way to here and past me and on still further.

It’s all about the individual isn’t it? Me Me Me, what I want. I want more, I want to upgrade larger, replace for better quality. Just a rampant consumer culture, which had a blip, but ‘growth’ is just around the next corner and we can start consuming again like we are used to and it will be back to normal soon.

Well I have noticed that I was reading about Totemic systems of social structure. These have been wiped out by integration programmes now. I am talking about Aboriginals in Australia and Red Indian cultures in America, all broken by expanding European ideas. These totemic societies seem romantic with no crime, but they focus on community and nature which are the issues we need to focus on as a modern society. They don’t focus on the individual; they focus on the welfare of the group or clan, we may equate this to local communities. It is done through identification with a nature, usually an animal. I can’t help wondering if these ‘primitive’ people were actually way more sophisticated than we thought and we should have learned from them and been influenced by them, and solved our own social problems if we had tried to see things their way.

I like the wind turbines because they are a totemic symbol for the wind people, who ever they are, but they must live round here somewhere?