On God, Surrealism and DA Projects

My dear friend,

I am sorry to have been out of the loop of all of your energetic efforts here of late. I am facing financial difficulties and badly need to find new income sources. This has been a distraction from my art and this community.

I suppose there are other reasons that loom as large in my present situation, and I will mention two. I have been re-examining my early development with regard to both my religious training as a small boy and my early absorption of surrealism, thanks to my father's library and art collection.

With regard to religion: By the time I was eight or nine I was convinced that I was a freak of some kind, that I was missing the "God Receptor" that everyone around me seemed to have built into their psyche -- the Sunday school, Bible readings at home, the sermons, etc., all fell flat for me. The God of the Old Testament seemed a horrible monster and the God of the New, a sadomasochist, and all of it seemed a confusing jumble of impossible and disturbing nonsense. I talked my parents into letting me skip church at age ten, and found myself excluded from a large part of family life. No one offered to help me to find a way to believe, to have blind faith, and in retrospect I am grateful for that. In my early teens I discovered psychedelic drugs and dozens of esoteric subjects to study, and in some way I think I spent the next 30 years as a skeptical agnostic, trying to grow a God receptor through the use of drugs and the intentional derangement of the senses and constant studies, exercises, meditations. The whole project was a complete failure, although artistically it had some interesting side effects. Mostly I succeeded in staying intoxicated for thirty-some years and missing out on a lot of life, and failing to mature in some ways, because of this quest.

Revisiting this terrain with a few short years of sobriety to steady me, I find that I am now quite happy to say that I am, in fact, an atheist. In my 52 years I have found not the slightest reason to take religion seriously, and the time has come to fully admit this to myself -- religion, the occult, superstition, the supernatural realm of the spirit -- these are all children's fairy tales to me.

Surrealism (and its many offshoots), my father's other major influence on me, served as my sanctuary all those years, my refuge from quotidian reality, my comforting dreamspace, my magical cave, and my excuse for not meeting the world on the world's terms. Posterity, if it grants me a small footnote, may well lump me with the latter-day surrealists, but for now I need a bit of distance.

Sorry to not be jumping on the Exhibition cart. Part of me wants to jump in and lend a hand, but I cannot at this time.

-James

PS: By the way, evolutionary biology is one of the most fascinating, awe-inspiring fields of human research that I have ever delved into. The story of DNA on this planet is more marvelous, subtly nuanced, elegant, wide-ranging, free-wheeling, beautiful and richly comic than any scripture pretending to absolute Truth -- imho.

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

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