January 3, 2005. Montreal, night.
#7, 2005
The painting was begun with the originating text of what I heard about what I have learned today:

                What have you learned today,
what remembered and what forgotten?
I learned I will never let the lights go out until
 I have not the strength to light them.
Every color of life I will preserve until my powers fail.
I will love until the end.
There are no words, only the stuff of life.
The daily world and the symbol world, the mirrors face each other reflecting infinity.
I learned that the wood will never die,
even through the rot
it will pass on ceaselessly becoming.

And then at the end
(and in the red smeared base of the painting)
I wrote the new words I heard:
The deep heavy sound of FUCK

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Note: The painting was completed January 5 at Lac Ouaureau as #7, January 2005

January 4, 2005. Montreal, early morning.
Observation the next morning about #7, 2005.
From the start—was it in my stars?—it’s all I’ve ever known or made: cock, procreate, build. There at the end of the painting it came forth, the smearing streaking of life followed immediately at the base with the deep heavy sound of FUCK. As in my response to Vico, written on the plane on the way here…

 December 29, 2004.  En route, San Francisco-Montreal.

 From Vico: (The New Science, §§ 1089)

“Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.”
 Thus, he says, the course and return of history. But, what is the driving force: “eat, sleep, and fuck; and then eat, sleep, fuck again.” That’s how I learned in Jr. High Social Studies.
And why are we trapped in this round? The force of life to reproduce itself. We are its tools. And the course of History? Was so we could do it with less loss: we are life’s fight against death. We do it by reproduction, and civilization is so we can do it with less dying. That’s why we can never stop working. That’s why when decay sets in, we start over. Life won’t let us stop.

That’s right, “Keep ’em cummin’.” That’s life’s purpose and history’s meaning.

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