We’re story creatures. We tell stories, think in stories, live out stories. We act them out and make them up and write them down. Truths and falsehoods both, it’s all stories. Stories can be told to inspire or to deter, they can be weaved to disguise or reveal; a single story can topple an empire or kill a god. What is Rome without the legend of Caesar? The fact that he was a real man who did real things is more or less irrelevant to the fact that his story helped forged anew an empire. The American Dream is a story. The Bible is a story. The second world war is a story.
So is Snow White.
The lines between truth and fiction aren’t always so clean-cut as we think. Facts are important. But the reality of things is sometimes less relevant than the story told about them. Not less important, less RELEVANT. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if the house is haunted or not, if no one goes there because everyone thinks it’s haunted.
Truth and fiction tend to mimic each other. Art and reality are mirrors. 
Just a thought.

-Jacky Paper

One of my art history professor’s lectures got me thinking.

When the world wars ended, an entire generation was scarred by them. Dada came out of that, and changed everything in art. The industrial revolution led to kitsch art, and ultimately to the postmodern and pop art movements, which in part were an embrace and repurposing of kitsch. Long before that, when the printing press first came around, illustration and fine art were changed by the new forms of distribution. 

The printing press changed the world forever, so what will the internet do?

I wonder what art we’ll make? A generation raised on brand new rules of communication and distribution. What will the internet generation leave behind? Lolcats and memes are the kitsch of our times, but what movements will we form? More than any point in history, our senses are constantly bombarded. Information on any topic imaginable is just a click away. Communication is instant. Our world is experienced through a screen, mediated and distorted by digital reproduction. I’m excited to see it happen, and to be a part of it.

Please, do not dumb yourself down.
Do not reduce yourself to the lowest common denominator.
Be yourself, not just the slogan of individuality but the truth that inspires that message. 

Homogenization does not come from cultures mixing together until the stew is a uniform brown; it comes from individuals allowing themselves to become a uniform grey. I implore you, all of you: Do not stop questioning, do not stop seeking, for the love of all that is great and good in this universe DO NOT STOP THINKING.

I truly believe we are better than they think we are. Who is ‘they’? They are the spin doctors and puppet masters who see people as collections of statistics. The jaded, cynical minds who think in checklists and sacrifice freedom to the altar of efficiency. Our lives are being tugged at by marketeers and product placement. Corporate propaganda telling us we deserve it all and only they can provide it; lie-smiths and false-tellers chanting at us in billboards and whispers, wearing us down until we do what they want and think the choice our own.

We are being fed lies, equal parts glamor and despair. That we deserve opulence by virtue of existence. That there is only evil and deceit in the world. That there is no value in those things that do not pad the wallet. There is a lie that floods the world, that profit is the ultimate validation. The thing is, we can stop that. It’s not easy but I believe we can do it. I believe that there is honor and goodness in this world. That there are intelligent people who know it is wrong to rape the earth and call it freedom. That there are decent folk who know it is wrong to violate another and excuse it as inevitable.

If you blindly consumed all that was put in front of you, without discretion,  you would slowly kill yourself on a diet of salads, potato chips and lead paints. If you wouldn’t do it to your stomach, please, don’t do it to your mind. 

So please, open your eyes. Think. Question your sources. Question your views. Question your parents, your teachers, your politics. Question your favorite comedians, question your friends. Question what I wrote here. Question yourself.

fading out
into wide-pupiled want
sense lost to sensation
tangled in perfume and nectar
salty sweat, skin soaked sweet
dripping honey.

-Jacky Paper

We come from afar and from a-near
Never there, and always here.
Trouping and leaping with flicks and twists,
dancing and flickering, shadows and mists.
From high mountains cold
and roots gnarled and old,
down rivers so swift, riding logs set adrift.
Up and awake from ‘neath our hills
to play and to gamble, to caress and to kill.
In dewdrops and whispers, we’ll kiss the world.

-Jacky Paper

I bite my lip when I think of you,
holding back a moan I wish was there.

People can be really down on reality. They talk about how much it sucks, and about how the fantasy worlds they love so much are so much superior. I don’t really get that. It strikes me as strange that in the same breath someone can dismiss reality and embrace a fantasy; as I have yet to find a fantasy that wasn’t about reality, and really, I have haven’t found anything in reality that wasn’t fantastical. It’s like saying “I only like the black bits of the zebra”.

-Jacky Paper

She drew down the moon and made love to her, caressing her crescents and kissing her pockmarks. She was the moon, and the wave, and the monthly blood. She felt the ocean moving in her, a sea of mystery and magic, felt it shifting with the moon. She swayed with the rhythms, the cycle of the tide… swell, and break. Flow in, flow out. The moon waxed, and waned, rose and fell. Her hips sway now in the arch of the crescent, captivating as the face of the moon. They sway to that rhythm, the dance of the moon and the tides. Her hips hold the life and the death and the ocean. Her heart now beats with the pulse of the sea.

-Jacky Paper

We live as though separate, but we’re not really. All races, cultures, lifestyles, orientations, they do exist. Pretending they don’t is silly. They’re differences. But they aren’t necessarily separations. The solution isn’t to pretend they don’t exist, and it’s not to hide from them because of whatever your ancestors or their ancestors did or didn’t do. The problems are real, and should be addressed. All the time. But they aren’t the result of one branch of humanity being evil, that’s never it. Celebrate and learn from each other, that’s what I think. The color of man’s skin is no more or less important or beautiful than the color of his eyes. Culture is important, but I truly do not think cultural differences need to be the walls people make them out to be. Like learning a new language, when learning a new culture you’re going to sound like an idiot for a while. You’ll probably get laughed at, you’ll probably make some mistakes. You might offend some people. But chances are they’ll forgive you so long as you’re clearly making the effort. And if you can get past your pride and your fear, you can learn so much. Our fear of the unknown, and our romanticization of the foreign and exotic, are both difficult things to get over. But just don’t dwell on them too much, I suspect that is the key. 

I have trouble getting over my pride, but I think I have to make the effort. If it’s going to hinder my growth, I need to allow myself to screw up and be laughed at for it, and then keep on anyhow. 

-Jacky Paper