Let us hope my friend that your appreciation of your wife grow in direct proportion to the size of her underwear
My friend Peter van Straten is cool. He is definitely in the world not of the world and his art bears testiment. Speaking and being around him (and his amazing family) is breath of fresh air and reminds one of different ways of being and expressing yourself. Take a look at his fantastic paintings But nothing I could say says it better than Peter:
Every person has a distinct relationship with his own life, a different attitude to the fact of his own existence. However, certain attitude types are discernable.
There’s the lucky majority, who regard their own existence as no more strange, or interesting, than a sunrise. Then there are those who feel that their presence amongst us provides evidence of the Universe’s foresight and generosity – those who feel that their existence is a gift to themselves and others. Then of course there are those who are angered by their own existence, and doubly angered by a Universe sick enough to produce them. Those who would like to leave as soon as possible.
And then there are those who are just genuinely puzzled by there own presence on this planet. Those who – despite a perfectly adequate and reasonable amount of daily happiness – cannot help feeling that they are the victims of some horrendous administrative error, somewhere out there in the vast blackness. And since most schools of spiritual thought advise against suicide, and since these people, as we’ve indicated, are not really miserable so much as just bewildered, they are faced with the task of having to kill eighty years or so, before they can return from whence they came, and deal with whatever legal conflicts might arise from their case.
One such person is Peter van Straten, and he decided early that the only way to compensate for the mischievous slight of hand that landed him in something as lame and embarrassing as a body, would be to use that same body for its greatest possible purpose, namely, the creation of art – perhaps the only acceptable defence for the physical. But, absurdly: as soon as he set his body on this path, his mind followed suit and started to fill with questions. Questions so fascinating, that an obsession with their solution made him forget to be upset about existing, and thus led him into the forest of illusion about which our Buddhist Friends warn. There were questions about everything: why do the religious discourage humorlessness, when humour is our most divine attribute? What killed Whimsy in art? Was it the Second World War? Why are there no parts of this planet set aside for experimental modes of governance? Would it be possible for a military dictatorship to enforce liberal principals in pursuit of utopia? Etc. All of which certainly helped the months and years speed by. He also became obsessed with that mockingly thin layer of rainbow-oil on life ‘s water, that layer we call beauty. He wanted to make goose-flesh beauty by the running meter. He wanted to make oil paintings with the same transcendental luminosity of the old masters. But above all he yearned to think beautifully. Like many deluded mystics before him, he believed that he could think his way to enlightenment, perhaps even instant enlightenment. He often dreamed of a thought so vast in beauty and implication that the brain that thought it would instantly haemorrhage, leaving the thinker a blissed-out, drooling, idiotgenius, who would be freed – if not from the karmic responsibility of lives to come – then at least any responsibilities remaining in that particular life. But such was his secret fear of actually reaching enlightenment – End Game of the Soul – that he decided (as so many others had done before him) to use religion to slow down his pace of understanding. However, since even his favourite pre-fabricated religions, such as Zen Buddhism, and Sufism lacked sufficient manoeuvrability of vision, he realized he would have to start his own religion. This he did, and he remains its High Priest (and grounds-man) to this day.
He preaches The Path of The Layered Way, and warns against the conceptualisation of unlayered events of any kind. He advocates the use of constant (though gentle) self-mockery in the interests of reaching the profound bliss of insignificance-awareness. He is a tireless campaigner for the fusion of spiritual and psychological disciplines, since each is the other’s blind spot. He pursues all that is most evocatively mysterious, and he teaches transcendence through the mundane. He is deluded and amused. He is an absurd visionary thought-freak. He is neither an artist nor a romantic, but a Utopianist to the end, drunk on the mere possibility of transcendence. But do not judge him to harshly, for – strictly speaking – he does not exist.
Also at http://curiousdale.posterous.com/artist-peter-van-straten
