Titan

I remember exactly where I was when Titan first shone its elaborate luster upon us.

Artistic Statement

We were living in times that could be described as demoralizing if the word had truly entered our collective psyches. But in 2015 it was still not yet fashionable to throw that term around, for we had yet to witness the unbelievable power one can yield when seeking to pervert language.

My days were filled with the embarrassment of the struggle needed to simply live. We were suffering through 2008’s money-printing, the inflation making any form of living insanely cost prohibitive, the notion of adequacy determined by what excess was thrown behind your work output and not merely the standard. The fact was that it was growing harder and harder to justify the effort. But then came the declarations of putrid insanity: racism was systemic, and never practiced at the individual level. Yet simultaneously, one’s “lived experience,” became a crucial talking point - the most individualist thing imagineable. We lived in a “rape culture,” yet were satisfied by barely wearing anything at all while outdoors in the hot NYC summers. We seemed blissfully unaware of all the children we’d killed and maimed over Obama’s years of terror reigning control over the US. We were never speaking up on the actual horrors that were ours to own. But we were happy to make them up, to suffocate in the smugness of having never read a book on these topics, of having never listened to an actual victim of this country’s horrors. We were content with random social media tidbits defined and perpetrated by intelligence agencies. We were getting hit at all ends by those without the slightest clue of how to think. Suddenly, the wisdom of the crowd had become the tyranny of the majority.

This transformation had many of us retreating into our own heads to avoid having to wrestle with the contrasting and contradicting sentiments. Our senses proved one thing quite dramatically, while the speech, the communications, the media, and the increasingly horrific sights of the public square, all were detailing something illusory and quite untrue. Who wouldn’t, if they knew of this, go back to the classics? To Greek mythology. To Aristotle. To Socrates.

Titan is an imposing force with which nobody may reckon. Its supremacy is all but forgotten yet it may never leave us. It may be a moon but it is more human than our own, and it is more forceful than any modern hip-hop warrior king. She has weather. She has class. Her nitrogenic encompassment produces rivers. But not of water - of methane. It shrouds itself in an orange cloak and produces for us not just a beautiful image of living but also a sincerely perverted sense of survival. We may see her surface as inviting and exotic but landing on her will strangle us into a collective suicide mere moments later. There is nothing but death and misery uopn her surface, yet we see its parallels to us and yearn for it.

We yearn for the time we had nothing to go on, for when we had thoughts and we had disciplines. But pitiful extravagance is where our people will go when the Earth cannot satisfy our basest perceptual desires and we thus yearn for the retreat to Titan - to our demise. To our misery. To our forelorn auspices of certainty.

Titan was the name for the horrific monster that exploded into our surface back in 2015 and she has not left us, and in fact, has shrouded us all in her toxic bosom. We fail to understand her majesty because we came to her, rather than inviting her to understand us. My God - we’ve produced a monster of ourselves and allowed it to form the most sticky, exothermic asphalt as it plunders our open minds and our ravaged hearts. We, the Titanness people - the lobotomized worry! We have no certainty left. My goddess, my Titan, my grand chancellor, my horror!