The Artist, The Radical

*Journal Entry by Hamzah Taleb

The art that radicalized you is the art you are forced to create and recreate. Your one hope as an artist is to get as close as possible to that of which gave you the gift of artistic vision. To continue to consume art is to continue to be radicalized. Therefore, breathing new life into your legs as you chase the sun. Art can never be truly recreated so artists are cursed with fondling a fruit they can never bite into. 

This is why art cannot be separated from politics, from memory, from the brutal inheritance of your name. The artist is not a dreamer, but a documentarian of altered states. They turn pain into blueprint and beauty into weapon.

You do not owe the world serenity.
You owe it the truth, and if that truth disrupts, fractures, or humiliates, then so be it. Your task is not to soothe, but to awaken.

To create under occupation; of land, of mind, and of memory is to refuse erasure. You do not seek universality. You seek to make the particular, undeniable. It is the remnants of a house shelled before morning prayer, the sound of keys to a door that no longer exists, the weight of a surname caught the mouth of a checkpoint.

In this sense, creation is continuation, it is keeping the story alive, even as they try to bury it under new maps. 

You do not write to be read. You write because to remain silent is to participate in your own disappearance.

Just as we cannot exist in the same moment twice, nor can we return to experiences, nothing made by humanity can ever be created in the same way again. Reshape your own object of radicalization, mold the bloody teeth, and caress the clichés of your art into something tenser, thicker. Create and create until your art is used to radicalize others. 

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