Swale House on Governors Island June 1. 2026 Photograph by Aviva Rahmani

My essays this month will be briefer than usual as I complete a residency at Swale House on Governors Island in New York City, for the new project, “Tidal Flushing.” This Sunday at 1: PM, I will host a casual live chat on the porch of Swale House about the project. It won’t be recorded. What I hope to discuss are some of the choices we face now that climate change is forcing upon us all. One of those choices is political but I have tried, in these essays, to stay focused on systemic implications rather than individual situations. Nonetheless, like many, events trigger big emotions: rage, terror, disappointment, and my reflex is to attach my feelings to individuals. But the reason I try to stick with systems, is that even though systems might seem more abstract, if we can correctly analyze systems, we can also correctly identify where and how to intervene and create cascades of change. That is at the heart of why I developed trigger point theory and have often referred to it in these essays.

A recent article on the American aquifer documented that the United States has already drawn down its fresh water to the point that agricultural land, as droughts expand across the globe are in danger of no longer being sustainable. Another report states that El Niño will bring dire drought conditions to Southeast Asia and Australia.

These are realities that confront the entire globe as conditions for survival become ever more desperate and widespread and repercussions amplify. In me, these realities trigger the same emotions that flare up when I see politicians making choices that attempt to sweep these immense problems under an increasingly thin carpet.

In my personal life, I face dramatic choices now about whether or not to go ahead with selling my shorefront property to aquaculture fishermen. The choice is dramatic because if I go ahead, I lose my studio and the storage for my inventory. The cost of compensating for that loss may be prohibitive. A working artist without a studio is at an immense disadvantage in the market place. But as I have asked before here, will working artists of the future have either studios or marketplaces? AI threatens many creatives and benefits some. The gap between who benefits is deeper if we build in the ecological cost of AI. My personal loss, as systems tilt towards the haves and away from the have nots, is a loss that may reflect the choices and losses we will all have to make as we adapt to climate change. Right now, I’m not sure we have even identified not only the scale of those losses but precisely what they will be, except to know from the laws of physics and complexity science that there will not only be cascades of repercussions, but growing relational systemic failures and realignments: the terrifying uncertainties of the unknown unknowns.

In preparation for the forthcoming book I am submitting with my co-editor Gale Elston on art and environmental justice to Routledge, Dr. James White wrote in his Foreword, that artists stand at the frontlines now to ask the most difficult questions that will unlock our future. I feel like I am in the frontlines and that is terrifying.

I hope I will have a good audience Sunday to discuss these questions in more depth.

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Photo taken in 2021 from the ferry to Governors Island, NYC, where I will start working again on Tidal Flushing Monday June 1-14.

Please join me 1: PM June 6 if you will be in NYC, for a porch chat about my new project, Tidal Flushing, which I will be developing as part of my residency at SWALE House on Governor’s Island, New York. There won’t be Zoom access for the conversation but I will report after the fact. My residency is at the invitation of Patricia Watts of ecoart space. In the next two weeks as I perform this residency, I will be making a decision about whether it’s prudent to sell my studio and wharf on Vinalhaven Island, Maine to aquaculture fishermen. The sale would require me to find another place to store my inventory and another way to continue my practice. The porch chat will be about all the ways climate change is forcing unmanageable adaption on many of us and how we can commemorate those adaptations without self-erasure or denial.

Besides that invitation, this will be a relatively short essay. I am thinking a lot about choices these days, not just my own, although my own are pretty significant for me. Before I end the residency, I will have to answer to myself for what the cost to me will be and how my decision will determine my future practice. But I will make that decision with others and as a public event.

As sea level rises, and the climate changes, selling my studio, three feet from deep water and its wharf site may be a prudent bargain with reality. The choices I have to make are central to Tidal Flushing: will culture be sacrificed to expediency as climate change escalates? As more and more people become climate change refugees, as we will, how does that impact governance or environmental justice? And the ultimate one, the age-old animal question, how can we best negotiate conflicting desires and values?

I like the idea of finding a meeting ground between art and the fishing community but finding a new home for my life’s inventory and reconceiving what it may mean to have a studio at all are immense challenges: it’s just tiring work to think it through. It will also be a tremendous physical task to complete whatever the solution might be. But that is precisely what all climate change refugees are facing. It isn’t just me, or any of us alone.

As we head to the midterm elections across the United States, it seems that many choices come down to whether we will erase traditional values, whether it’s about how we support artworkers or democracy and whether we deny the realities of what we have done and are doing to our ecosystems. We have choices about what we adapt to live with and how. Do we find new solutions or adapt to a world driven by greed, denial and cruelty- survival of the fittest defined by might makes right, as some advocate? Alternately, can we choose to thrive together with creative solutions rather than murder and erase each other?

In Maine, we have several brilliant candidates for Governor of our state and they have all taken time to visit our little island, talk to us and answer our questions. It has been very civil and congenial. At least two of our candidates are refusing outside money contributions. There is open agreement that if one of the Democratic candidates wins, they will bring on the others to pool their experience and expertise. We have ranked choice voting so it will be interesting to see what happens. There is an old saying that as Maine goes, so goes the country. If that is true, there may be hope for this country. And the human species.

Whether we can adapt to the world we live in today and the future we have locked in, will depend on whether we can work together across demographics, or whether we will sink into the hopeless mire of disaffection, collapse and submission to despair. A former policeman who had been battered by insurgents at the January 6 riot fomented by our current “President,” expressed extreme bitterness over his experience of betrayal by colleagues and other people driven by what he identified as greed and lost to cowardice. Alternately, what could we accomplish if our values are not only grounded in empathy for each other but about service and altruism?

People do strange things when they give up and run away from reality or accountability. They can drown themselves in addictions and hurt people who love them. Life gives everyone of us an opportunity to adapt to reality, work with reality to change predictable outcomes, erase reality or erase ourselves. Sometimes the distinctions are pretty fuzzy. This time, I don’t see anything fuzzy about the challenges humanity must survive or how urgently we need pull together in the traces. The next two weeks, I will be working on my own clear view of reality, making drawings of what I see and pondering what choices that leaves me. I hope to engage directly with some of you about exactly the questions my choices evoke 1: PM January 6 on the porch of SWALE House on Governors Island, New York.

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“Red Squirrel at the Bird Feeder,” Photo by Aviva Rahmani 2026

Sometimes life happens. In case you missed my weekly essay, life is the explanation. May 9, I fell asleep at my post at MAC Book Pro and spilled coffee over my entire system. It died a sputtering death. I had been writing another essay for this series so it might be considered a form of murder suicide. Many people have told me for a long time that I work too hard. I once asked the late great artist Carolee Schneemann whether she thought it was possible to be a serious artist but not a workaholic. She replied immediately, “no.”

Since my tech debacle I have been making do with ancillary systems: the PC in my office mostly used by my assistant, Daisy Morton, and therefore utterly alien to my normal routines; my iPad, which I bought years ago, sure it would change my life and had not touched since and whose prompts are also utterly alien to me; and my cell phone. This is not adequate means to complete the two new books I’m working on, complete a large grant due yesterday, and a host of other tasks. But I did put in my Spring garden.

And I have also developed a close relationship with a local red squirrel, who spends all day gobbling up the bird seed in my feeder on the other side of the window that I face as I work. Nonetheless. I am continuing to develop my thinking about Tidal Flushing and have been practicing my singing for a concert in the local Union Church Memorial Day.

Tidal Flushing is all about how we will adapt to climate change. I think about that a lot and have to wonder what the future landscape will be for art after sea level rise has taken out all the coastlines and climate refugees have flooded arable land. Maybe this is a precursor to a time when the confines of my own mind will be my studio.

“Tolstoy & I 5-6-26,” Ultramarine cretacolor on pages of my late mother’s cyrrilic version of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” self-portrait as avatar for Sofia Tolstoya and the project as a metaphor of the relationship between Russia and the United States today.

I track demonstrations of civil disobedience, for example, currently at the Venice Biennale. Despite feelings of personal anguish, I try to deconstruct the relative success or failure of the tactics.

I feel conflicted about the current protests at the Venice Biennale. Altho I agree that the current leadership is committing genocide and must be held accountable, I don’t condemn every Israeli or think the solution is to eliminate the country. I wish I had a solution. I know many friends & family who are still working on finding solutions and have even lost their lives to defending justice. I have friends in Iran, Lebanon and Israel, and think and worry about them every day. I have come to truly hate religious extremists of all stripes and then hate myself for feeling that hatred. Worst of all are the uber-monsters profiting from this catastrophe.

As an activist artist, I am in solidarity with all the protests but am puzzled by why it’s just Russia and Israel and not the United States, which is playing such an outsized role in both genocide and ecocide? I also can’t endorse the self-righteous over-simplifications of systems we are all complicit in upholding by virtue of just living in the present. What I see discounted is the emotional labor mostly performed by women, to find lasting solutions.

Just saying “no,” isn’t always adequate. Sometimes even saying no is a bridge too far. Sometimes circumstances are ambiguous and complicated. That is generally true about the strategy of civil disobedience. There is a space between that needs excavation.

Leo Tolstoy is considered to be one of the founders of the civil disobedience philosophy. He grounded it very much in his Christian beliefs. But his wife, Sophia Tolstoya’s diaries tell a more complex tale that I have come to believe explains why civil disobedience doesn’t work in the long run to create lasting political change. I am thinking of India and the black civil rights movement in the United States. Right wing power in both cases, reasserted itself. Why and why do I think Leo’s marriage to Sophia holds a clue?

What is striking about Sofia Tolstoya’s diaries is that she never says no. Instead, she never stops introspectively considering how much more she could do to make a happier union. She is forbearing to a fault. She is indefatigable in seeing to her husband’s comforts, regardless of the discomforts, humiliations and stress for herself. In response, Leo seems self-centered, entitled and contemptuous. In the mid-nineteenth century, it would have been unthinkable for her to leave. She does occasionally speculate about what her life might be like without him but that is always brief and far overwhelmed by suicidal feelings and the occasional effort to off herself because she is trapped. Her husband insisted on access to her diaries and his writing is replete with references to what she wrote as his own material, even as he disparaged her in every way.

Instead of leaving she transcribed his manuscripts by hand, by candlelight, including “War and Peace,” which she transcribed, eight times, working deep into the night , damaging her eyesight, after managing their household, his publishing concerns and giving him editorial advice. Writing for the forthcoming anthology I am editing with Gale Elston, “Art, Law and Environmental Justice: Transforming the Commons,” I recounted that:

“... I began a new project, making drawings with pencils the same Ultramarine blue pigment used for Blued Trees, “Tolstoy & I.” These drawings were contemplations on Leo Tolstoy’s role in developing the resistance model of civil disobedience. I considered his theory in the context of Leo’s fraught marriage to Sofia Tolstoya, in which she bore him eighteen children while editing his writings. Parallels between the emotional labor of birthing a child and birthing art has long been cited. But legal decisions also require creative labor. The drawings are an extension of my research on liability, standing, originality and valuing art over economic dominance. Reciprocity, enmeshment and attribution are in the Pandora’s Box of looking at how and where these ideas and realities intersect. If Sofia Tolstoya’s diaries documented the immense emotional and intellectual labor that contributed to her husband’s work on civil disobedience, then if a wife or even a child benefits from a husband’s ecocidal behavior, are they also equally responsible? Where does attribution and liability end and overlap definitions of originality and standing?”

Sofia had little or no opportunity to say no, but she did resist in an other way. It wasn’t enought resistance to save her from Leo’s torments or fulfill her own potential, but it was a model I think Leo coopted. The model was to turn the other cheek, find her private joys in nature and music and bear witness in her diaries to what she was experiencing and seeing. Over one hundred and fifty years later, she might be heard and seen. The trouble was that Leo stole the model and worked at destroying the originator. And that, I think is the missing piece that keeps the socio-political systems intact that civil disobedience is intended to change..

What I have concluded is that when there is a lack of respect for invisible labor, big chucks of reality are ignored. That has always been true of slave labor, whether by people of color or women trapped in relationships they did not choose. Of course, that begs the question of what permits choice? I would argue that many people are trapped by social-psychological chains as solid as steel. Further, that the weak link in the evolution of strategic civil disobedience thinking is not only how Tolstoy exploited his wife, but how Feminist concerns have been detached from how social systems need to change. With that omission, any socio-political system will revert to a patriarchy and any patriarchal system will recapitulate cultural narcissism.

“The Blued Trees Symphony Global,” 2018 Daejeon, South Korea KRICT Gallery 10’x30’x15’

A substantial aspect of my practice studies and creates maps. Recently, I have been looking at maps of global patterns of drought. This isn’t something I am hearing much about. These patterns are being dramatically exacerbated by climate change.

June 1, I will begin a residency at SWALE House on Governors island, New Yor City. I will produce sketches for Tidal Flushing, my new intercontinental project about climate change. In HONGGEER, Inner Mongolia, I will expand The Blued Trees Symphony (2015-present), a copyrighted aerial symphonic score composed of “tree-notes” across miles of Noth America. The symphony challenges what Americans call the eminent domain rights of fossil fuel corporations. At the original Ghost Nets (1990-2000) site, which restored a former coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands and made it my home, I am considering relinquishing my wharf side studio to aquaculture farmers. In Daejeon, South Korea, I will open a show September 28 linking global patterns of drought and sea level rise to changes in Chongqing, China. Each of these sites are facing dramatic cultural and environmental changes in response to climate change.

It has always seemed to me that good art is about seeing honestly. Of course, the assertion of any truth in perception veers into long discussions of the philosophy of truth. But I am simply arguing for a very narrow aspect of truth, which is visual perception, determined by optics.

When I taught, I always used the example of perceiving a fist aimed at the face. if there is a direct line from the eye to the shoulder. The assumption with new artists, is that looks like a long rectangle from the knuckles to the shoulder. But thanks to foreshortening in depth, a form of perspective, the actual image will be an oval. The most famous example of the application in Western art of foreshortening is Andrea Mantegna’s The Mourning over the Dead Christ, which broke new perceptual ground at the time.

In 2022, I was invited to speak at Princeton. Before I accepted, I warned my hosts that I had no hope to offer. Spencer Koonin, one of the students who were inviting me replied. “We don’t need your hope. We need your honesty.” I decided I could do that. I have never thought seeing with an honest eye was simple but the task always inspires my curiosity.

Throughout this past winter and into the spring, I was developing the new work that has culminated with the launch of Tidal Flushing. The danger from drought is different at each site in form and scale but the consequences are similar: loss of arable land, threats to fresh water and fire hazards.

This past week, for the installation proposed in Daejeon, South Korea, curated by Yu Hyunju, I started studying international drought patterns in depth. In 2018, I had created another installation for Hyunju (see lead image), which included a photomontage of available land mass after projected sea level rise. What became obvious in that project, was that all terrestrial life could not fit on the remaining dry land and a lot of that dry land would be prone to drought.

A few years later, in a project called Fire Tigers for a digital residency with Arts Cabinet in the UK and modeler Olivia Haas at Kings College, we worked on global patterns of extreme fire regimes. It was no big insight that drought and fire go together. Now, as I work on drought, I am reminded of what I saw during that fire project.

Tidal Flushing began with my personal experience of sea level rise when the building my studio is in was threatened by storm flooding. But as the project has evolved, it has folded in the vulnerability of the island’s sole source aquifer, something that I worked on when I first came here in 1989. Going forward with aquaculture now to adapt to marine changes requires coastal fresh water. That carries freshwater risks for the rest of the island.

As I stare at the new maps I have of global drought patterns, consider the freshwater risks, think about fire regimes and what life is going to adapt to live with, I am also thinking about a big project I did with Jim White in 2007, Trigger Points/Tipping Points, for the “Weather Report” show Lucy Lippard curated for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. That project revealed the scale of disruption from climate change refugees colliding with conflict zones. Now I feel both stunned all over again and confused. What stuns, alarms and shocks me is simple: we are facing an imminent perfect storm of global patterns without many solutions. Billions of humans will not only be climate change refugees at a time when authoritarian regimes are insisting the doors are shut, but uncountable other species are going to be trapped on land that may not be fit for agriculture, let alone grazing, with scarce fresh water and in imminent fire danger.

What confuses me is that no one is screaming bloody murder about this rapidly advancing apocalypse. Complaining about climate change can seem very abstract. Bickering about who started wars or hurled the worst insults is an enormous distraction from what seems to me to be rapidly coming down the pike in our lifetimes. Trips to Mars and AI are not going to fix any of this reality. It also doesn’t help that we seem to be mainlining totalitarianism at the cost of dissenting opinions. Most of the dissenting opinions being sacrificed have been challenging the status quo, the same status quo that has brought us to the brink of this precipice. The priorities of tyrants rarely include the needs of ordinary people unless you consider sticking your head in the sad to be a viable lifestyle.

Are we really, really, really this stupid?

But then really, when I consider the drawings of global drought I’ve been staring at, I admit I didn’t see the pattern either until it stared me in the face. Well, I see it now. I just wonder whom else sees something but maybe isn’t talking about it. What I am pretty sure about, is that the future I saw in Daejeon in 2018 is coming closer, faster and not too many people are are paying much attention. What I foresee is a real train wreck if that continues, much worse than what most of us are suffering so far but maybe not so different than what we have already witnessed of global conflicts and scarcities. Just, more.

“The Sea Will Have The Last Word.” Installation with photography, drawings and painted branches also used as a set for an iteration of the Blued Trees Opera.

280”x680”x180” Anita Rogers Gallery 2024

Earth Day 2026, is the official launch of Tidal Flushing. This new project is about how climate change is dramatically changing the Earth and how we might adapt to those changes. I have begun work on visualizing what that looks like. Preliminary sketches will be at Swale House on Governors Island, NYC, the first two weeks of June 2026, viewing by appointment. Over the next sixteen months, I will share my plan for 2027, when I will mark the divestiture and abandonment of my long-time coastal studio to the sea with a major hybrid public event.

On Earth Day 1970, many of us believed that education, good will, common sense and hard work would turn the tide against environmental disaster. We have been disabused. There were in fact, many victories, but not enough to overcome the ecocide of a tsunami of fossil fuels. That was partly due to well-documented campaigns of information suppression and disinformation from fossil fuel corporations.

Tidal Flushing emerges from The Blued Trees Symphony.

Documentation of The Blued Trees Symphony project will be at the 92nd St. Y in NYC, June 4 to July 27 with an opening reception and panel on June 12, 2026, curated by Eleanor Heartney, as part of an event celebrating the book she co-wrote, “Mothers Of Invention,” which includes text about the project. The Blued Trees Symphony began in 2015, the year of the Paris Agreement and our last chance to have moderated the worst effects of climate change.

The next year, Donald Trump was President of the United States of America, perhaps with help from Putin and every possible regulation and initiative that would have supported the Paris Agreement was rescinded. My project had attempted to enlist the courts to resist fossil fuel use with a copyrighted aerial score created in proposed natural gas pipelines. The legal theory for protection was analyzed in depth in 2017 by Jaya Baja.

If we had supported the Paris Agreement and aggressively acted stopped emissions at that time we might have mitigtaed what is coming. But activist lawyers who challenged corporate power after the first Trump election were threatened with crushing retaliations and I did not have the resources to pursue the case further. In 2018, a mock trial adjudicated an injunction from April Neubauer, Bronx Supreme Court Judge, that validated the legal theory behind the project.

In a series of opera-in-progress iterations, based on the trial in 2023 The Blued Trees Opera and 2024, and The Sea Will Have The Last Word in installation, I explored the question of liability for ecocide. I continue to explore that question in a series of small drawings, “Tolstoy & I.” However, evidence of causation doesn’t mitigate our failure. Tidal Flushing is about marking the real consequences of that failure.

The Blued Trees Symphony is still expanding across the globe with sites in Asia. An installation of that new material will be at Hannan University, Daejeon, South Korea, opening October 3, 2026. But now I am incorporating patterns of drought and fragmentation from habitat and species loss into the score along with vanishing coastlines, as that project segues into Tidal Flushing.

Tidal Flushing addresses the implications of the fact that even if we stop all carbon emitting activities today, sea levels will continue to rise for thousands of years, swallowing enormous amounts of urban infrastructure and creating forced migrations for billions of people, often under traumatic circumstancess, even as host countries attempt to shut the doors on desperation. The environmental dynamics of tidal flushing threatens 1/3 of humanity living near marine coasts. Without mitigation, the effects will be that much more powerful, chaotic and irremediable.

Vinalhaven Island, Maine is the fishing community where I live. I am witnessing a micorcosm of the changes I describe. New residents put pressure on our sole source aquifer even as drought depletes fresh water reserves for the entire region. Lobsters have been moving North to colder waters, threatening an hereditary life style. Fishermen are adapting from being hunters to farmers, as they consider creating new businesses in aquaculture. We will all confront similar adaptive challenges as well as many we can’t yet anticipate. Tidal Flushing will be exploring the options as our future unfolds.

“Sites of The Blued Trees Symphony,” 32”x 60” GIS, gold leaf and colored pencil on paper 2022

In each of these essays, I have prefaced my text with an image from my own practice that epitomizes my thinking in some way. In this essay, I’ve attached a map of the worst-case scenario of our future, swallowed by the sea and losing control over habitats we have depended upon. I discussed this map with Dr. Jim White, with whom I’ve worked for almost twenty years, in a Zoom about my new project, Tidal Flushing.

As wars proliferate with impunity and climate change overtakes planning, it is worth considering how we got here. I think we got here by failing to craft a sufficiently powerful narrative that could counter the appeal of feckless strong men, “leaders,” who dominate the world stage and incidentally, others, with intoxicating narratives of effortless dominance. “We” are those of us who have been committed to an inclusive world view, what I have called “withness,” in my writing and amounts to an expansion of democratic, culturally evolutionary values. Now the same feckless leaders have leveraged narrative to drive humanity to the brink of extinction with absolute impunity.

Narrative can drive history. Narrative is a form of artmaking that crosses many disciplines and makes story into a world view. Narrative is how story is structured to create meaning. Story has power across every human culture. Metaphor, often foregrounded by an iconic image, is the shorthand that represents the world that narrative crafts. Narrative can drive history by scaling from story to the metaphorical to policy.

The Historian Heather Cox Rchardson has driven a narrative that pivots on the idea that the Confederacy won the battle for story of the Civil War and has risen again in the crafted fictionalization of personae to serve contemporary politics. She has written extensively about how the radical right capitalized on reifying Reagan and then Bush as individualistic cowboys and our current regime leader as a self-made man. Neither the cowboy nor the self-made man was based on reality, but both appealed powerfully to the imagination, particularly of other white men. The imaginary was that a white man didn’t need anyone to succeed to power over his environment. That ignored a lot of reality, including government subsidies, slavery, misogyny, colonization and genocide. There is a clear through line from the Confederacy to Hitler to the current American administration, as Richardson has documented.

The terms scale and scaling used to be the purview of science but increasingly, they have become part of the colloquial vernacular, referring to a model that may have been created in a micro world but can now be applied to the macro. I would argue that the Confederacy was a small model of colonization, built on earlier Eurocentric presumptions, such as manifest destiny, a religious mandate that has been scaled up and leveraged, primarily to serve today’s international fossil fuel hegemonies.

It is interesting to consider the implications of and possibilities to leverage narrative. It is also interesting to me to consider it in relation to ecoart and the idea that small events in one place could have big implications everywhere.

The West has a long history, partially related to Christian thinking, of rendering unto God vs to Caesar (Matthew 22:21). Although in many ways that is the church-state separation foundational to democracy, it implicitly scales up to regarding the world through the lens of compartmentalization, a point of view I would argue, that actually fragments our perceptions and legitimates the creation of fantasy worlds, such as seems to be inflicted on the world today: the fantasy of the strong man savior. I think that fantasy keeps us in a closed system of the status quo, where evolutionary social change is impossible. In that example, the model scales down from a spiritual mandate to a very personal scale, particularly in personal relationships, where it scales up again from individual narcissism to cultural narcissism

Art can scale up, whether as narrative or image. I recently read a short article in The New Yorker about the installation of some of Michael Heiser sculpture at the famed Gagosian gallery. The scale is immense, 60’ at a side. I have no doubt that they make strong impressions. Others named in the article for producing BIG art, included Jeff Koons, whom I mentioned in my last essay as an artist who produces large cartoonish objects so highly polished that a viewer can see themselves in the surfaces. Heiser is one of the most famous Land artists, who appropriated BIG parts of the natural landscape to make their marks.

Big, like shallow, makes an impression. These are works that demand attention for exactly those two qualities: big and shallow. These works are highly finished and expensive to produce. The artists that produce them are very well remunerated. They seem to accurately witness the values of billionaires who purchase them, such as Jeff Bezos, who has his own art collection which includes individual works valued at $200 million. Elon Musk owns Damien Hirst’s “...The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), of a shark in formaldehyde and shares the American president’s taste for gold.

What does this tell anyone? That rich white men, would be dominators love big, shiny objects that reify their financial power to acquire. And what does that tell us about our culture? At the very least, it trumps the work of artists who work at a smaller scale with less expensive materials and perhaps more interesting ideas. And what that tells me, is that big objects that celebrate the possession of vacuous size for its own sake counts more than the humility of beauty that celebrates the modest, the emotive, the vulnerable and the natural, particularly the natural world we depend upon. Indigenous cultures produce art that is integrated into their care of the environment and each other. That world is not big, shiny or expensive in mercenary terms. It is often on a modest scale, made of available natural materials, such as basketry.

Other cultures have reified big. Mesoamerican Olmecs and Aztecs produced pyramids long before Chartres. But I can’t recall any past civilizations that so abandoned themselves to celebrating triviality and narcissistic delusion.

No wait. Maybe Louis the XVI before the French Revolution. Losing ourselves in manmade BIG will not save us from the reality we have made.

This may be the time to start making another narrative ro be scaled up before we entitely erase the story of humanity.

“Tolstoy & I- 3-30-26” cretacolor on pages of Tolstoy’s "War and Peace.” Aviva Rahmani 10”x7.5”

A diary can be a work of art. Sofia Tolstoya, wife of Leo Tolstoy, a father of civil disobedience, was a genius emotional worker who chronicled her labors in her diaries while he blew hot and cold, alternately demeaning and uplifting her while gobbling up attention from the whole world. She propped up her husband’s ego and narcissistic persona throughout their long marriage, to her personal peril.

After over a year of studying her journals and drawing self-portraits as her avatar, I think I have figured something out. My conclusion is that the men proselitizing the architecture of civil disobedience have had clay feet. The clay feet stand in the denial of women’s power and the narcissism of their own denial. It has become abundantly clear to me that narcissism is the precursor to fascism. In the United States that means the reification of an “idealized” man devoid of humanity. I now see that civil disobedience is the cooption of what women have always done, without deference or acknowledgement. That is a strategic mistake.

The most prominent promoters of civil disobedience, including Leo Tolstoy, who happen to be men, have failed to substantially change a society that reverts to acculturated narcissism, culminating in authroitarian regimes. Rather, they have only manifested the mirror image of fascism. Real change can only occur when we question the tropes of narcissism and acknowledge the emotional labor women contribute to social stability, a labor all responsible humans should be engaged in practicing, not just women. Sofia Tolstoya’s journals witnessed her labor and questioned Leo’s behavior, asking over and over, why was he cruel?

If he could have honestly answered that question, the spell of the narcissistic might have been broken. But he was too broken to do that, as is true of any narcissist. Her fault was to be unceasingly introspective, to the point of self-destruction, becoming his enabler at the cost of her own life while demanding unrealistic spiritual and emotional perfection of herself. Neither lived a full life. They eventually emotionally self-destructed each other. He could not answer her question because it required real moral courage, not the shallow semblance expressed in his writings and she couldn’t stop servicing his needs, by setting aside the question over and over and repeatedly trying to control her own human reactions to his casual cruelty.

Sofia’s diaries are a work of art, witnessing the tragedy of that paradigm of self-acrifice and cruelty at the heart of narcissism. The tragedy and resistance manifested when she always came back to ask the question again. Her weakness wasn’t her imperfection. It was her refusal to connect the dots between her self-sacrifice and his hypocrisy, a dishonesty, cowardice and hypocrisy shared by all narcissists and arguably, the Achilles heel of civil disobedience.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), especially malignant narcissism, has entered contemporary colloquial discourse since this American President and his agenda have ascended the world stage. Many professionals, including his niece, Mary Trump, have diagnosed him as a sufferer of NPD and a malignant narcissist. Even those of us with only a garden variety, amateur understanding of therapy and psychological analysis, glibly natter on about our perceptions of this condition and how it manifests.

Full disclosure: I have had a lifelong weakness for and fascination with narcissistic shiny objects. That has often been my blind spot. It is why I have often written about the topic and mentioned that I have had a long-term layperson’s fascination with narcissism.

The most salient and dangerous characteristic of narcissism is the absolute lack of sincere empathy. Lack of empathy is not just a matter of misunderstanding social cues. The parts of the brain that should register empathy just don’t. It’s hard to wrap my mind around that but it’s true.

Neural imaging has identified the key areas of the brain that simply don’t function in people wth NPD. These are people whose brain functioning is disabled, as crippled as any amputee. There is abundant data that most narcissists are made, not born, reared with paradoxically demeaning messages and grandiose entitlement. Nonetheless, once damaged, the individual rarely returns to health. They rarely seek therapy, stick with it if they start or are able to change. Change would require great strngth to face the point where they broke. The intimacy of a relationship that includes empathy and self-reflection is not possible. They are permanently impaired and impairing.

What is fascinating for me about NPD is not only that absolute lack of empathy but the sadistic pleasure people with this disorder exhibit as they enact discard. Discard is the popular term for what a narcissist does to a source of energy (an admirer) when they stop “delivering” a supply of attention and validation on cue. The sadism and cruelty are instead of empathy or depth, performed to provide toxic nourishment. When a narcissist enacts discard, they are strategically shoring up another supply of attention that feeds their remarkably weak ego. The distress of their victim can only whet their appetite for even greater displays of cruelty to maximize the return on their investment. A community that tolerates that desperate need to prop up a weak ego capable of such sadism and grandiosity at the expense of others is not ubiquitous in human civilization. Some Indigenous tribes would find such behavior ludicrous, contemptible, pathetic and repugnant.

Art, as always, is ahead of the curve in reflecting such shallow values back to us. Jeff Koons’s sculptures often brilliantly reflect that narcissistic world by reifying large expensive symbols with shiny surfaces that might be seen as parodies of the narcissistic paradigm. People who love his work can literally see themselves mirrored on his surfaces.

Nonetheless, in our dominant culture the appearance of fearless self-confidence is seductive and mesmerizing for many. The seduction of shiny surfaces is not only why Jeff Koons became a very wealthy artist, why many leaders today with NPD may have vast followers and acolytes, but another form of addiction to one more escape from reality, no different than any other addiction. I have thought a great deal about why this is so. In recovery communities it is as frequent to come across an addict as it is to find enablers of the addict. Although there are clear distinctions between an addict and a person with NPD (one is behavioral, the other is structural), I suspect there is no difference between enablers of either the addict or the narcissist. In both cases, the addiction of the enabler is to a delusional mirage of a person. But why is that delusion so seductive?

Social interdependency and the trust society prizes so deeply are foundational to cummunity. A person with NPD may be utterly tone deaf to those qualities. And yet, externally, they can present as not only very materially successful but so charismatic that they can enjoy a vast following.

It’s easy to speculate about how that could be? How could the absence of empathy, the very quality of humanity that monitors our collective health, in fact be so richly rewarded for that absence? We could answer that social media has fostered emotional distancing. Normal (healthy) people live with a measure of self-doubt, introspection when things go wrong and deference to others. People with NPD, have no such compunctions. They can often charm their way through life, coasting on boundless superficial self-confidence, easily negotiating competition and challenges that would deck a normal person.

But I think it’s all much simpler. In normal life, a sane person will experience uncomfortable feelings, especially if they are capable of depth. Normal, healthy people experience disappointment, fear, occasional rejection, grief and anger. It is a skill born of emotional labor to learn resilience despite those feelings. In healthy families, healthy parents nurture that resilience to build self-confidence, humility and the strength to persist despite adversity. That creates a healthy ego. But it requires labor. Perhaps it requires more labor than any other skill.

I think the seduction of the narcissist is not only the shiny veneer of accomplishment and beauty. It is the delusion that a wonderful life could be effortless. It is the same seduction as a glamourous selfie. It is the antithesis of what is required for communities to find solutions to complex problems. And in fact, most human communities today haven’t solved very much of the really complex problems we face. Now more than ever, as we have driven the world to the precipice of anthropogenic disaster, I think shallow delusions are very very seductive to too many people.

So what does this have to do with civil disobedience? This is the crux of what has fascinated me most in my reflections on narcissism as I consider the marriage of Leo and Sofia Tolstoy. I have written before that I think civil disobedience is an incomplete political strategy. Now I think I know why. I will contextualize that in what I’ve learned from studying Sofia Tolstoya’s diaries of her marriage to Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the fathers of civil disobedience. The Tolstoy’s made a practice of sharing each other’s diaries. But Leo consistently expressed misogynistic disdain for women in general and often, for his wife. In Sofia’s accounts, the portrait she paints is of a brilliant and demanding narcissist, to whom she was tethered by love, religion, codependency and the historical times. In effect, she performed prodigious emotional labor to maintain a semblance of equilibrium in the marriage and care for him regardless of the cost to herself. In effect, her primary strategy was civil disobedience. In fact, civil disobedience is how women have always dealt with difficult men: to witness but disengage.

I now think Leo Tolstoy coopted that strategy as though he had originated it and then performed a routine cruel discard on Sofia, gaslighting her into insanity rather than attributing her contributions. Civil disoberdience without attribution to women has been adopted ever since by resistance leaders who never achieved lasting systems change. I think there’s a connection. We always come back to the ideal narcissistic authoritarian (usually male) leader who promises easy solutions to complex problems.

In fact, I now think the missing link in civil disobedience is just the Feminism of recognizing honest labor, witnessed and practiced by most women (clearly not all), embraced with a measure of humility by men. That is not the same as what was once called being “pussy whipped.” It is the opposite. It is about recognizing that a healthy human community recognizes the work of BEING human and is willing, men and women, to learn, teach and live by the skill of being human, which starts with empathy and attribution. The sad part, is how many men in our current manosphere infused culture not only decline to perform any of that that work, but do the pussy-whipping of demeaning men who try. And so goes the world till we are all shocked into honesty.

“I Can’t Remember,” Egg tempera on wood 36”x44” 1985

Rule #4 of my Trigger Point Theory is that metaphors are idea models.

All societies have stories, myths, and sayings that distill their wisdom, and values as teaching tools. Metaphors influence society by projecting aspirational values. Metaphors can project such vivid pictures of comparison that a powerful vison takes shape, whether or not they are grounded in or supported by truth. Linguist and philosopher George Lakoff wrote of the influence of political metaphors, such as the nuclear family to evoke a sense of commonality in campaign language. The historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted how various politicians had commandeered the metaphor of the lone, individualistic cowboy to promote a fantasy about a traditional masculine ideal. In the former case, if American party politics are like a contented family, recent history has indicated that it is rather a particularly dysfunctional family. The lone cowboy is also misleading, as nineteenth century white settlers prospered at the expense of many others, particularly Indigenous Peoples, and benefitted from government support.

Scientific metaphors have often been used as an entry to complex ideas. The Gaia principle was a metaphor developed by chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s presented the Earth as one living, sentient, self-regulating system, currently under assault and traumatized by anthropogenic activities.

An idea model visualizes a metaphorical hypothesis that can be proven. Maxwell’s Demon, is an idea model that was conceived as a thought experiment by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. It had metaphorical aspects that challenged one of the most fundamental tenets of physics: the second law of Thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system entropy (chaos, randomness, energy dispersion or disorder), will always increase. Entropy increase is called the arrow of time because it follows an irreversible linear progression. Maxwell proposed that an intelligent, hypothetical “demon.” operating in a closed system, could sort hot and cold molecules to establish order to reduce entropy and control chaos. The revolutionary implication was that it was possible to defy the second law. But that conclusion ignored the energy required in the work of sorting. Because the demons’ sorting work required energy, it added entropy. Maxwell’s Demon is my favorite example of conceptual modeling because it reveals both the delusion about and power of hidden work. The metaphorical aspect of this idea model is in how we discount work that we don’t recognize.

Maxwell conceived of the Demon as a challenge to entropic probability. The probability was that entropy was inevitable. Recognizing the work of the demon as a source of energy was seminal to the development of information theory and has informed many other fields.

Many of us l work very hard to deny or ignore various kinds of essential work we feel entitled to or receive for free or beholden to supply. We can take work for granted, even our own work, rendering it invisible. When work isn’t valued witnessing or observing may make it obvious. Many people work very hard to repress their personal needs to conform to a corporate ideal, we are withholding information from ourselves. Many women, particularly, invest prodigious amounts of emotional labor in holding families and other relationships together. Artists of all kinds contribute invisible and often unsustainable labor, in countless ways, to oil the wheels of culture.

The second law of thermodynamics applies to many systems, from chemical to political. In ecological terms, entropy functions in an open system as extractive imbalance: a forest is clearcut for various reasons and the remaining ecosystem is left in a state of collapse with a cascade of effects, from drought to species loss.

In the case of an open system, at times, one agent can gain entropy as another loses and vice versa, sustaining stability. In island biogeography, the exchanges between habitats, like any open system, will maintain the equilibrium of homeostasis.

Between humans, behavior determines whether the system is closed or open. When secrets are kept, power is imbalanced or one partner controls the other through manipulation, the result is like a closed system. Entropy (chaos) increases. leaving less energy for work. Whether in an institution or an intimate relationship, when the work of sorting, compartmentalizing, forgetting, forgiving, choosing the psychological work or domestic duties of keeping things on track while others maintain control can only work for a while. If we credit the emotional labor people might invest in a relationship, as long as the system is closed, and that work remains invisible, entropy, means that eventually there will be less and less energy available to maintain a healthy relationship. As in any situation in which denial perpetuates an unhealthy status quo, the effect of all that unrequited work shows up as increasing conflict, apathy, ghosting, indifference or other painful symptoms of disassociation.

In traditional marriages, as in the classic example of unhappiness in the marriage of Leo and Sofia Tolstoy recounted in their writings, Leo became increasingly controlling and narcissistic until he apparently drove Sofia insane: hysterical, isolated, obsessed and suicidal. In the end, as an old man, he fled his own consequences into the Russian snows of deep winter and died of the consequences. In its extreme, the chaos of intimate partner violence can escalate from emotional to physical abuse in a family or in the case of nations, to revolution or war.

In an open system, the participants can feel comfortable with transparency, tolerance and vulnerability. That is like tidal flushing in a littoral zone at the edge of a sea. In the healthy, open system, where energy is equally distributed and exchanged, interdependence becomes a symmetrical dance.

“Death Mask” 86”x96” egg tempera and oil on linen 1990

It is the first day of Spring and I am ready for something new. My new work will be “Tidal Flushing.” The lead image for today’s essay is a death mask of my father. It illustrated a previous essay in this series and was painted shortly after his passing . It is based on a photograph I took immediately after his death. It represented what I was just beginning to understand about death, life, tidal flushing, the power of the sea and the vulnerability of the land. Now, I am facing the last years of my life and my life’s inventory must negotiate reality.

Tidal Flushing, is going to be about more than myself. It is also going to be about negotiating how sea level rise is forcing migration for 1/3 of humanity. “Death Mask,” was the last artifact of my project, REQUIEM and the first major work I completed after moving to Maine. I deliberately used the tones of the view of rocks and marshland from my studio. When you stand close to the painting, it may seem like a landscape. It is only when you step back, that the portrait emerges. It was my statement about the nature of death and life.

Tidal flushing is the natural cleansing process tides perform as ocean water moves in and out along any coastline. Water and nutrients are exchanged in an eternal conversation. Some urban sites at the edge of the sea have “hardened” their coastlines, with concrete construction, in vain efforts to control the sea.

I have enjoyed almost forty years perched on the edge of the sea for my practice. That experience, like my life, like many things I have loved, are coming to an end. The sea left her calling card in seaweed deposited all around my studio during the devastating winter storms of early 2024.

This project will build on the Blued Trees (2015-present), interdisciplinary project which challenged ecocide caused by fossil fuel industries with novel ideas about environmental justice. This will be a relatively short project for me, to climax in less than two years, although I may continue to work on the themes for some time afterwards. As time goes on, I will unroll details about the conceptual and practical plan for the tidal flushing work of leaving the edge of the sea, accepting that to make new life, I must also accept that the sea has the last word.

Detail of the Cities and Oceans of If project, 24”x24” print on paper 2000

The sitting President of the United States recently stated about the current war in Iran, “...some people will die.” Indeed. When you reach an extreme of inability to communicate between systems, war inevitably means some people will die. It may be worth considering why we reach those extremes.

In 1990, two things happened that changed the course of my life and both were about extremes. First, on the basis of a dream and an intuition, I began Ghost Nets on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, which committed me to a site far from the pivotal New York artworld I was familiar with. Second, I was diagnosed with a severe case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), which left me with very little energy to accomplish my aspirations. My solution to both was to begin a series of intensive acupuncture sessions. Acupuncture would inform how I subsequently developed trigger point theory for restoring degraded habitats. Acupuncture also supported my gradual, but never complete recovery from CFS. Acupuncture, as a system, is all about systems in fluent communication.

From 2000-2010, I worked on a project called, Cities and Oceans of If. That was between Ghost Nets (1990-2000) and starting my dissertation, “Trigger Point Theory As Aesthetic Activism.” The premise of the Cities and Oceans of If, was that cities are often built on former hot spots. The project proposed that a careful biogeomorphological analysis of those urban sites could affect a cascade of regional change. The analysis, I further conjectured would provide models for future city planning that didn’t make cities into sacrifice zones for capitalist exploitation and extraction. Based on previous work, including in drought prone Southern California, I was sure that fresh water contiguities would be the missing link to a solution.

I started with the city of Portland, Maine and mapped all the possible contiguities between buried freshwater systems on land and its potential connections to wetlands and coastal ocean zones. I then went on to analyze a number of sites internationally for the same kinds of insight, including at Bergen Belsen, Germany, the site of a former Nazi concentration camp. The print above was one of a series created as part of a residency at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, which for a time was displayed in their city planning department. I have no idea where they are now. Parts of the project were shown in exhibitions at public venues, including at the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Art, Pittsburg, Penn.

Ghost Nets had given me the template for the trigger point premise. Cities and Oceans of If, allowed me to explore possible proofs of my premises. I then went on, in my dissertation, to thoroughly explore the scientific logic of my premise. Blued Trees took my premise further, to explore possible global patterns of habitat contiguity that depended on challenging the international application of environmental justice to reestablish homeostasis. All this work was theoretical.

Recently, I have been presented two opportunities to take my theoretical premises further. One might be in a project under development between China, with my colleague there, Lipeng Jin and South Korea, with Yu Hyunju, tracking habitat contiguities between Asia and the West. In China, one aspect of our project will be to investigate possible correlations between local indigenous understanding of how traditional acupuncture systems apply to healthy human bodily function and how water systems are key to healthy habitat contiguities to protect that health for the sake of all life on land.

Back on the site of the original Ghost Nets project, I have been discussing the possibility of converting my art studio at the base of the Ghost Nets site into another use. That could create a new trigger point model for adaptation. The opportunity is for the emerging industry of mussel aquaculture and how that conversion might model a larger international shift from conventional cultural relationships to the natural world, as sea level rises. That possibility will be contingent on whether my property has enough fresh water to support the industrial process. The site of my wharf they might takeover is actually coastal made-land, originally for the schooners that took finished Vinalhaven quarried granite up and down the coast of New England. There is a well there but it is so close to the edge of the sea, that we will have to find out if it might hold enough fresh water for that operation. All they need the fresh water for, is for their workers to wash their hands.

The land that needs to provide fresh water to provide workers with water to exercise the aquaculture that was created at the expense of a local tidal estuarine system, which Ghost Nets daylighted in 1997 may not have enough fresh water for that simple task, on which the entire project would hinge.

The outcomes of these two projects will be as out of my hands as the original surrender to my intuition was when I committed to creating Ghost Nets, on the basis of a dream. The outcome of this trajectory in my work that began in 1990, almost forty years ago now, will hang on small details I can’t fix or control, like enough water to wash hands clean.

So, we come back to the beginning, and outcomes hang on a thread of If/ If was also the title of a show I did for the Maine Center for Contemporary Art in 2002. If displayed photographs from the restoration of Ghost Nets, some of the work for Portland as well as a mural of the hypothetical water contiguities between the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of Mexico: Fresh water is the missing link between energy that holds the promise of reaffirming habitat contiguity. But fresh water is vulnerable to the capacity for humans to limit our disposition to extract to the point of collapse and death.

So in the small world of the Ghost Nets site and the wide world of rethinking how we align our needs with our aspirations, there is an immutable connection and an absolute disconnect. The aspiration for clean hands seems like a perfect metaphorical paradigm for what the world faces today. Can we ever clean our hands enough to solve the disconnect between ourselves and nature?

In my most recent work, I have been making drawings on the yellowing pages of my mother’s Cyrillic edition of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” self-portraits of myself as an avatar of Sofia Tolstoy, Leo’s wife. With every drawing, I struggle to understand a missing piece in Tolstoy’s writings on civil disobedience, hidden in their unhappy marriage. He could not contain his grandiosity, egotism and perhaps his homosexuality. She could not contain her need for connection and her frustration. Both Leo and Sofia contained despair until his death. Historically, civil disobedience, whether publicly or privately, in our relationship to the rest of the natural world and to each other, has often worked in the short term to forestall authoritarian monstrousness, but in the long term, the same proclivities return.

I am convinced that understanding the relationship between Leo and Sofia holds a key to why civil disobedience ultimately failed to create lasting change. Meanwhile, at least as much is lost and will continue to be lost as we can ever recover unless we start initiating better systems of communication, whether in intimate relationships or public policies.

“Tides,” 24”x24” oil on linen 2025

In the natural world, change is determined by laws of physics. Energy in, energy out. In a rhythmic flow of energy for example, ocean tides carry water in, and energy out, as nurturing soil, maintaining a constantly changing wetlands system. That exchange consistently creates new fertility on land and in water The process is called tidal flushing and provides a measure of ecosystem stability, continuity and equilibrium.

In out dominant culture today, I would argue that change is not rhythmic , nor does it result in fertility. There are tacit and explicit rules to engage with and conform to our status quo. What is flushed out (discarded) doesn’t generate the creative fertility of happiness for most people. Rather, many of us seem to be stuck in a schizophrenic, lawless universe without realistic values that might maintain a fertile system. What is not realistic is what we are extracting from vulnerable sectors of our environments, our societies and each other with impunity.

In a recent example of extraction and impunity, the regime in charge of the USA, made clear over the vote for the War Powers Act, that what one person decided to do at the expense of many others, would not be impeded by anyone else’s priorities. But rules, limits and laws are useful.

It seems like a good time to consider why we have rules.

Setting aside the political implications of ignoring the rules set forth in the American Constitution over my example above, rules are what reduce anxiety about the normal exigencies of life. Someone dies and rules exist to contain the grief with rituals of mourning. Schools teach history to explain how the chaos of the past explains the chaos of today. Love is contained in a myriad of social norms that cover ghosting, childbearing, communal property and dinner parties.

Art also has rules. The rules of art contribute to how what we witness reflects upon and sometimes challenge the rules of the day.

Art has rules, for example about proportion: a square is a difficult formal geometry to negotiate because it sets up perfectly harmonious equilibrium before you register an image. The task of the artist contending with a square, is to find where the tension is that creates excitement. Harmony has little to do with real life. Contending for life that contains tension is a vision of harmony that is contingent on reality. In that way, the tension between sources of equilibrium mirrors our experience of the natural world.

Art can ask questions about rules for society and, as in many examples of social practice art projects, promote new rules. Generally, however, it is very hard for most artists to break through the barriers to change and earn a living from challenging the status quo of our culture. The result is that few artists run their careers as a profitable business. Rather, many people regard art as a hobby or charity. That is a categorization that has serious implications for the health of the entire culture.

In the artworld, that is a problem of form as well as content. Formally, paintings are easier to sell. As far as content, vagueness is safer than confrontation. The culture in general resists challenges to the status quo of comfortable forms, content and values. It may be easiest to see the reality of that resistance and its implications in our relationship to art. There are corollaries in other aspects of the culture, for example, our apparently limitless appetite for water resources, most obvious in the promotion of AI, or the routine presumption of emotional labor that women generally contribute to relationships of all kinds. None of those are situations that promote equilibrium.

The American tax code for artists, stipulates that there must be evidence of profit every few years, or an artist will be audited and can be declared a hobbyist. If an artist is declared a hobbyist, they are liable for penalties But art contributes enormously to community social well-being, whether paid or not.

In fact, most artists are treated as though we are running a charity, a pleasant hobby, even when an artist can generate a modest living. Most serious artists actually consider their career a calling. Artists are routinely asked for free donations of labor. The assumptions are, if we can’t make a substantial and consistent net profit, then we must be making art for our own pleasure, therefore, we should be grateful to share our hobby with others.

The Vermont Arts Council found that, “ Serious artists and the broader arts industry contribute significantly to prosperity, with the sector injecting over $1 trillion into the U.S. economy in 2023. This industry supports 2.6 million jobs, generates over $29 billion in government revenue, and drives local tourism and spending, outperforming sectors like agriculture and transportation.”

In an earlier study, the same researchers contributed,

“Nationally, the survey found that:

• In 2022, nonprofit arts and culture organizations and their audiences generated $151.7 billion in economic activity nationally— $73.3 billion in spending by cultural organizations, which leveraged an additional $78.4 billion in event-related spending by their audiences.

• The economic activity’s impact is far reaching, supporting 2.6 million jobs across the country and generating $29.1 billion in tax revenue to local, state, and federal governments.

• The survey also looked at social impact, and found, overwhelmingly that audiences deeply value the work of nonprofit arts and culture organizations, with 86% of respondents saying that arts and culture is “important to their community’s quality of life and livability.”

Categorizing art as a hobby, something “anyone can do,” without rigorous training and years of hard work, means no one is entitled to special respect. Dedication, years of research and self-sacrifice count for nothing if the outcome is trivialized. We have an industry (art), which is very labor intensive and provides enormous cultural capital, but the basic human needs of most producers are punitively demeaned and deprived. Trivializing individual artists while extolling art in general is contradictory, even schizophrenic behavior.

Artists, women and water are not the only vulnerable resources this culture extracts value from without an equal and fair return for production. For example we:

1. Adore out pets but keep other animals in miserable industrial purgatory until they are murdered and consumed

2. Current attitudes towards immigrants and refugees.

My argument is that the rules of engagement are inconsistent, untenable and if not immoral, then at least irrational.

The numbers confirm that art may not be profitable for artists, but artmaking is a serious business like any other that generates enormous capital. Some artists surpass society’s paradoxical, schizophrenic expectations. Besides luck and vagaries of taste, those people are far superior than others at business management skills. Paraphrasing something art coach Paddy Johnson said about the “normal” business and the real business of art, “normal” business identifies a need, brings a solution to market and then works hard to market it at a calculated, affordable price. Art responds to irrational urges, requires endless work at product creation and marketing at a price that reflects the real investment in product development but does not guarantee any compensation at all.

Consider that. Art is invaluable but art producers are worthless. Are we a culture where the only criterion for respect and support is profit to the status quo? Apparently. The art historian Rosalyn Deutsche once commented that successful public art reifies the values of its times.

If all that counts in a culture is net profit and the stability of the status quo, but the status quo is schizophrenic, cruel and indifferent to self-examination, or the consequences of extractions, what creates the most net profit? Well, war. AI explains, “War is exceptionally profitable for specialized sectors, particularly defense contractors, energy firms, and private security, with major firms splitting trillions in Pentagon contracts over decades.”

So let’s see. Art provides huge benefits to society, but artists are starved for support. War destroys societies and warmongers are richly rewarded for the minimal effort required to bomb another culture into oblivion. What does that world look like? We live in it so we ought to know. What does this world tell us about the rules of engagement we must all live with and accept for our survival in this community?

I would say that we live in an unmedicated schizophrenic world, a culture of malignant narcissism, awash in delusions, denial and deceptions; a world that exerts enormous pressure on others to conform to insanity at great personal and moral cost. And that most sane people find that world intolerable. It is impossible for most people to accept rules of engagement that put the destruction of other people and life of all kinds at the top of the pyramid of life outcomes.

Well, for almost anyone. Narcissists seem to thrive with those rules.

I would argue that art thrives on rules of engagement for clear sight: to render a clear view of our world today, not sentimentally as we might want to experience it as pretty mountain ranges and pleasant portraits of con men plastered on every public space or even exclusively, the horror of what we routinely destroy. But just as a skilled witness to reality as it is lived, in the tension between harmonious aspirations and the real conflicts of life, like, war and suffering. And that labor, it would seem to me, might deserve some respect.

“The Pocketbook Piece,” by Aviva Rahmani with Aviva Rahmani, Claudia Bader and Barbara Zakarian 1969 Photograph by Fred Lonidier Claus Von Wendel Studio, Del Mar, California

Chaos is terrifying but it’s also a source of fertility. I took a week off last week to think about the uncertainty that chaos creates and what it takes to live with that uncertainty. Two useful qualities I decided were essential, are humility and patience. Faith and trust help but are more sophisticated skills.

In 2023, we had a terrific winter storm on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, where I live. It was during an unusually high tide, called a King Tide a time when the sun, moon and Earth align. The building which is my studio, is three precarious feet from deep water is picturesque but tremendously vulnerable in these times of sea level rise and intensifying storms. Many buildings along the Maine coast and elsewhere, were washed away with devastating economic losses. The fishing community along the coast was hit very hard. The next morning, I found the stairs to my studio had been washed out, although I retrieved them not far away. Some of the structural elements had been dislodged and there was seaweed all around the base of the structure. The sea had spoken and I had no way to adequately respond.

I have spent the past three years fruitlessly living in limbo, trying to find solutions to save my studio and its contents. FEMA grants were only available for fishermen or homes. Other kinds of grants I applied for didn’t materialize. My precarity inspired some writing and drawings, neither of which solved the problems. The title of my last opera iteration, was, “The Sea Will Have The Last Word,” and indeed, it still may. Until I can find a solution, I have accepted that I am living with low grade, emotionally controlled chaos and profound uncertainty.

Since August, events in both my personal life and the world at large have ratcheted up that sense of controlled chaos more than usual. By some accounts, almost 1/3 of us and the world at large live on or near a coastline. What is happening to the Maine coastline, which also includes me includes a lot of the rest of the world. So I did what I often do, I had a conversation with friends and colleagues about what was on my mind and we had a Zoom conversation about coastal futures. Aquaculture is one answer. Mussel aquaculture might be the least impactful to the marine ecossystem. But it doesn’t answer the bigger problem of forced migration for billions of people who may have no place to go.

It’s not fashionable these days to discuss overpopulation, but the fact is, there are too many of us at the sea’s edge and if we move back from the coast, too many of us will either be in conflict with each other or will be in even more conflict than we already are with struggling wildlife. Humans are not entitled to gobble up the entire planet. Many nations are complaining about not enough young people to keep ntheir economies productive and service the elderly, but tying population to productivity is when we are already consuming three plant’s worth of resources strike me as insane. We need to think differently about all the equartions that have led us down a garden path into chaos.

Urgency can be the mother of invention. Objectively, what is chaos? In physics, it means that predictable patterns will eliminate free will or chance. In human relationships, that means that past behavior will generally predict future behaviors and probable consequences. There are a host of colloquial aphorisms to reinforce that simple idea: for example, “ “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got,” attributed to Henry Ford.

What I have always done in response to chaotic events, is to try to control outcomes by figuring out a different approach to a problem. For example, in 2015, the intractable problem I saw was the proliferation of fossil fuels. My response was to conceive of and implement the Blued Trees project, to prioritize art over the short-term profits of natural gas companies. That was a legal strategy based on applying my understand of ecological art. The deterministic pattern I could not control was the scale of investment international fossil fuel hegemonies have in suppressing resistance to the status quo of the energy market. Nonetheless, being an extravagantly stubborn creature, I have persisted in contesting that status quo, in various ways, in my work. The most recent is an anthology in progress with Routledge Press, which I hope will be in print this summer.

In personal relationships, it has taken me a long time to accept that not only am I unable to control how others behave, but I also can’t control own responses when others behave badly. In fact, I will most likely behave badly in reaction. Then the conversation can become a toxic and chaotic stew of reactivity. By behaving badly, I mean incidents of abuse or simple disrespect. I cannot control my feelings of hurt or anger when I am the target or others I care about. But if I express my feelings in ways that offend others, the conflict will escalate.

I have always believed the cure to conflict is honest transparency. In 1969, immersed in the California encounter group culture, I created “The Pocketbook piece,” for three women. Entering from three different directions, they who sat down facing each other on the floor in the center of an audience, emptied out the entire unscripted contents of their pocketbooks between them. Then they proceeded to describe the use and associations to every item they had emptied onto the floor between them, while making eye contact with each other and the audience. Memorably, on one occasion, a performer held up a lipstick and said, “this is the lipstick i wore the night I was raped.” When they had completed their narrations, the three performers replaced everything and walked out of the audience circle in different directions. The performance was an exercise in honest transparency and acceptance, prerequisites to negotiate solutions to conflict. Honesty is always useful.

In a February 2, 2026 article in The New Yorker, “One direction; what MAGA can teach Democrats about organizing - and infighting,” by Charles Guhigg, he analyzed the relative political strategies of MADD and indivisible. His argument was that MADD is effective because it tolerates differences for the pragmatic sake of passing legislation. Arguably, that approach to strategy is basic diplomacy. It depends on effective communication skills. If you can talk, hear and listen with respect and a measure of empathy, you have a better chance of negotiating productive outcomes. By productive, I mean outcomes that all agree will satisfy as many shared needs as possible.

Needless to say, finding where shared values intersect is not always possible. Sometimes one party demands something unreasonable or unfair for others. That’s why humans invented war. It’s also why animals of all kinds compete for dominance and mark their territory. In research about island biogeography and the complexity of ecotones, this, like all chaos, is where ecosystems evidence the greatest potential for fertility, or in the case of invasive species, entire ecosystems can collapse. In the case of the sea, resistance is useless. Conversation of any kind depends on listening. First we need to listen. So I can put that on my list of useful qualities, with humility, patience, honesty ...

I might say fossil fuel hegemonies have invaded the democratic ecosystem and pushed it to the brink of collapse. If Guhigg is correct however, coalitions of resistance could evolve to resist that trend. In nature, for example in the case of the coastal invasion of the European green crab, humans have become predators to rebalance the chaos. The crabs decimate seaweed beds that are fin fish nurseries. If humans predate on the crabs, they may contribute to preserving many species. That intervention describes a conversation with nature.

Transparency, gathering information without prejudice, may just be other terms for honesty but there are many caveats. Not everyone is honest. Not everyone knows how to be honest. We all know from personal experience and the study of history, that dishonesty often leads to chaos, in the form of betrayal at the very least. Can even a dishonest source of chaos be productive?? So then, why is honesty often difficult? And then, is honesty the only way into chaos? And more relevant to these essays, is what can art do about it?

I think the answer to the last question is simple. Art fosters conversation. We need more conversation, ideally with honesty. The sea seems to be having a conversation with us, like it or not. We shall see what the best response might be but fighting, ignoring tor pretending we have equal power with the sea is likely a fool’s waste of time. These days I am listening very carefully and thinking very deeply about how I respond to what I’m hearing.

This will be brief.

When people disagree, whether in the bedroom or in rooms of power, it is always easier to get angry than to listen and learn something. When power is asymmetrical, too often a disagreement is resolved with bullying and gaslighting instead of some simple reality-fact checking.

When people act on the assumptions and judgements they make without a reality check, major, major wounds can open up.

It seems to me that right now, some people are leaping from judgement to action and exercising power without checking reality. The results are opening huge wounds we may not be able to heal.

We have the justice system, ethics about integrity, social norms and endless workshops in communication skills. It seems to me that now might be a good time to avail ourselves of those wonderful systems.

“A few minutes after dawn 2-4-26” Aviva Rahmani

Today’s picture asserts the truth that there can always be a new beginning, even a few minutes after the world has a lapse. My lapse yesterday, was to miss my daily photograph of the dawn as the sun firsst rises. My redemption was that the universe still provided light and beauty. At a time when the Epstein files remain mostly redacted of perpetrators while victims are exposed, and ICE is threatening midterm elections in the USA, it’s worth considering false promises and lies. Redemption is always possible.

Let me start by saying I don’t know the answer to what to do about lying. AI says, “Lies work because they are highly effective, evolved social tools used to manipulate, protect, and gain power. They function by exploiting cognitive biases, such as confirming pre-existing beliefs, and allowing for social, emotional, or self-centered advantages. As people lie, the brain adapts, reducing negative feelings and making deception easier over time.”

AI has emerged as arguably the greatest liar in all of human history. If our eyes can decieve us, if one picture iss worth a thousand words but the picture is faked, then what? We are animals who rely greatly on our eyes. All of science is based on empirical evidence.

The title of today’s short essay refers to an an old ad for Chanel No. 5 perfume, “Promise her anything but give her Chanel.” A lie is a promise broken before it is delivered. Presumably, at some point someone suggested that the Chanel slogan wasn’t politically correct and then discontinued that marketing strategy.

In today’s politics, we have people deliberately trumpeting lies they know perfectly well are lies, and some people arguing that those lies must be truth because they confirm what they always thought. It gets hard to untangle the truth from the lies, the biases from dispassion and then the consequences are dire: rifts and wars.

In ordinary human relationships, people routinely discount white lies. But those little deceits can mask the most egregious and devastating betrayals and leave us unprepared for serious consequences.

Since I had no good answer to my question, I went back to AI and asked, “what to do about lies?” The answer came back:

“Dealing with lies involves a mix of direct, calm confrontation, setting firm boundaries, and protecting your mental space. Key strategies include asking for details to expose inconsistencies, documenting conversations for clarity, and, in cases of chronic deceit, reducing reliance on the person or limiting interaction. Always prioritize your emotional safety, avoid reacting with immediate anger, and consider the underlying reasons for the dishonesty.”

Wise advice.

“Bed of Nets,” Aviva Rahmani, iron bed and drift nets 1991

Some people are arguing over whether or not we are in a civil war in the United States today. In a conversation with someone yesterday, we discussed whether we are already into WWIII: whether the environmental wars begun as backlash to the Green movement, has morphed into an all-out assault from fossil fuel hegemonies, from Russia to Texas to Silicon Valley, extracting life at blood price. I think we are both in a Civil War and fighting WWIII. It just doesn’t look like previous wars.

I remember as a small child, wearing an, “I like Ike,” button. Today, I think Eisenhower was our most prescient President. At his farewell address, when he said, “Beware the military industrial complex,” there would have still been people in the audience who lived through or even fought in the American Civil War. It is worth remembering that the orators of the Confederacy inspired Hitler. The military industrial complex has morphed into the criminal tech. Thiel, trump, Putin, et al are out to dominate the world at all costs. We should beware.

At all costs, for some time, I have hoped I was/ am wrong. I have friends and some family who eagerly tell me I am wrong, with a measure of benign pity for my trump derangement. But I don’t think I am wrong or deranged.

Recently some referred to my trigger point theory, which I developed out of carefully watching how ecological restoration occurs in my Ghost Nets project, as about tipping points. It’s true that I believe trigger point theory can begin to effect serious change but the theory doesn’t turn on a linear change, as a tipping point might. It turns on the idea that as in acupuncture, a system needs to reset to balance and can, if a sufficiently complex set of alignments can affect a cascade from a tiny point of intervention.

Trigger point theory mirrors my understanding of complex adaptive systems and complexity theory. I began developing it in 1990. That was when I was diagnosed with a very severe case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that left me mostly bedridden for several years. The only thing I found then that helped me was acupuncture, so I researched it as deeply as I could. Those were the same years I was first developing Ghost Nets. During those first difficult years, the only daily task I set myself was to walk the entire site, regardless of weather or stamina, to observe every tiny lesson the land might teach me about healing.

Trigger point theory presumes that resetting a system to a point of balance means unraveling where it has become unmanageable and intervening at exactly the point where order might be reestablished. The Ghost Nets project as ecoart, was inspired by seeing the lost drift nets, called ghostnets that strip-mine ocean life. The idea that there was a time when my fishing people neighbors patiently unraveled the entanglements of summer to prepare for the next fishing season inspired me. The work of untangling depended on finding the one place to begin: the trigger point.

In the horrific events unfolding in Minneapolis and elsewhere at the hands of the current occupiers of the White House, we are watching a contest between two systems. One is unraveling and trying to reestablish control with violent power. The other, despite fatal violence, and betrayals of truth and decency is reasserting basic humanity, kindness, community and democratic values. Apparently, as in any war, this will be a fight to the death.

In acupuncture, when a system is reset, the lines of energy simply realign. When I went through cancer treatments about a decade ago, I carefully studied how cytokines work in the system to provide resilience to intrusive threats. They work much as Chinese medicine views systemic disruptions and resets. A part of the system that must rely on coordination for health goes haywire.

A nation has a legitimate right to a military to defend itself from assault. Military turned against its own nation is an abomination. Industry and technologies are wonderful things. A military and technology complex turned into instruments of brutal repression and deceit is criminality. Violence purely for the sake of power and control in subjugating others cannot legitimated. Minneapolis may have activated the trigger point. Whether it will be the tipping point, we shall see.

Still from “Trigger Points/ Tipping Points,” Aviva Rahmani with Jim White 2007

Art can see the future.

In 2007, Dr, Jim White, founder of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, where I am an Affiliate and I studied the relationships between geopolitical conflict zones and climate change. Our work was part of the “Weather Report” show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) in Boulder, Colorado, curated by Lucy Lippard. Our collaboration was written about in a feature story in the New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section, in which Jim and I mentioned that we had bonded over agreeing that we (the industrial West) were raping the world.

The results of our work was called, “Trigger Points/ Tipping Points.” We generated 24 data visualization still images about the relationships between conflict zones, climate change and future projections generated from our online conversations. We also generated the short film that documented our analysis and conclusions. One of our conclusions was that the United States would become extremely isolated.

In addition to BMoCA, the work was shown internationally, including the Joseph Beuys 100 days of Conference Pavilion, for the 2007 Venice Biennale and the Independent Museum of Contemporary Art, Cyprus and in “In Transition, Russia” at the National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow and the Ekaterinaburg Museum of Fine Art, Ekaterinaburg, Russia. Today, Jim and I still collaborate in a series of webcasts called “Gulf to Gulf” with Dr. Eugene Turner and friends. We still analyze geopolitical relationships and reach alarming conclusions.

My question now is, why were our insights, then and now, along with those of so many others who have been studying reality for decades, routinely ignored? Is it simply short-sighted greed?

“Children’s Mural,” composite documentation 1985 Acrylic on interior wall original approximately 96” x 360”

Doors can open up to a new world but they can also sometimes be a one-way trip. Sometimes that works. Other times it doesn’t.

In 1985, I embarked on an ill-fated but important project, developing an interior mural with residents of a shelter for abused children. It was ill-fated for several reasons. One was that I organized our imagery around my presumptuous understanding of Native American Medicine Wheels, an unfortunate claim to wisdom that was not mine to claim, but was ubiquitous at the time amongst maturing middle class ex-hippies. The other was that the images the children came up with revealed and triggered some of their traumas in ways the staff was not prepared to deal with. Finally, I was oblivious to the cultural politics of the situation. The consequences were that the administration sand blasted the finished work off the walls and banned me from further contact with the children. To top off the cascade of misfortunes, after documenting the completed work in stills, promising the children I would find a way to memorialize their work, in conversation in a parking lot with the photographer, I briefly set his slides on a handy car, before the owner emerged in a rage over using her car as a table and then drove off. All the slides were lost in the process. Fortunately, I kept a few back and there is a video tape of the entire work. I hadn’t thought about all that in years.

Recently, I found the original tape. Now it is being digitized. Finding the tape, provoked me to reflect on that whole adventure. Specifically, to revisit the meaning of trauma. Making the mural was an important experience for two reasons. One was, it is the only time I ever tried creating a project with children. They self-reported that it meant a great deal to them, which meant a great deal to me. Secondly, I got to thinking about the nature of trauma. What does it do to the brain? Is there any connection to imagination and creativity? Some people think so. What does recovery from trauma really mean?

I have always had great faith in my own intuition and its link to my own unconscious. In the years following the mural experiment, I searched more deeply for answers to my questions. That was really when I began developing Trigger Point Theory, my guiding light in the project, “Ghost Nets,” the topic of my dissertation and the subject of my book, “Divining Chaos.” It was in 1985, while making those murals, that I first started asking, when any system collapses, how does a new system emerge that might heal the larger landscape, whether emotional or biogeographic? I still think I was on the right track in 1985, with studying Indigenous cultures. Over the next decades, I continued to study Indigenous cultures but gained humility and distance.

My previous experiences of recovery from trauma weren’t particularly useful in my personal life. I had my share of trauma to deal with in my own childhood and early adulthood, in a range that included epigenetic memories of my parent’s past as war refugees or my own experience of rape. I knew how to compartmentalize, disassociate and deny trauma but not how to stop the consequences from inconveniently leaking out. I was familiar with Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, psychodrama, The Living Theatre, with whom I had worked and the writings of R.D. Laing, whose work I had illustrated for a psychology textbook, but I had not yet considered that the trauma itself might express a well of creativity. That well is what Carl Jung described as our unconscious. It is the same well Indigenous Shamans access. In those systems of belief, there is the conviction that the unconscious might open new doors, not only to the imagination, but to all kinds of wisdom and knowledge. Any trauma can blow open the mind’s stability and unleash a gift. There were people, mid-last century, who believed various devices, like psychedelic drugs, could rearrange brain chemistry for positive effects. Today, psychedelics are being researched for the positive impacts on PTSD and other disorders when drugs open our mental doors.

Ecologically, the only way that breaking down a system to the point of collapse and then rebuilding it works is if potential refugia remain, or if the topography lends itself to edges, where complexity can reemerge. In time, those pockets of refugia and edges between topographic features can become the trigger points for new beginnings. That doesn’t mean retrieving the original system. That will be lost forever. But if promising conditions remain, even if the loss of habitat disrupts corridors for wildlife and patterns of migration there may be hope for recovery. For example, in a larger landscape, restoration of vitality may emerge via a systematic network of refugia. That contiguity may reestablish contiguity for the fragmented landscape. In “Ghost Nets, ‘ I systematically identified such pockets and edges and then did what I could to support life there. I moved rocks, deposited seaweed and cast seeds.

As is true in the wider world of environmental justice or in large landscapes for habitat contiguity, that potential for recovery may also be true in an individual. If there are pockets of stability and sources of security, no matter how small, a good life is possible. Sometimes, what lies on the other side of the door trauma flings open, can be an unexpected vision of great value. Obviously although some thinkers, including Artaud, in the last century, or Steve Bannon in ours, think deliberately precipitating trauma can open salutatory doors beyond an initial chaos, that is not what I am reflecting on in this essay.

Speaking for myself, trauma has opened doors to my unconscious, to my intuition and to creativity for me my entire life. Art was one source of stability that anchored me. Art has been my refugia and protection. Art has been where I distilled and protected my experience of life.

I have often had conversations with friends about the “choice” to be an artist. It is true that for many artists, having a career as a professional artist can be a choice. But it is also a lifeline to survival for many of us. I believe I had no more choice about becoming an artist than I had about how tall I grew. Learning art skills is certainly a choice, usually driven by passion. And sometimes but not always, what we choose to focus on is a choice. But amongst my colleagues, one’s experience of life as an artist is never a choice. For those on the artist path, trying to squish ourselves into other lanes, just demolishes us.

Being an artist is as arbitrary, in my opinion, as the color of one’s eyes. And for many of us, it is what allows another system to emerge, often despite daunting challenges, as daunting as a tree that grows in the crevice of a boulder. Perhaps what was different about my own encounters with and response to trauma as an artist was my intuition that what worked in one place, like making a mural with children who had survived abuse, might also be applied to degraded land, as I did apply it in “Ghost Nets,” or to a demeaned judicial system, like “The Blued Trees Symphony.”

“Mask,” clay and wool 1955 5”x4” Aviva Rahmani

When I taught drawing, I taught it as dance: center yourself from the base of your spine, breathe. Defocus your eyes and hold the tool you will use lightly in your hand. Let your perception come from your whole body and trust your eyes to honestly witness space. Enter the space between you and your subject with all your senses alert. Before you touch your surface with your soul’s eye, give up anything you think you know.

Today, we are told black is white. White is black. War is peace. Peace is placebo. We are assured that AI will do all our perception for us. Reality, however, doesn’t do well with masks and blinkers. I think I have always known that but never wanted to see the knowledge behind the masks.

“Sorrow,” Color xerox detail from lithograph 30”x24” 1974. 1966. Aviva Rahmani

In 2026, it seems to me that we need to answer several questions I suspect may be related, including:

1. What is America’s current relationship to Russia?

2. Why hasn’t civil disobedience been an adequate response to totalitarian regimes?

3. Can the future survive a narcissistic culture?

4. Can we avert further ecocide or ecosuicide?

5. Can women survive patriarchal systems?

6. If a relationship is grounded in trauma bonding, how can the bond be broken when there are no ways to escape the connection?

7. What is the connection between inflammatory triggers to the body system and a range of disease and addiction consequences?

8. Can men find the courage to be vulnerable and emotional and still identify as “manly”?

9. Is the regulation of cytokine function a key to serenity and well-being?

10. Why does communication across barriers require such skill?

This article will take a stab at answering at the end of this essay.

I am convinced that asking those questions in the process of making art will reveal answers. I believe those answers will reconnect many dots that now seem to be free-floating in the universe. I am looking for the answers to all those questions in my series of drawings, “Tolstoy & I.” I sometimes share my insights in these essays. Whatever insight I glean emerges as I contemplate my research and complete each drawing.

In considering possible connections, I have been convinced, despite my lack of medical qualifications that the dynamic relationships to my question hinge on understanding narcissism. Narcissism first emerged as a topic of general interest in psychological circles in the late sixties. It was described in 1968 as a psychoanalytic term in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) by Heinz Kohut. But long ago, the disorder was enshrined in Greek mythology by Ovid, when Narcissus became lost in his own reflection. Narcissism as a popular routine description of behavior entered our language in a big way in 2025. A loose popular consensus has emerged about what the term means. Colloquially and simplistically, it seems to mean a self-centered person who extracts empathy and attention from others to their detriment. Recently, I have noted how many articles address narcissism as a social danger. Some people think it is on the rise in younger people. That interest seems to have emerged as people have observed the behavior of the current American administration and its supporters. The description of Narcissism as a personality disorder precludes and is the opposite of how healthy relationships or communities function. Healthy relationships are an aggregate of individuals in connection with each other for mutual well-being in a relatively stable system, where each individual is valued and protected. That requires honestly considering others as much as one considers oneself.

Complexity theory explains how systems work: not by the effect of a single agent, or any lone individual but how many agents/ individuals fluidly function in an affective community. This is the opposite of how a narcissist functions. As we have come to understand the vernacular meaning of being a narcissist, the narcissist functions: in an isolated world of delusions, enabled by flying monkeys, none of whom are in any reality-based connection to each other. In a narcissistic universe, the dots only connect to a singular agent whose entire world view is fantastical.

In 2013 and 2016 I survived bouts of breast cancer. At the time, I researched possible causes and how to make the most of chemotherapy. My research took me into the biochemistry of cytokines and possible connections to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), which I’ve lived with since 1990. At one time, I followed research that suggested a link between CFS and cancer but that was not pursued by further laboratory research. What fascinated me ten years ago in my citizen scientist research, was the critical regulatory function cytokines play in every aspect of the body, but particularly in inflammatory responses, a factor in many diseases, including diabetes, heart and cancer. One reason, besides my own survival. for my fascination then with how cytokines function in a body system was the role complexity theory could play in understanding how these biochemical agents interact (that the relationships between agents in any system are at least as critical if not more so, than the agents). Considering those patterns subsequently helped me flesh out how my trigger point theory could inform environmental restoration. As I studied cytokines, I began to understand the human body as a system in an entirely new way. That new understanding informed how I found new ways to apply trigger point theory, as, to the legal theory applied in my project “Blued Trees.”

In the past year, I have written a lot about the nature of narcissism, living in a narcissistic culture and how that explains our drive towards planetary ecocide. What follows are my personal opinions. The tragedy of narcissism I see, besides how crushingly destructive it is to anyone else, is the complete incapacity for the narcissist to be honest with themselves. Self-honesty requires humility. A narcissist will confuse humility with humiliation. Humiliation is an intolerable experience for a narcissist because it triggers impossible shame. The result is that a narcissist would rather kill the messenger than face anything unflattering, no matter how slight or well-motivated. It is therefore no surprise, that on a personal and global scale, as narcissism explodes in our culture and leadership, that extraction, exploitation and ecocide could become the norm, reifying the power of individuals rather than the longterm survival of the planet and the planet’s wider living community.

In my series, “Tolstoy & I,” I have considered the relationship between Leo and Sofia Tolstoy, as not only the paradigm of a marriage with a patriarchal narcissist, but to understand, as one of the progenitors of civil disobedience, where Leo Tolstoy might have missed a crucial part of that political strategy. Besides Tolstoy, the most famous advocates for civil disobedience, Thoreau, Ghandi and King, were all men. Each had problematic relationships with women. Leo Tolstoy’s was in the context of two powerful conditions, Russian imperialism and ideas about Christian service. Despite external changes, little has changed in either of those conditions for Russia today. My father, born in Odesa at the turn of the century, grew up in a world determined by both. My mother grew up in a world that accepted those conditions. My parents shaped me despite a lifetime of rebellion.

My questions brought me to ask if there was a fatal flaw in the conception of civil disobedience and whether contemplating its historical roots might yield some answers? Could the “woman question” and Feminism hold a key to whether something might be missing in civil disobedience? In each drawing I generate for the Tolstoy’s time, I have projected my experience into Sofia Tolstoy, trying to understand their marriage, them as individuals, life in Eastern Europe and particularly in Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century. That is the world I knew as a child because it was my parents world. It is the world that still lives inside me. I still see critical elements of the same world around me today.

This week, as I was continuing to puzzle through what my artmaking was teaching me about Russia and America today, civil disobedience and adaptation to narcissistic systems, cytokines came back into my life. Cytokines reentered my life through Dr. Susan Levine, the physician who has long treated my CFS, in the form of a very low dosage of terzepatide. Terzepatide, known as Zep, is the same class of medications as Ozempic, the controversial drug developed for diabetes but now being used to treat obesity. This class of drugs is controversial because many see it as an “easy fix” for weight loss, an arguably narcissistic goal in itself. But it also seems to have affected the compulsive addictive behaviors people have in other realms, and now in these low doses, which don’t cause weight loss, they are being considered not only for diabetes, but also CFS, Long Term covid and a host of other diseases, which all have in common, inflammatory responses to phenomena. Those phenomena can include anything that stresses the body system.

In any addictive state, it is hard to pay attention to anything except the craving, for alcohol, sex, rage, food, gambling or any other drug of choice. In that way, the person acting out addiction parallels narcissistic behavior. As helpless as the addict may be, the circle of loved ones is even more helpless, and often even more vulnerable to destruction. The missing link is the feedback between inflammatory responses to stress, expressed in cytokine behaviors, triggering cravings to decrease the stress with whatever drug of choice. Then, when inflammation spirals even further out of control that’s when illness becomes more serious.

But here’s the thing: if so many agents can precipitate an inflammatory response, and regulation comes down to breaking a cycle of cytokine behavior, then perhaps we’re looking at fractal cascades, with as many implications as we might imagine.

In the Tolstoy’s marriage, the pattern of patriarchal and cultural narcissism was deeply entrenched and Sofia had no way to escape. Leo, driven by an ascetic Christian sacrificial vision, was nonetheless, a bully in their marriage, alternately withholding and satiating himself sexually, leaving Sofia often drifting suicidally in the wind from the whiplash, lost in what today we might call trauma bonding .

So here are my speculations to answer my original questions. What might be missing in civil disobedience is Feminism. That includes the humility and emotion of a woman determined to love and be loved as a whole person, at times with anger, fear and depth and a man who can feel grief, desire and fear without isolating. In the wider world, that just means an empathetic society. That is exactly what any narcissist can’t do. Therefore we need to look at the relationships between agents differently. So my prescription for cytokine regulation in 2026, with or without medications is just to feel the whole spectrum of human emotion with vulnerability and transparency, not as martyrs to feelings but in the full and risky richness of a whole life.

Some preliminary, arguably flippant speculative answers to my original questions:

1. What is America’s current relationship to Russia? Answer: Similar to Leo Tolstoy’s relationship to Sofia Tolstoy.

2. Why hasn’t civil disobedience been an adequate response to totalitarian regimes? Answer: It left out the subjugation of women in any patriarchal culture.

3. Can the future survive a narcissistic culture? Answer: No.

4. Can we avert further ecocide or ecosuicide? Answer: Yes.

5. Can women survive patriarchal systems? Answer: Yes but at great cost.

6. If a relationship is grounded in trauma bonding, can the bond be broken when there are no ways to escape the connection? Answer: Maybe not.

7. What is the connection between inflammatory triggers to the body system and a range of disease and addiction consequences? Answer: Everything.

8. Can men find the courage to be vulnerable and emotional and still identify as “manly”? Answer: Yes but apparently for many men, that is very difficult and undermined by the culture and each other. A supportive group can be critical.

9. Is the regulation of cytokine function a key to serenity and well-being? Answer: Apparently.

10. Why does communication across barriers require such skill? Answer: It takes willingness, courage and empathy, which often don’t come naturally.