All We Have Is Means
Williamsburg, 📸 July 2017
Last night I dreamed I painted over a blue sky with glowing coral. Breathing in the thick fumes of linseed oil, I could hear my flat brush swiping about, watching my hastily mixed pink-orange hue bleed streaks of blue, red, and green across the canvas. Little by little, a patchwork of dusky squares coalesced and smoothed into a lustrous warmth, covering up the cool cerulean blue—save for the very top. Some subconscious force prevented me from eclipsing the broad day completely, commanding my dreaming hand to leave a trace of space and memory for the vibrating contrast between colors.
I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed about painting or mixing or laying down oils, but I found it very soothing, surrendering to the delicate sounds and smells and colors. When it comes to creating art in my waking life, I enjoy the individual parts much more than the sum itself. The process. The means.
There’s a lovely line from Ursula K. Le Guin’s dazzling science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven—about dreams, realities, and an unusual painting—that goes,
“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
I interpret this to mean that while humans themselves are transitory, humanity is perpetual; kindness, generosity, and forethought matter. A person’s actions, the entirety of one’s life, is the slow spreading of a single brushstroke, contributing to an endless, boundless canvas. We are not the painting; we are the act of it. Living is a process. Living is the means.
Capitalism would have us think otherwise. Wholly dependent on greed, domination, and shortsightedness, capitalism cunningly whispers into desperate ears that we, the individual, are the end, the finished work of art. But when the end is a billionaire, how can the means—unlivable wages, child labor, deplorable working conditions, death—possibly justify the billionaire’s success? And when the billionaire dies, do not those devastating means go on living long after?
The billionaire isn’t the end; just a cruel means. In exploiting humans and the environment, in inflicting violence and suffering, all the billionaire does is fuck up their own infinitesimal brushstroke at an enormous cost to others. And there are far too many of these fucked up infinitesimal strokes being laid down, collecting like rainwater and pooling into an ugly, visible stain on history. Rather than shaping the means of humanity with vision and compassion, capitalism compels a profit-seeking society to see their individual ends met. Survive to thrive—best of luck with that.
“All we have is means.”
Imagine if we nurtured the means, ensuring safe, healthy, dignified lives for everyone, ever intertwined. Imagine that painting at the end of times, how exquisite it might be, dreamlike in its vibrating contrast of colors.