words are the loom of the stars life's breath - Cecilia Vicuña

Even in the ’60s, the ecological disasters had begun, and I think by focusing on dissolution and regeneration of the lifeforce, I was instinctively responding to that pain, the pain of the ocean, the pain of the sand. I walked on this beach as a kid and the sole of my feet would get black from oil, everything was already blackened. That was 50 years ago. We have lived with this denial and destruction for 50 years, and when you think of the damage that those 50 years have done, if there’s a future for humanity, those 50 years are going to be known as one of the most criminal.

If you think that you don’t know, you don’t know. But if you think that you may know, if you think that it’s perfectly possible that you have a knowing, then you can find it. So it’s a matter of opening. It’s a matter of releasing the structures that have been imposed upon you, realising that every form of education is an imposition that’s coming from outside your being. I think the liberating force of art and poetry is that it releases you from that, and it puts you in the place of discovering, of exploring, of acknowledging that you have senses, that you have awareness, that you perceive and are paying attention to the precise form of those perceptions. That’s the joy of the poet, the joy of the artist, to focus completely, zero in on those perceptions and see the universe expanding out of ‘a grain of sand’, as William Blake said. Everything has infinite possibilities of knowledge and that’s what it means to be human. We have been brought up to believe that the machine knows better than we do. Everybody believes that now. That’s preposterous! Machines only know how to do operations, they can’t imagine, they can’t imagine the unimagined, they can’t travel like we can to the end of the galaxies just by thinking about it. So, why are we so willing to renounce our agency as creators? That is what is troubling.

Only by becoming collectively aware of the pain we inflict on each other is there a chance for change, for a new moral code to prevent it. We need to archive not just art and literary works – often the record of the unacknowledged behaviour we have witnessed, or felt within – but also its effects on others. The social context makes change possible.