Robert Cremean: Gula/Gluttony from STUDIO SECTION 2005-2007, The Seven Deadly Sins and Three Diptychs from The Winter Notebooks

2005-2007

80" x48"

Colored pencil, modeling paste on wood panel

 

Below is a transcription of the handwritten words of GULA above:

 

Nothing fills me, satisfies me, binds my need. I hang bloated, an inflatable sack of gaseous inconsequence. Self-pity, self-loathing and disgust swell my perimeter. I consume everything and exhaust nothing. I have cannibalized all desire and packaged myself expandable. I am greed without anus. That which my sibling, Avaritia, cannot retain, I cannot expel. I am a single-holed hunger, a swollen toothless bladder of vast proportion My skin is moist with shit. I boil with the blessing of my punishment. Pity me. Pity me as I pity myself, with love and understanding. Let me devour your love. Afford me the sweets of your acceptance and loving understanding. Do not judge me repugnant and without merit. Enlarge me with your lack of judgement. Forsake punishment and retribution. I hang helpless of defense. Is there not some beauty in my dedication? A certain admiration for my capacity to retain? I have always been and will always be. As you swell my enormity with repetition, I will devour you generation upon layered generation; a vast compaction of obfuscation, a conspiracy of ignorance. Through your insatiable hunger and my infinite capacity, we will devour the earth. I require no change of diet. Repeat is the fare of the day and of all of the days. I am putrid with it and exalt in its exhilaration. The perfume of blood and shit expands my girth, gives measurement to my wastefulness. To eliminate unwelcome surprise or unpalatable experiment, let me list the menu: War—Only war—all else is a potpourri of surrogates and stuffing. Greed feeds me, expands my perimeter. I devour what he acquires. What he cannot retain, I contain. I am the reticule of avarice. Nothing escapes me save the stench of layered repetition. I hang heavy with it, crucified by consumption. Pity me. The menu never varies. I have no taste for it, but can stomach no other. In symbiotic stagnation, I serve my purpose with passive accumulation. Though what I hold is never used, the very weight of me is proof of our existence, our triangulation. Gula, Acedia, Avaritia. We three, in symbiotic triangulation, illustrate the entelechy of mankind; but it is I, only I, Gula, who is passive. I hang and I hold, absent of anus in constant and tractable expansion. A balloon of infinite compaction. My layered weight and weighted expansion is shaped and molded to the contours of war. I am what I eat: rape, torture, horror, suffering, torn flesh, burning flesh, rotten flesh...I am full of it, suppurated by it, hanging and twisting like a fragrant pudding. I am the right flank of Acedia, sloth, follower of dogma, ritual, and recipe, sleeper of dreamless sleep. It is Acedia who scribed the menu adding, perhaps, subtle variations depending on shifting taste and available condiments. Avaritia stuffs me like a goose’s gullet. Generation after generation after generation I have been crammed with the rot and spoils of war: Like carrion, works of art, raped and pillaged, putrefy my core. Screams and wailing waft my bowels. Base laughter and jeering fill the leaded chambers of my heart. I reek with piety and deceit, the stench of hypocrisy. I am stuffed to bursting—and yet I do not burst. My expansion is infinite—or so it seems. Acedia sustains me. In passivity I accept all things given. In suspension I hang heavy with the nothingness of belief. I accept all things. I accept all things save one: Absence. Absence is never proffered, never interred or contained. My expansion is secure. Contradiction hinders not my dedication. My crucifixion is assured...the ecstasy of my torment, self-hatred and pity, assured. What Avaritia feeds me suspends me, increases me, intensities my hunger. Greed feeds me and so I hang, swollen with self-satisfaction and contempt. All precious things are artifacts, man-made, artificial, indigestible—. I hang heavy with them. Precious ideas, precious objects, precious dogmas and manifestoes. I contain them all. Layer upon layer of them. Millennium upon millennium, I am bloated with their flatulence. Avaritia stuffs me with his plunder...Gods and rituals, jewels and gold, paintings and sculpture. Boundaries. Things. Manufactured values. Realities, gaseous and pervasive. Beliefs, metaphors, poetry. Greed feeds me, over-feeds me, stuffs me with illusion. I hang heavy in duplication. Stuffed with pretense, superstition, and lies. Only compassionate history forgives this gluttony, for it, too, lies within me. It is in me and of me and is me, for only history can contain the weight and volume of this layered repetition, this gluttony of repeat, this unchanging menu of greed. I am what I eat, the rotting spoils of masculine entelechy. But there are certain divertimeni, certain unexpected interludes of frivolity and license that lighten my bowels of the heavy wheat and potatoes of war. Though the menu never changes, the means of acquisition add flavor to my layering distension The Inquisition was one of Acedia’s finest diversions. Sincere, dedicated, passionate, it delivered unto me unselfishly, without pretension, expansion in the name of the salvation of souls. Ambitious, slothful Torquemada, in all the purity of Acedia’s sleep, delivered unto me a sumptuous feast of souls. There could be no greater fare than this. Gula eats, no matter who or what the provider. The layering proceeds without discrimination. War, holocausts, inquisitions, whatever guise the provider, whatever size the provision, Gula eats. My sin is accommodation, my distension, layered by Avaritia’s taking and Acedia’s slumber. These two, war and religion, greed and sloth, create me, distend me. I am history, a fabrication of man’s making, frangible and artificial, mythical and metaphorical, a layering repetition of man’s image of himself in frantic desperation to create himself viable. All that was written and remembered, I contain, repeat upon layered repeat. I am his reality, his proof of existence and yet I am not real, I am his interpretation of reality and reality itself is an artifact created out of the compulsion to endure and to prevail. I am swollen by conflict, bloated with competition, layer upon layer I fill and distend. In Acedia’s slumber, men compete to be first. I am puffed to bursting with fame and acclaim, awards and rewards. Names remembered and names forgotten stud my accumulation. Bodiless without axis or armature they lay draped across obscene ambition, prudishly covering their whorishness. What need forces this dedication? It can only be endemic, endemic to masculine entelechy. Men layer me with their dedication To be first! To make history! To kill and conquer and conquer and kill in an endless repetitious obsessive linearity of Acedia’s sleep. This is my accumulation. This is my expansion. But my expansion is no longer finite. I have become finite and terminal. Acedia stirs and Avaritia’s consumption abates. We succumb to chaos. There is a sense of famine and deprivation. My layering has become agitated and frenetic. Like a pig drowning in shit, there is a thrashing about in passed realties. All the metaphors have changed and this is known but unrecognized. Still, Acedia sleeps—with lids forced shut. But now he dreams. He dreams of death. He dreams of death and the end of repeat. He clings to his sleep in desperation with otiose religiosity. Fear shapes his dream and trembles his complacency. He is afraid. He is trapped in gluttony. I have swallowed him whole. Our conspiracy falters. That which was absolute has become transitory as mankind and all his metaphors slide into past tense. I, Gula, have become quaint, a hope chest filled with trinkets and ornaments for a future that must never come. Would that I could simply clamp shut my mouth and preclude repetition. As he has layered me in to redundancy, he, too, has become redundant. Even Avaritia with his consuming catholic appetite has become cautious of toxicity. We are over-whelmed by paradox and inevitability. If Acedia wakes, we will die. If Acedia sleeps, we will die. Sloth controls us all. What has provoked this dilemma? What suddenness has brought us to conclusion? I cannot accept my ending. After all these centuries of accumulation, to be now suddenly absurd is unbearable. Self-deprecation is not in me or of me. I, above all artifacts, am to be respected. Am I not sacred? Is not man’s memory of Acedia’s sleep and Avaritia’s greedy accomplishments magnificent? My enormity and longevity alone should ignite awe and yet I am threatened. My layering ingestion presumes conclusion. I have swallowed my end. I am become the product of conclusion. My forever ness has become momentary. I have eaten fear and am poisoned by it. Avaritia has destroyed me. By forcing one last layer of repetition, he has doomed me finite. Infinity exists now only within Acedia’s fevered sleep. Mankind’s triad of dominance has concluded. My mouth is sealed. My death is immanent. Embedded in Gula’s gut is war’s diffusion and history; the glut of me hangs heavy in completion. War, the meat and potatoes of Avaritia, has transferred its significance from Avaritia’s greed to Acedia’s slumber. It hovers in supposition. The date 8/6/45 turned men into boys and clamped shut forever the mouth of Gula. The history of mankind hangs reified in Gula’s gut. Layer after layer of Avaritia’s hunter has bloated me with weaponry. Boundaries moved forward and back by sheer force of innovation, borders erased and redrawn through death and dissemination. Whole countries and continents devoured and reconfigured by replacing one man with another. Gula is a history of death and regurgitation Trapped in the depths of Acedia’s sleep, mankind has blundered itself into suicide and disappearance. All humankind is at the disposal of one man-child. This seeming suddenness is the product of Acedia’s sleep. His otiose slumber. His sloth. His isness. Layer upon layer, Acedia has required nothing of me other than that I be filled, stuffed, and silenced by the stuffing. He has neither seen nor tasted the poison of his slumber. As he simply is, he expects Avaritia to do what he does and I, Gula, have to ingest it all. But I am become finite, finished, redundant. I await my layering but nothing comes. My mouth is clamped against it. 8/6/45 lies within me. Avaritia is stunned. He is become child’s play, all rhetoric and redundancy on an empty stage. The weeping and wailing of women, heroism, patriotism, the blood and gore of it all has become the laughter of little boys. There is no place for laughter in Gula’s gut. I am built of sterner stuff, neither mockery nor self-deprecation are stored here. Since 8/6/45 history has been sealed against games posturing as repeat. The layering of me is either real or it is not. In war, to withhold a weapon out of fear is a contradiction unworthy of recordation. Mankind has forsaken tragedy for farce, only the masks remain as time and space are compressed on a stage of finite proportion Humankind has increasingly become audience, leaving the stage to bad acting and foolery. As the stage shrinks so, too, the appreciation of the audience leaving apathy to occupy the emptied space. And so I hang layered by verbs and shifting boundaries, mouth clamped shut against light and other impossibilities. I am beyond complete. My death is immanent. Filtering down through my millennia of layered verbs, art, war,, and religion dominate my distension. I am swollen with them. In review, only war has achieved progression, only war increased through repeat, only war and the shifting of boundaries has brought me to conclusion, only war has wrought me finite...only war. In this brief hiatus before completion, all nouns await extinction There is a strange quiet amidst the mayhem of repetition, a curious awareness, a listening for that which is to come, a final visitation or a burst of light, a signal of arrival, a sign of fulfillment. Silence now is only the absence of laughter. My mouth is shut against it. Religion thrives. Carried along by rote and self-fulfilling prophecies, it is the noisome droning of Acedia’s sleep and the genius of Gula’s layering accumulation. Through memory, I have reified verbs into nouns and frozen moments of chaos into dogmatic linearity, denying questions and demanding answers—the same answers—to questions unproposed. This, religion does and does so well in the layering of Gula’s gut. Only my completion has created nullity. In all the weight of my distension, I am porous of significance. Religion is Acedia’s glory, the proudest and most profound depth of slumber, the complete absence of light in all its paralyzing stimulation. It pacifies me, comforts me, abets my laying repetition; and now it has sealed me whole. I hand in absurdity awaiting implosion. As I remember (I am doomed to remember) the layering of weaponry and the shifting of boundaries, I hold compacted within me that which escapes me—that which has always escaped me, and escapes me still—those verbs encapsulated in artifacts that elicit awakened response. Even in hiatus, even now in the depths of completion, they elicit response, the torn open eyes of Acedia, the death of sloth. As Avaritia’s relentless progression through laying repeat shifted the paradigm of weaponry from one kills one to one kills all, from murder to suicide, Art has remained singular in its ambition, fluctuating only in repose. Unlike war which transitions from verb to noun, Art’s transposition is from noun to verb, the transmutation of artifact into orgasm, the creation of silence. I, Gula, am fatted with noise, layer upon layer of it. It is Acedia’s lullaby and Avaritia’s appetite. I contain the applause of Genius and chicanery, the screaming futility of women in war, the snapping crackling flames of Inquisition and holocaust, the suicide’s horrific whimper. All, all lay layered within me. How I love the layering repetition of sounds. They adorn and define me, marking beginnings and ends from the chaste cries of birth to the gurgling chuckles of death. All the hellos and goodbyes that accompany repeat. They confirm me, distend me, make me whole. Without sounds, I would hang heavy with boredom, deathly interminable repetition. I have harbored throughout the layering centuries the layering cries of absence, the songs of departure, the melting sighs of glaciers and the volcanic rhetoric of rebirth and revolution. This is my storage, the layering variations of repetition. I am Gula. I am Gluttony. I am history. I am all the stacked and vaunted puffery of man’s reflection in tiresome feckless supposition. I would not speak of Art here. It is unsettling. I will say only this: Neither Avaritia’s plunder nor Acedia’s slumber has stuffed my gut with Art. It exists elsewhere. It lies not within me. It is a verb, active and ahistorical. It does not lie static within me. It is in and of the moment of response. The over and over ness of my filling has leaded me with conclusion. I am become finite in distension. Through extrusion I hand now in self-awareness of repeat. Repetition no longer describes my layering. I am become parody. In pause, in this hiatus between immanence and imminence, infinite and finite, I have only deception to deflect perception. I am bloated with noise, blinded by it, crucified by it. I hang senseless with mouth forced open to accept laughter, the final poison. Avaritia continues his blind consumption filling that which resists filling, filing that which can no longer be recorded, a clamorous froth of self-absorption. Acedia sleeps with eyes clamped shut and lids thinned transparent by evolution. How vapid and futile are all our metaphors! Our triad is no longer viable. We have become too simplistic for the vastness and complexity of it all. That which we have sought to diminish through sloth and avarice is not containable. We have cast our crucible too frail and our golden prophecies have become lead. Our incessant drumming of the present into the conformities of repetition no longer circumscribes the abstractions of Desire. Avaritia is hollow noise and Acedia is mindless slumber. My distension has been clamped shut against them. Our death is imminent. I long to release myself, to drain history of Avaritia’s layering plunder and Acedia’s dreamless sleep. Even in my earliest layering, I knew our end. The process of man’s completion through the technology of death rests now within me. His end is accomplished. All his feckless fearless metaphors of war have brought me to fulfillment. I can tolerate no more of him. 8/6/45 marks the end of history, the end of Gula, the end of gluttony. I can eat no more. Nothing can subsume Avaritia. He exists now, like Acedia, in exaggeration. Both are magnified by desperation. Cast large in the awesome victory of his accomplishment, Avaritia’s shadow has embraced the earth. Nothing can grow in this lightless place, nothing save the anxious expectancy of the final repeat, the great light that will lay waste all shadow. How clever was Acedia to write his slumber in the process of inevitability, his metaphors, in passive verbs, to make repetitive that which was irreversible, to make rote that which was endemic. Like all mystagogues, he created sin in order to forgive it and so he stalls, he procrastinates, he forgives it. He sleeps on because he has no dreams, because he is fearful of awakening, because he cannot, must not, awaken because if he awakens we will die. The triad and all man’s metaphors will die frozen in oblivion and I, Gula, will hang heavy with it all, a rotten pudding of narcissistic repeat. All, all will finally and forever revert to what it has always been: gluttony. I pity, if I were capable of pity, Avaritia. His mindless rapacious appetite has brought us to conclusion. And I envy Avaritia.. His senseless anusless consumption makes him incapable of retention and history has served him well. I, Gula, have served him well, as does Acedia’s blessed sleep. We, the triad of man’s reality, will die by virtue of Acedia’s sleep. I record now only the inevitabilities of epilogue.

 

Collection:

Crocker Art Museum

Sacramento, California

Done