Polyamorous Love Song Quotes

“If we make a union in these fields, is there anything we can do to ensure it doesn't become corrupt? Or that later it doesn't only look after the people who work here, we just look after our own, and everyone else can fend for themselves? We need to fight for ourselves, here and now, but we also need changes so large and impossible they encompass the entire world.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“And my theory about professional artists was as follows: artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community. Instead they are those individuals most willing to exploit their own creativity and inspiration, most willing to gain personal profit from their unconscious and its emanations, those with the most missionary zeal for the dissemination of their own idiosyncratic perspectives. Questions of pure creativity clearly lay elsewhere.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“The most effective lie is always the closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily lives, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use for understanding a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“Often the idea of survival is mentioned in relation to capitalism, as in the phrase ‘economic survival’ or the thought ‘I need to earn money to survive.’ However, in our endeavour we hoped to sever survival from economy, striving for a purer form of modernized surviving. Our fight would be a fight for survival and the fighting itself would be our life, not in the sense of employment but in the sense of a full reality with all of the inherent risk, complexity and completion that living implies.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“There is a difference between literature and just writing in your diary. I think perhaps the difference can be measured in degrees of pain. Hard work is also a factor. When I abandoned poetry there were so many questions lost to me as well. It remains astonishing to me the degree to which poetry has lost all value and meaning within the conditions of what I loosely refer to as corporate capitalism. Absolutely amazing.”
― Jacob Wren, Families are Formed Through Copulation

“But no, I’m sorry. I can’t end there. I haven’t yet said everything I want to say. A little girl is at school, out in the playground with her friends, and she sees a flower and says to her friends, just thinking out loud, wondering gently to herself: Do you think flowers have feelings? And for the rest of the day her friends tease her relentlessly, with every new opportunity that arises. Do flowers have feelings, that’s so stupid. Right, flowers have feelings. All day and for the rest of the week: stupid flowers have stupid feelings and that little girl feels she is never going to say anything like that ever again. She has already learned that when you open your heart or express genuine, innocent curiosity or wonder about the world, your friends will pounce on the opportunity and use it to hurt you as viciously as possible and there is nothing anyone can do to protect her. It’s simple stories like that that really break my heart.”
― Jacob Wren, Families are Formed Through Copulation

“I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“our personal anarchy is composed of deep pain and intense joys”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“{T}here are millions of books published every year exposing the world's corruption, and the corruption of the world only increases. Each book, in its own way, has teeth but nothing to bite into. No clear way to attack. There are also millions of books pushing for things to remain the same, or teaching you how to make money at the expense of others. Everything balances out, but the balance is so deeply imperfect, always tilting further and further towards the worst.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“There is pleasure in reading a version of myself I know in my heart could never exist, since mine is not an iron mind coldly calculating every possible option and outcome. Instead I am a businessman who loves excitement, loves tension, loves risk and the unexpected, and just happens to possess an extraordinary, on occasion even miraculous, degree of good luck.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“He tells me he can't believe how bitter he has become, how sour, that all his life he had been one of the most fun, one of the happiest, one of the most joyous people anyone knew, and now he was like a crumpled piece of steel covered in rust. The way he describes himself, a 'crumpled piece of steel covered in rust,' I don't think I'll ever forget those precise words or his voice as he said them.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“I don't really have any positive vision of the future, don't know what kind of world I'd someday like to live in or if it's even possible to achieve something better than this. I only know that the billionaires are attacking us, again and again taking measures that serve no other purpose than to increase their own wealth and debase all other aspects of life. And when you are attacked you must fight back, in whatever way you can.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young, it cannot yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep on growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“I thought that perhaps all of my stories, my writings, my so-called works of literature, were exactly like this one: little tales to distract myself from something I actually didn't want to look at too closely within the strictures of the present moment.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“What if you were to fight fire with fire, money with money, belief with belief? Would it be possible to get rich in some way that, at the same time, could decimate the Right, disgrace power? To form a religion that could undermine their strength? What business plan, what church, could set the foundations for such an attack? (...) A church that is also a business. Because religion is like a fantasy, a dream, and maybe money is also a kind of fantasy, they belong together. So then a religion in the form of a dream that hurtles forward towards the future, because money is an energy stored away for what comes next, but also a dream for now, because there's no living without cash. A dream for the future and a dream for now.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“cynicism is only ever a kind of broken idealism”
― Jacob Wren, Families are Formed Through Copulation

“People might think they’re making rational decisions, but often, without even knowing it, they are essentially making emotional decisions. But where does emotion stop and thinking begin? Even to put it in these terms feels obnoxious and misguided. Such distinctions are artificial. Thinking and emotion are completely intertwined. To believe otherwise is to block so many genuine possibilities. In Western democratic politics the rational decision is supposed to rule the day. What could democracy possibly mean if people are unable to make rational decisions as to what is best for the society they are a part of? However, as we know, current electoral politics, much like advertising, often plays directly to the emotions of the voter. I’m not saying this is only a bad thing. What I’m getting at is how we all need to understand this process so much more. And how in further understanding it we might begin to change the ways it does and doesn’t work on us.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I wonder if in this book I’m giving away all my secrets. Then I think that’s okay, if I live long enough I’ll get new ones.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I only know that the billionaires are attacking us, again and again taking measures that serve no other purpose than to increase their own wealth and debase all other aspects of life. And when you are attacked you must fight back, in whatever way you can.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“The connection between hospitality and performance is both obvious and perhaps not obvious to everyone who makes performances. In the dynamic between performer and spectator there is always the potential for at least a certain degree of hospitality on both sides. How open-minded am I going to be when I begin to watch a performance? How open to the spectator is any performance I might make? Sometimes being too open, taking the spectator too much by the hand, might come off as condescending, and keeping this in mind it is possible to convey a greater hospitality by making work that is in fact more challenging.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried-wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“Not as much now, but more when we first met, Sylvie would sometimes talk about the power of being the official opposition in theatre or in art. That the official opposition can sometimes do more to change things, both more to change the discourse and more to change concrete policies and actions, than those actually in power. The official opposition has the freedom to push as hard as they want, to act purely on principle, and by continually doing so they can keep things moving toward change.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“There are no individual solutions to collective problems.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I went to the theatre and what I saw hinted at my desires but mainly felt like their frustrating opposite. If in conventional theatre you had costumes, characters, acting, scripted narrative, piped-in music, and artifice, instead I wanted people dressed in their normal clothing, being themselves, walking a tightrope between structure and spontaneity, music we loved played on vinyl, CDs, or with instruments, anything and everything that might bring us just a little bit closer to authenticity or reality. There was a kind of theatre that already existed and a kind of theatre that didn’t yet exist, might never exist, and I knew which side I was on.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“There are no individual solutions to collective problems. Nonetheless, it is individuals who must come together and figure out what to do. In all of this, there is the unaddressed question of leadership. The anarchist in me genuinely believes rotating leadership is a solution: people take turns taking the lead in the areas of their greatest competence, interest, or desire. Another similar collaborative idea might be: best idea wins. But art is so subjective, and for five different people five different ideas might each seem best. It has always been my thinking that if someone in the group feels strongly that we should do something, then we should do it, their strong desire shouldn’t be watered or sanded down by the democratic entropy of the group. I want the projects to be open enough to welcome the strongest impulses of each of the participants. This is my ideal, and like all ideals it is something I often fall short of achieving. Perhaps this ideal is not even best for every collaborative situation. In a sense, it is just another way of saying that I want to work in ways that are deeply collaborative while at the same time keeping our most intense individual artistic differences more alive than alive.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“This is actually the real work. To be with people who we care for, and who care for us.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“One afternoon I was playing, lost in the music. I worried each time that I became lost in the music a little bit more, that maybe someday I wouldn't want to come back, that this refuge from the tension and potential violence - violence I'd done everything to incite - would once again become a refuge I wanted to make my permanent home.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“What are the clichés that accurately reflect me, that me and my class of assholes seem to say over and over again, like super-elite broken records. That the poor are lazy, that we work harder than everyone else and deserve every penny we make(in my particular case, this happens to be true), that we are the global class and therefore effortlessly, with great skill and determination, run the world.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“I go to the shelf and pick out a few poetry books to take with me. A few old favorites and a few I haven't gotten to yet. As I slip the books into my carry-on, it occurs to me that there really are a lot of poems about death, that I've always read many poems about dying, but had almost never noticed them before. They were always the ones I lightly skimmed, and I thought that maybe I could start reading these poems more carefully. It was almost nothing, but it was also a decision about my life.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“I know business, I know money, and therefore I know that they are always slightly troubled by the realities of sexual prostitution, since sex is something that can never be stripped clean.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor