In a country rabid with anger, where the seeds of fear are watered with blood for the golden harvest they provide, the frontiersman walks. He is a man beyond the law; he subsists in the wilderness, in the spaces beyond shopping malls and the senate, cable TV and fast food chains. He grows, like a virus, in the spaces of decivilisation that exist within American society - the conflict that allows for the constant regeneration through violence so integral to the American myth. The spaces that propagate it's current mode of existence. He is the Searcher, but knows not what he seeks.

He becomes a man through violence. It is with fire and brute strength that he asserts his existence. Out there, in the wilderness, there are no mothers. There is no love, or compassion - these are luxuries for others; the slick, sharp-suited fast talker. The frontiersman is no fast talker. He is a fast shooter - shoot first, don't-ask questions later, don't think. Do Not Think. If you think, for one moment, you would see that the myth you seek to inhabit is one with origins that pre-date the stage on which you draw, each morning, the curtains. Do you really cast your gaze, out of your window on the world – mailboxes and sunshine, Americana and waving flags, white picket fences and resilient life - and see a desert, a forest, a harsh land to be tamed?

The forests you stalk are towers of glass and concrete, the wilderness is not one that can be conquered with the gun, the axe, brute strength. You are acting and reacting a simulacra; you are playing a part in a myth that was forged of necessity in a time when the land was still alien and new, and the frontier still crawled its way westward by blood. Those times are gone now. The myth which harkens back to it works in service of something darker. Yet still - when the moon warns of danger, the cries of war echo across ancient planes laid supplicant to the powers of modernity. The frontiersman hears the cry, and he knows only blood.

It upsets me, that far from being an anomaly, events such as today's tragedy seem disturbingly at home in such a landscape. A landscape which calls for individualism, thrives on competition, propagates the myth of the hero, worships the bullet, kills for the dream. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."? But the golden fruit it bears is rotten, rotten to the core. I would not seek to shed blood for that.

“American Democracy was a form of self murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.” - DH Lawrence.