Our Real Condition – A Few Notes from Agnes Martin

Our Real Condition

What we really want to do is serve happiness.
We want everyone to be happy, never unhappy even for a moment.
We want the animals to be happy.

The happiness of every living thing is what we want.
We want it very much but we cannot bring it about.
We cannot make even one individual happy.
It seems that this thing that we want most of all is out of our reach.
But we were born to serve happiness and we do serve it.
The confusion is due to our lack of awareness of real happiness.
Happiness is pervasive.
It is everywhere. And everywhere the same.
And it is forever.

When people are really happy they say:
‘This will last forever even after death’, and that is true.
When we are unhappy it is because something is covering our minds and we
are not able to be aware of happiness. When the difficulty is past we find happiness again.
It is not that happiness is all around us. That is not it at all.
It is not this or that or in this or that.
It is an abstract thing.
Happiness is unattached. Always the same. It does not appear and disappear.

It is not sometimes more and sometimes less.

It is our awareness of happiness that goes up and down.
Happiness is our real condition.
It is reality.
It is life.
…
When we see life we call it beauty. It is magnificent – wonderful.
We may be looking at the ocean when we are aware of beauty but it is not the ocean.

We may be in the desert and we say that we are aware of the ‘living desert’ but it is not the desert.
Life is ever present in the desert and everywhere, forever.
By awareness of life we are inspired to live.

Life is consciousness of life itself.

Excerpts from a set of notes by the artist Agnes Martin, prepared for a 1979 lecture at the University of New Mexico, Santa Fe, included in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, by Arne Glimcher.

Art by Agnes Martin, “With My Back to the World” (1997)

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