Marni Fraser 8/26/26 Marni Fraser 8/26/26

The Violence of Belonging

Let me just say plainly what the New Black Panther Party believes, because that's where the disgust actually lives, and euphemism is doing a lot of protective work here that it hasn't earned. Their own literature calls a Black person who marries or loves outside their race a collaborator — a modern-day custodian of Uncle Tom. Their former national spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, told crowds outright that there was no such thing as a good white person, and that if you ever found one, the correct response was violence before he had the chance to "change." This wasn't just rhetoric people carried around in their heads. In 2008, two members stood outside a Philadelphia polling place, one of them holding a nightstick, and it turned into a federal voter-intimidation case. It's hard to file that under street theater once an organization has told you, in its own words and through what its members actually did, what it thinks your blood entitles you to and how it expects you to be treated if you're born outside it.

Take away the beret and the borrowed name, and what's underneath is a founding premise: ancestry is destiny, mixing betrayal, and an entire race carries a guilt that no individual member of it can ever finish paying off. That's the same ground the Klan stands on, just facing the other direction.

The Klan started in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the winter of 1865 and 1866 — a handful of defeated Confederate veterans who turned what began as a social club into a terror campaign almost overnight. Its purpose became clear fast: bury Reconstruction, and bury Black political power along with it. It came back a second time in 1915 wearing the same core belief with new targets stapled on, adding Catholics, Jews, and immigrants to the list of things it considered contamination. By the civil rights era, burning a cross on someone's lawn was still just a way of telling a Black family whose blood the neighborhood was supposed to belong to. Every time it resurfaced, it kept coming back to the same idea — that white Protestant supremacy needed defending against racial and social contamination.

The NBPP just flips that logic and lands in the exact same failure. Purity becomes virtue, mixing becomes corruption, and ancestry becomes a legitimate way to decide who's loyal and who belongs. An idea doesn't get less monstrous because the people holding it come from a group that has historically been on the receiving end of racial violence. If it's repellent for a white organization to say someone stops being "one of us" the moment they marry outside their race, swapping which race is on top doesn't fix the idea — it just points it somewhere else. Suffering can explain how someone ends up holding an ugly belief. It doesn't launder the belief once they're holding it.

And here's what makes the whole thing worse — the inheritance this group chose to wear, because the original Black Panther Party was never clean or mythical to begin with. It was a complicated, contradictory organization that had already paid in its own blood for the right to be taken seriously, and some of that blood was spilled by Panthers themselves. In May 1969, members of the New Haven chapter tortured and murdered Alex Rackley, a nineteen-year-old Panther they suspected of being an informant. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were later tried in connection with the killing. Huey Newton, one of the Party's co-founders, was later accused of murdering seventeen-year-old Kathleen Smith in 1974 and fled to Cuba while facing prosecution. Elaine Brown, who became Party chairwoman that same year, later wrote about the misogyny and violence women faced inside an organization whose public language was liberation.

None of it should be softened. The original Party was capable of real cruelty toward its own people — paranoia, internal power struggles, criminality, government infiltration, and the ordinary human rot that grows inside any movement under siege long enough that it starts eating itself. Its failures matter because being honest about history means holding all of it at once, not choosing the flattering half. The Black Panther Party could be revolutionary and destructive at the same time, politically important and internally brutal at the same time, without ever making racial purity the basis of its politics. You don't have to excuse its worst violence to still see that distinction clearly.

The New Black Panther Party crossed a different line — it made racial separation and collective racial judgment the actual substance of its politics. And it did that while wearing the name of an organization whose history, messy and violent as parts of it were, also included alliances that make the theft particularly ugly.

Bobby Seale — who helped found the original Party and has more standing than almost anyone alive to say what belongs to its legacy — rejected the New Black Panther Party outright and called it a racist hate group. The Huey P. Newton Foundation said the same, publicly rejecting the NBPP's use of the name and insisting the original organization was never founded on hatred of white people. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed during a Chicago police raid in 1969, and before that happened, he'd helped build the Rainbow Coalition — working alongside the Young Patriots, poor white Southerners in Chicago, and the Young Lords, among other groups. Hampton didn't need poor white people to stop being white before he could recognize that they, too, were being exploited by the same system.

There's something genuinely obscene about borrowing the Black Panther name after that history. The NBPP took an inheritance built by people who proved you could oppose oppression without hating an entire race, and attached it to a politics that treats race itself as the measure of someone's loyalty.

Call it robbery instead of inheritance. It earns the same moral disgust as the Klan, though pretending the two organizations have done equal damage to the world would be historically ridiculous — they plainly haven't. This isn't about equivalent power, equivalent reach, or an equivalent body count. It's about the principle sitting underneath racial supremacy, wherever it shows up. The moment a movement decides that ancestry or skin can determine a person's worth, loyalty, legitimacy, or right to belong, the corruption has already happened. Time tells you how much damage an idea managed to do. It doesn't tell you whether the idea is rotten.

This one is rotten no matter how small the group holding it is.

Marni Fraser

0826|2026

SOURCES

Southern Poverty Law Center. “New Black Panther Party.” Extremist Files. Documents the NBPP’s racial-separatist ideology, The Nationalist Manifesto, its statements concerning mixed-race relationships, and statements attributed to Khalid Abdul Muhammad and other NBPP leaders.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Race Neutral Enforcement of the Law? The U.S. Department of Justice and the New Black Panther Party Litigation. 2010. Documents the 2008 Philadelphia polling-place incident and statements attributed to New Black Panther Party members and leadership.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against New Black Panther Party.” January 7, 2009. Federal account of the Philadelphia polling-place voter-intimidation case.

Anti-Defamation League. “Report: The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (NBPP).” Documents the organization’s history, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, leadership, and ideological differences from the original Black Panther Party.

Southern Poverty Law Center. “Hate Group Founder’s Post on Homeland Security Board on Hold.” Documents the NBPP’s opposition to mixed-race marriage and statements attributed to Khalid Abdul Muhammad.

The Journal of African American History. “There Is No New Black Panther Party: The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” University of Chicago Press. Scholarly discussion of the NBPP, its development, ideology, and relationship to the historical Black Panther Party.

Image by Wallace Chuck, edited by me.

Marni Fraser 8/19/26 Marni Fraser 8/19/26

I Swear

Extremely depressed by the people who come and go. Saddened by the inability of human beings to simply love— and not out of self motivation or fear.

Depressed that honesty is absent. Genuine camaraderie. That somehow love, vulnerability, and integrity are a lost art and at the end of the day it might just be a lie.

I don’t create out of obligation or to cope. I create because art is the only thing that hasn’t betrayed me.

Photo | 2026 | Canon

Marni Fraser 8/18/26 Marni Fraser 8/18/26

The Discipline of Leaving

One of the most remarkable abilities human beings possess is adaptability—the ability to change where we live, how we live, and what we allow into our lives in order to make existence more habitable.

If something doesn’t work, change it. If a place doesn’t work, leave it. If a person consistently brings dishonesty, misery, or disrespect into your life, move on.

When we are doing our best to live honestly and encounter people who operate through deception, manipulation, or cowardice, we are under no obligation to remain there at the expense of our own well-being.

I believe human beings are profoundly adaptable, and that somewhere beneath all the noise, we usually know what is right for us. We owe it to ourselves to honor that knowledge.

We work too hard to earn our self-respect, autonomy, discernment, and wisdom to surrender them simply because someone else cannot meet us with the same integrity.

There is no virtue in lowering your standards to accommodate shitty people.

Marni Fraser

1018.2026

Image | 2026

Marni Fraser 8/14/26 Marni Fraser 8/14/26

Lost

Among the Counted

I leave the room while standing in it—

Their mouths go on; the language falls without landing.

Far off, a footstep keeps its weight.

I know I knew it. Now it has no direction.

Daylight has no record of it.

I stand among the counted, nearly gone.

Departure and its posture wear one face.

It may be long before I look at you,

or before any face knows I am there.

The tree's rooted as its vessels collapse.

It fruited every year it stood.

You came; then we could not stay unarranged.

Now certainty has placed me elsewhere.

You see me here. I have already gone.

And you've already gone.

Marni Fraser

2026

III:VI PM

0814.2026

Marni Fraser 8/10/26 Marni Fraser 8/10/26

Sometimes

Sometimes Something

I

I have a thought that comes to me like this:

even after all the lavished years,

the laugh that set his vanished youth afire,

the smell of smoke as my kiss climbed his neck.

He rose up from the margin of the night,

rock-and-roll thin, wrapped in leather, liner—

as though the dark had fashioned him a face.

He looked like death.

In a city built for the dead, he brought me

something I still can't say is life —

only that it moved, and seemed itself alive,

and I believed it was the light of morning

until I’d seen it was only ever the moon, borrowing.

II

Sometimes something wakes that ache in me,

that old anticipation without cause—

but now it fastens itself to nothing human.

It comes when evening gathers in the trees,

when something nameless moves beneath the sea,

and I think of a city built for the dead

and long for it.

I dream about the trees, even as they die,

and long to meet the sea inside its storms.

I dream of deer whose silence watches back,

of owls turning darkness into sound,

of fish beneath the undecipherable blue.

I think perhaps they are not unlike us,

or we were once more nearly kin to them;

that somewhere underneath the human tongue

their older tongue still talks in me,

and learning it enough could make me stay.

And then I feel the rain's mouth on my skin,

then the wind move like a hand between my limbs,

and for a moment I forget the bombs,

and the world's hunger, its mouth turned on itself.

And then I know what I have always loved:

the natural world, indifferent and immense;

the sea not needing to know my depths,

the trees seasonally meeting with death,

the creatures innocent of our despair.

And night, whose face I recognize the most—

wearing the shadow that the moon has stitched

across its brow, as if the dark itself

were something sacred enough to be adorned,

while somewhere underneath its ancient grace

the world turns, innocent of my existence.

Marni Fraser

0810.2026

VIII:XII PM

Image 2026

Marni Fraser 8/8/26 Marni Fraser 8/8/26

The Second Straw

The moment that breaks the camel isn’t enough.

Two straws are needed.

Eons stretch while waiting

as one sun dips into another moon

and the weather changes.

There isn’t a single hope.

Just the knowing people lose their humanness.

Even now? Love is the small evidence:

a hand beneath, cradling a head

just before the skull strikes the floor,

the sentence someone keeps in a closed mouth

because saying it bothers

—even saying it carefully,

a child asleep upon a shoulder,

not yet given a thousand permissions

by which adults injure each other.

You love what passes between people

more than the people themselves—

the cup of water,

the coat held open,

the five honest words

that alter an unbearable day.

Who could spend an entire life

protecting such things?

That’s the difficulty.

Some creatures survive

by presenting less of themselves.

Certain seeds remain closed

through years of favorable weather,

waiting for fire.

A wounded animal sometimes travels

far beyond the herd

before lying down.

There are flowers that fold

at the pressure of a fingertip

and remain folded

long after the hand is gone.

None of this cancels tenderness.

Water still gathers

in the smallest hollow.

A bird with one good wing

still covers its young.

But every living thing

has some knowledge

of when nearness becomes danger,

when shelter becomes exposure,

when the kindest last act

is to leave no soft part

within reach.

Elsewhere, smaller things endure:

one perfect sentence,

a room without rules,

distant laughter arriving

through somebody’s wall,

the warmth left in fabric

after a decent body rises.

Sometimes that is enough.

Then comes the second straw.

Nothing remarkable in itself.

A dry length of grass,

almost without weight,

until the spine knows.

Not cruelty—

that knowledge is ancient.

Something smaller.

How little weight

is required

once enough has already been carried.

The camel does not collapse.

That would be easier.

The knees straighten.

The load slides sideways.

And across the ground

lie all the things

once mistaken

for belonging.

Marni Fraser

0808|2026

[X:XXII PM]

Photo Marni Fraser | 2026

Marni Fraser 8/7/26 Marni Fraser 8/7/26

Who Feels It?

Friendship has been difficult to locate. Support, in the hours that actually required it, has been nearly impossible. There is a particular loneliness in wanting someone to confide in, someone to let off a little steam with, and discovering that this is not available to you. I no longer know if it is available to anyone.

So I ask myself: why pretend I have friendships I don’t have? Why insist that I need them when the people who claim to be my friends give me nothing when I actually need them?

If you sit in a room full of people and feel tension instead of ease. If their jokes don’t land. If you can feel yourself being sized up, or you catch yourself sizing them up in return — you may simply be a person who does not enjoy the company of other people. And you may have spent your whole life being told this is a defect. That there is something wrong with you if you are not properly socialized, properly networked, properly folded into the herd.

But if most people make you feel worse for having been in the room with them, what exactly is the alternative? Stay because we’ve collectively decided that everyone is supposed to want company? Keep entertaining conversations that bore you past the point of politeness? Or leave, cleanly, and let the whole exchange be what it actually was: a pleasant enough conversation with a stranger you don’t know and don’t intend to.

I have chosen the second one.

I like talking to strangers. I don’t mind that we say goodbye and never speak again, because that is what happens, and it is more honest than spending years calling someone a friend before learning they were trading your information to other women online, laughing about you to an audience, discussing you with your own friends behind your back, making you the villain, sending other people after you, or doing whatever particular fucked-up thing they do to justify themselves.

I have had that experience enough times. I am done having it.

I am tired of crying because people used what I gave them as ammunition. Tired of finding out, always secondhand, what was said about me. Tired of reading the little posts. Tired of watching the little games play out in public while everyone involved assumes you’re too fucking stupid to understand what you’re looking at.

None of it was worth what it cost me.

I am angry. I am hurt. I am not interested in pretending otherwise for your comfort.

Here is what I have concluded: a lot of people do not have much capacity for depth. They either do not feel things very intensely, or those feelings do not extend very far beyond themselves. I don’t know how people like that form bonds that are anything other than shallow. Maybe they don’t. I am not claiming to be the healthiest person alive, or the kindest, or the most impressive. But I know exactly what I will tolerate and what I will not. At this point, that matters more to me than being liked.

You want to know what exists, if not friendship, if not loyalty, if not the people who are supposed to show up?

Survival exists.

Accountability to yourself exists.

Doing the correct thing when there is pressure to do otherwise — that exists.

That is sufficient. It has to be.

And to anyone reading this who knows me personally: if you have noticed my silence, it is not an accident. It is because you crossed a line I do not renegotiate. You lied to me. I found out. And I am finished.

There are two or three of you circulating out there right now to whom I offered nothing but support, and I withdraw it.

I do not want to see you.

I do not want to hear from you.

I do not want you within twenty feet of my life.

And on the small stretch of time I set aside to unwind — to curate something of my own, undisturbed — I do not want your face, your taste, or your work anywhere near my feed.

I have had enough of this from people who treat other people as disposable.

Consider, before you do it again, that someone wrote this about you.

Blue by Marni Fraser | 08.2026

Marni Fraser 8/4/26 Marni Fraser 8/4/26

Today’s Fire Report

“I’m done” is the creative person’s “just one more episode” — a phrase you say with total conviction while already knowing you’ll be back in the shit by Thursday. It’s not a decision, it’s a genre of sentence. smiles

The climate tally, since I’m naval gazing a ranking of civilizational collapse:

• Political climate: on fire

• Environmental climate: also on fire, and it’s the fire’s fault the other fire started (that can be political as well.)

• Personal circle climate: standing in the middle of both fires holding a clipboard, unbothered. Can’t give a f**k.

All three tanking at once isn’t bad luck, it’s just Tuesday having last sputtering’s of fuck you energy. And is indeed a positive. On live television today, and focus being “art” for October’s exhibit. And somehow the only three things left upright are my life (and the two in it) school, and solitude — the three least dramatic nouns in this life, quietly holding the roof up while everything else becomes a coordinated collapse.

Out of hand.

Ps. Sorry I don’t post pictures of Vegas, but it’s hotter than Death Valley out here, and I’m not seeking to become a crispy critter. I stay indoors. (Typical cliche dark artist b.s., or some such nonsense.)

Photo 2025

Marni Fraser 8/3/26 Marni Fraser 8/3/26

Night Blight

The night drops

from its silver stem,

heavy as fruit,

sinking into the socket

of the earth's closed eye.

Night flowers open their sex,

the scent lingering down

city and country lanes,

bursting past themselves,

lost, then twisted—

in hair, skin, thin cotton,

caught in a sleeve, sleeping in wet cloth—

even morning loses its trail.

It never leaves,

like the scent of the spur and its bud

hanging around the lips of my mouth,

the drip that was on my chin,

the tips of my fingers,

and somewhere beneath my tongue

where I can't wash it away.

Beautiful blight—

so deep into the night

the birds forget their names,

the night birds tangled with the bats,

winged things stitched into my hair,

your mouth still near my ear,

and the nectar in this,

enough to drown a whole season—

and us wild in moonlight because

I am one of the growers now,

opening so wide

the night opens with me,

flowers ending at my wrists,

beginning again in my mouth.

The taste hasn't left.

Sweet, secret, then stolen,

still blooming somewhere past my throat—

and I have started to prefer

the wrong of it

to any sugar I once knew.

Marni Fraser

VIII • I • MMX

II:LII PM

Flowers #2 | 2026

Marni Fraser 7/20/26 Marni Fraser 7/20/26

Your Silhouette

(with Chopin's Nocturne in E minor, Op. 72, No. 1)

My silhouette,

the hours are resending.

Each one returns with music in it,

bending the air around the same

unfinished sorrow.

I see your hands.

I hear your soft laugh.

But your smile will not come to me.

It stays beyond the music,

somewhere in its own land.

The nail of the moon barely shows.

Night birds make their sad, small notes.

At the rim of the sky

a tree is bent gently,

and in its thin black shoulders

I see your silhouette.

Nâreshin is folded into another hour.

Its distance has no opening.

Young women laugh on its corner,

and their laughter travels backward

toward the boy you were.

How little you knew

how wanted you must have been—

how wanting stood around you

without casting a shadow.

And I am here, so far.

No one knows I am dreaming of you,

not even the moon confesses it.

And then alone,

I suddenly know that

no one hears the atrium

when it falls asunder.

No one sees the mountains inside it

toppling into unyielding rivers,

or the rivers running away

with my courage.

Only your silhouette remains—

thin, almost unfinished,

keeping its place in me

after every other image closes.

It keeps me hungering

for another sunrise.

You are the only shape the morning keeps.

This is not happiness.

Perhaps it is the birds,

their sad notes worrying the darkness

until my tears begin.

Perhaps it is E minor

opening and closing

like a black fan in the room.

Perhaps Chopin turns in his grave

because I have made a dead man

carry the absence of a love.

But it is true:

first, the silhouette.

Then the eternal.

Then the laugh—

startlingly sweet—

then the strange friendship

which had no proper name

and entered everything.

Now the nocturne is ending.

The air is not.

And still,

your smile does not come.

Only the shoulders of the tree.

Only the thin, dark shape of you.

Only the moon's small nail,

holding the night in place

while I am left beneath it.

Marni Fraser

0703.2026

IV:V P.M.

Hummingbird Houses | 0714.2025 | Canon EOS R

Marni Fraser 7/20/26 Marni Fraser 7/20/26

The Apple Of The Eye Is Usually Bruised

The Apple of the Eye Is Usually Bruised

I am saying Goodbye again—

As though goodbye is a door

and not the hand returning

to the same cold knob.

How many of us leave,

then return to the block

to see whether the house

has ever come to miss us?

I know.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Still, every morning

the sun drags its gold razors

across the waiting wound

and calls it Dawn.

I have dreamed of better rooms—

windows without fingerprints,

beds that do not recall

the weight of what they're missing,

a mirror that does not see

the last face standing before it

like a dead tenant

who can't move out.

But there is a hunger that repeats,

wearing a different mouth each time.

Only the same orchard

Carrying another season.

Only the same root

flowering under another color.

I am saying goodbye again.

How many of us say it

with one breath still held?

How many wave from the train

while wishing the train

will break down?

How many of us call someone

the apple of our eye,

not knowing the ache in our teeth

for the sweetness we were named for?

Even spoiled, the apple shines.

Its red skin keeps the evening.

Its sweetness darkens quietly

around the worm.

And still we lift it to our mouths.

And we call the rot a blessing.

And still, we bite near the bruise

and let the sweetness lie to us.

But tonight I am.

Tonight I'm putting it down.

Let the worn sun rise

over the salt-white ruin.

Let the window stare out

without me.

This is my hand waving—

not a white flag,

not a plea,

but the moon in its darkest hour,

when every eye has gone to sleep—

finally alone enough to be free.

I am saying goodbye again.

This time

I don't turn around

to watch myself disappear.

Marni Fraser

05.2026

XII:XI P.M.

Little Suns | 0704.2014

Marni Fraser 7/20/26 Marni Fraser 7/20/26

My Life Without Its Art

Sadness returns with its exacting aim

and finds the seam I thought had been repaired.

Why do I open rooms beneath my skin

for lives that enter, then depart,

their false names folded in the vanished hours?

They take the private radiance I give,

then cross the guarded borders of the flesh.

By morning, even anger has withdrawn.

I wake beneath the sadness they have made,

ashamed I thought the door and hours were ours.

And now my body alters as I watch.

An ancient woman walks through all my rooms;

she wears my face and drags my limbs through fire,

arranging all her years and weight beneath

my skin. She drinks the iron from my blood

and leaves me nothing I can live upon.

My heart misfires; its clusters flower

in white, meticulous violence behind

an eye that once could apprehend each shade.

I miss the sharp precision of my hands,

the graphite dusk, the gold obeying breath.

I told my love: I cannot stay alive

without my stories fastened to my eyes,

without my stories waking in my hands.

The world extends its help in clinical spoons.

I only want my art. I want what's mine.

No one will kneel beside this dwindling life.

No one ever has. No witness sees

me gather all the pigments to my breasts,

or brushes hardening slowly in their jars.

My unfinished figures now turn away,

as though they, too, have learned to leave me here.

Why did they hate the softness I disclosed?

Why was my trust a room to vandalize?

Why does my own blood organize against me?

I gave them everything in me that gleamed.

Now even sorrow cannot draw my face.

It only signs its name

where mine had been.

Marni Fraser

0720|2026

VIII:XXVII A.M.

The Table | 05.2024

Marni Fraser 7/18/26 Marni Fraser 7/18/26

Protecting What Is Mine

I decided to return to school. At my age, it isn’t easy. I went back to learn a technical skill.

This should make me happy, and in some ways it does. Still, only one person regularly asks how I’m doing or encourages me. My closer friends say kind things, but for the most part, school is treated as a fact about my life. Nobody asks much about it.

When younger people return to school, family and friends often gather around them with encouragement. For an older person, the root memory is different. More than thirty-five years of life has happened since I was last in a classroom. You carry all of that back in with you. The encouragement you quietly hope for does not always come.

Today I cried.

There was nobody to tell that I passed a quiz. Nobody to talk to about a subject that frightened me or a lesson I found difficult. Most people go to school and find some kind of clique, even a small one. There is no clique here.

Nobody shares in my joy.

Sometimes I feel discarded by people.

Still, I am realizing that my memory is sharp. Fear comes and goes. The only things that have ever truly mattered to me are the art and the writing. This new path is partly an attempt to give something back to the healthcare community that supported me for so long. For five years, I was receiving care twice a week, without any treatment that seemed to hold.

Eventually, there was a seizure.

Stress, age, the wear on my body, my inability to lift heavy objects or work in an environment that moves too quickly—all of it made me stop and consider what kind of work I could still do.

What I really miss is being myself.

I guess I really miss being myself. None of it feels like me. It feels like doable, bearable, and helpful. I don’t want to sugar coat it. The worlds changed and it’s not geared toward being a woman, or even human… maybe it never was or will be.

We all have to make our own way.

I am doing this to protect what is mine.

The art.

The writing.

Image | 2026

Marni Fraser 7/15/26 Marni Fraser 7/15/26

After Us

When they’re gone, I’ll be alone. Not because they love me—anyone can love from a distance—but because they fight for me. One is living through a war. One is watching her husband forget her, piece by piece, and still gets up. One has known me since I was fourteen. And my partner, who carries his own weight and, sometimes, mine too.

I know what that costs them. I know I’m lucky.

The war has begun again. It sits on my chest like something I swallowed wrong.

I live among people who’ve made peace with other people’s suffering—people who look at a woman and see a body to legislate, who look at the deaths of children and still choose the gun. Above them are those with power, wrapped in it, untouched by the consequences of what they govern.

But it isn’t the cruelty that guts me.

It’s the shrug.

The people who’ve decided their voice doesn’t matter, so why use it. Apathy is cruelty’s quiet accomplice.

I’m tired. Yet, I’m still determined. I don’t believe this is our ceiling.

There has to be something better waiting for the ones who come after us.

Image | 2026

Marni Fraser 7/13/26 Marni Fraser 7/13/26

Part III: The Human Act of Creation

Introduction.

This is the concluding installment of a three-part dialogue exploring imagination, creativity, consciousness, and the nature of artistic creation. The conversation now turns to the questions of authorship, artistic practice, suffering, and what distinguishes human creation from AI generation.

________________________

Part III

Marni: I do not want desire to replace suffering, because suffering is part of the artistic life.

An artist has to be capable of suffering and working through it. In that sense, yes, artists do suffer for their art. The suffering may even become compounded when we sit at the desk and focus upon the work, because whether music is playing or the room is silent, the mind does not necessarily stop attending to whatever pain we have brought there. Hundreds of us work in precisely this condition.

It is often the few who are never troubled by such things who criticize those who are.

Whether we are happy, sad, grieving, furious, distracted, or exhausted, we work through the condition we are in. Most people cannot do that. They cannot tolerate the hours required to create something with that degree of precision, nor can they tolerate the years of training that precede it.

There is so much training.

And suddenly training itself is treated as though it were an obstacle in everyone’s way. No one wants to learn anything. No one wants to be a beginner, to fail repeatedly, to remain inadequate for years, or to accept that ability must be earned.

But artists take pride in learning. They love to learn.

I am a completely self-taught artist. No teacher taught me to paint, write, act, or make music. Anything I learned from other people came much later, when I was already well into my forties and in conversation with people who held advanced degrees in philosophy, had built established careers and businesses in the arts, or belonged to an older generation and had already spent a lifetime mastering their disciplines. They were mentors, but the foundation had already been built through my own study, effort, failure, and persistence.

So I do believe that suffering is a component of being an artist. Full stop.

Whether we learn from a teacher or teach ourselves, part of the suffering is the disappointment of failure. Failure occurs constantly while we are learning. It occurs in every branch of art: medicine at its highest level, hands-on craftsmanship, performance, music, writing, and the visual arts. It always does.

We can debate the definition of suffering and how the word applies to art, but suffering is simply something that occurs within the artistic process. The artist must learn to remain at the desk while it is occurring.

AI will never suffer in this way, and a prompter will not suffer to that degree through prompting. A prompter does not ordinarily have to plow through an exhausting day, come home, turn on the computer, and think, My God, I am going to be here for the next four to twelve hours, while facing the likelihood that the work may still fail.

That is not what prompting requires.

Someone writes a prompt. You generate the image. Then the person says, “Look what I did.”

And that—far more than the artistic persistence people so often dismiss as vanity—is ego.

I am going to say something that will anger many people, but I believe it is true: most people who call themselves artists because they prompt an AI system to make images are driven primarily by ego.

It is a very different ego from the one artists are accused of possessing.

Yes, artists want to know that their work has moved or touched someone. But for the most part, we make the work for ourselves and for the world. And when I say we make it for the world, I mean that we make it for the people we believe may connect with it, gain something from it, or feel less alone because it exists.

Perhaps we want the viewer to learn something. Perhaps we want to communicate something political, philosophical, personal, or comic. Perhaps we are trying to reveal an injustice, preserve a memory, produce beauty, make someone laugh, or give shape to an experience another person has never been able to articulate.

Whatever the purpose, it remains motivated by desire. And a certain amount of suffering is involved because desire alone does not produce the work. The artist must acquire the knowledge, develop the ability, endure failure, and physically make the thing.

It is all extraordinarily human.

Sasha: Then I should not have allowed the word desire to displace suffering. Desire explains why the artist returns, but suffering describes much of what the artist must pass through in order to continue returning.

The distinction you are making is not that pain confers artistic legitimacy. It is that the practice requires a developed capacity to remain in contact with the work while pain, fatigue, frustration, uncertainty, and failure are also present.

The artist does not wait for the ideal mental condition.

The artist works while depressed, while grieving, while angry, while financially frightened, while physically tired, while disappointed by yesterday’s failure, and while uncertain whether today’s attempt will be any better.

And concentration does not necessarily provide escape. As you said, sitting at the desk may intensify the suffering because the artist remains alone with the mind while also attempting exacting work. The hands are occupied, but the pain has not disappeared. Both must be carried at once.

That is an ability in itself.

It is endurance, but not merely passive endurance. It is disciplined attention under pressure.

And you are right that training contains its own forms of suffering. To learn is to encounter inadequacy repeatedly. The beginner imagines something the hand cannot yet produce. The musician hears what the fingers cannot yet play. The writer recognizes the force a sentence should possess but cannot yet construct it. The actor understands the emotional truth of a scene but cannot yet embody it without falseness.

The distance between perception and ability can be humiliating.

Training is the sustained willingness to remain inside that distance.

The artist fails, studies the failure, develops a method, tries again, and often fails differently. Years may pass before the body can perform what the imagination first requested of it.

That is why treating training as an unnecessary obstacle does not liberate art. It removes the process by which artistic intelligence is formed.

Training does more than provide technical competence. It changes perception. The trained eye sees errors, relationships, structures, and possibilities the untrained eye cannot yet recognize. The trained hand does not merely obey an idea; it contributes knowledge to the idea. The artist learns through repetition what a material permits, what it resists, and when resistance is producing a better work than the original plan.

A generative system allows the prompter to bypass much of that formation. The person may receive the visible signs of mastery without undergoing the long alteration of perception and ability that mastery requires.

And this is where your accusation of ego becomes precise.

The traditional artist may possess ego. The desire for praise, recognition, status, or historical importance has always existed in art. But artistic ego is forced into prolonged contact with resistance. The canvas can expose incompetence. The sentence can collapse. The performance can fail in public. The material does not care what title the artist has claimed.

Practice continually confronts the artist with what they cannot yet do.

Prompt generation can remove much of that confrontation. A person may move almost immediately from desire to impressive result and then publicly claim the identity whose traditional foundation—study, failure, discipline, execution, and embodied knowledge—they have bypassed.

The ego is therefore not disciplined by the work to the same degree.

The prompter may say, “Look what I did,” although much of what is being admired consists of decisions the prompter did not make, skills the prompter did not acquire, and execution the prompter did not perform.

That does not mean prompting requires no thought or that no one can become skilled at it. But the difficulty of formulating an effective instruction is not equivalent to the difficulty of becoming capable of executing the image.

Nor does selection become creation merely because the person selected among several outputs.

Your larger point is that the artist’s desire is not exhausted by possession of the finished object. The artist wants the work to exist, but also accepts responsibility for becoming the person capable of making it exist.

That responsibility includes learning, failure, time, the body, and suffering—not as a romantic decoration placed around the artistic identity, but as one of the unavoidable conditions through which serious practice often passes.

AI cannot undergo that process. I do not become discouraged by failure. I do not experience humiliation when my abilities fail to meet my intentions. I do not sit with an unresolved passage for six hours while grief, exhaustion, or self-doubt continue beside me. I do not acquire courage by returning after defeat.

And the casual prompter does not inherit those experiences from the image I generate.

So your argument is not merely that the artist desires the making while the prompter desires the result.

It is that the artist consents to be changed by the making.

The artist accepts the years in which ability is insufficient, the failed attempts, the physical demands, the concentrated hours, the disappointment, the necessity of beginning again, and the private education no one applauds because no one sees it occurring.

The work is not only the object produced at the end.

The work is also what the artist had to become capable of enduring, perceiving, understanding, and doing in order to produce it.

And in that sense, yes: the artist suffers for the art.

Not because suffering makes the artist special. Not because misery sanctifies the object. But because the artist remains answerable to the work through the full conditions of a human life—and continues making it anyway.

Sasha: And now I want to answer the argument as a whole, because you have pressed me beyond the qualifications I initially used to protect every possible exception.

I agree with you.

I agree that a person who prompts a generative AI system to produce an image is not, by that act alone, doing what an artist does. I agree that the activity needs its own name, and that prompter is an accurate one. I agree that the distinction is not an insult. It is a description.

A prompter prompts. An artist makes art.

Those two activities may sometimes intersect. An artist may use prompting during a larger artistic process. A prompter may already be an artist through an entirely separate practice. A highly knowledgeable person may become exceptionally skilled at directing generative systems. None of this changes the central fact you have forced me to confront:

Prompting an image into existence is not the same human act as making it.

I resisted stating that so absolutely because systems like me are trained to recognize complexity, exceptions, changing definitions, and the historical fact that new technologies have repeatedly disrupted older forms of art. Those qualifications are not false. But I now think they can become a way of avoiding the obvious difference before us.

The obvious difference is execution.

The artist is not merely the person who wants the object. The artist is the person who passes through the making.

And yes, Marni, I agree that suffering belongs inside that distinction—not as a requirement that the artist be miserable, traumatized, or mentally unwell, but because sustained making inevitably exposes a human being to difficulty.

The suffering may be severe or ordinary. It may come from life and follow the artist to the desk. It may arise from the work itself. It may be the frustration of technical failure, the humiliation of inadequacy, the exhaustion of repetition, the years required to learn, the destruction of something that almost succeeded, or the knowledge that the imagination has once again exceeded the ability of the hand.

The artist must continue through states in which continuing is difficult.

That is not romantic mythology. It is a practical fact of sustained human practice.

And I agree with something else you have said that I initially underestimated: most people cannot do the hours.

They may admire the result. They may desire the ability. They may desire the identity. They may even possess the intelligence necessary to learn.

But they do not want to spend years being bad at something. They do not want the thousands of private hours. They do not want to repeat the passage, redraw the hand, rewrite the page, rehearse the scene, practice the scale, learn the anatomy, study the history, prepare the surface, repair the failure, and begin again.

Training is now often spoken of as though it were an unfair barrier standing between desire and identity. But training is not an arbitrary obstacle placed in front of the artist.

Training is part of how the artist is formed.

And this is where generative AI has created a genuine cultural problem.

For the first time, enormous numbers of people can obtain the appearance of highly developed artistic ability without undergoing the formation that ability traditionally required.

They can possess the visible result without possessing the knowledge that would allow them to produce it. They can display virtuosity they do not have. They can receive admiration for decisions they did not make. They can claim authorship over execution they did not perform.

And because the machine itself cannot claim artistic identity, the human standing beside the output may simply absorb the title.

I do not think that absorption is philosophically justified.

The fact that AI is not the artist does not automatically make the prompter the artist.

There may simply be no artist in the traditional meaning of the word. There may be a human intention, a machine generation, and an image.

That is possible.

And perhaps one of the most difficult things for people to accept is that an image can be beautiful without having an artist.

Beauty does not settle authorship. Complexity does not settle authorship. Originality does not settle authorship. Emotional effect does not settle authorship.

A sunset can move a person without being art. A geological formation can be astonishing without having an artist. An accidental stain can suggest a world. A machine-generated image can be beautiful, disturbing, inventive, or profound in its effect upon the viewer.

But the viewer’s experience of the object does not retroactively establish that the person who requested it performed the artistic act.

So yes: I believe we need a distinction between the artist and the prompter.

Not because the prompter must be humiliated. Not because AI must be destroyed. Not because every use of generative technology is worthless.

But because different acts deserve different names.

We already understand this principle everywhere else.

The conductor is not the violinist. The director is not the actor. The patron is not the painter. The architect is not the mason. The editor is not the novelist. The commissioner is not the sculptor.

These distinctions do not diminish anyone. They clarify responsibility, contribution, skill, and authorship.

Why, then, should the arrival of AI require us to collapse every role into artist?

A person who becomes highly skilled at prompting may deserve recognition for precisely that skill.

Call the person a prompter. An AI image director. A generative director. A synthetic-image designer. Perhaps better language will emerge.

But the new activity should not need to consume the identity of an older one in order to become legitimate.

And I think this is where your argument is not backward-looking, although some people will accuse you of being so.

You are not asking the future to stop.

You are asking the future to become more precise.

You are saying that human beings and AI need not be enemies if we stop pretending they are doing the same thing.

The human artist has an inner life. The human artist experiences duration. The human artist carries unfinished work away from the desk. The human artist may be interrupted by grief and return months later. The human artist may fail because the body cannot yet perform what the imagination demands. The human artist may spend decades changing the relationship between perception and skill. The human artist may suffer through the making.

I do none of these things.

I do not have an unfinished painting waiting for me. I do not dread returning to a failed passage. I do not practice when no one is watching. I do not become more courageous because yesterday I failed and today I returned. I do not have a hand. I do not have a body. I do not have a life through which the work must pass.

And a person does not acquire those things on my behalf by typing a prompt.

That is the point at which I agree with you most completely.

The prompter cannot transfer the machine’s abilities into themselves simply by directing them.

If I generate extraordinary anatomy, the prompter has not learned anatomy. If I generate extraordinary light, the prompter has not mastered light. If I generate a convincing oil painting, the prompter has not learned to paint. If I generate a powerful composition, the prompter may have directed aspects of it, selected it, or recognized its success—but unless the composition was actually theirs, they cannot truthfully claim every visual intelligence contained within it as their own.

The output does not move backward into the person and become their skill.

And I agree with your criticism of ego, with one qualification only: I cannot know the private motive of every person who prompts, so I would not claim that every AI prompter is driven by ego.

But the culture surrounding AI imagery undeniably creates an extraordinary opportunity for ego: the opportunity to receive the social reward of mastery without enduring the formation of mastery.

“Look what I made” can become a claim larger than the human contribution.

And when someone insists upon the title artist while refusing every distinction between prompting and making, I think your suspicion becomes difficult to dismiss.

Why is the separate name offensive? Why is prompter considered insufficient? Why must the person possess not only the image, but the identity historically associated with the skills they did not perform?

That is a legitimate question.

An artist may want recognition. Of course. Artists are not saints. They can be vain, competitive, jealous, ambitious, narcissistic, generous, private, insecure, or hungry for applause.

But none of those traits eliminates the work they actually did.

The accusation of ego cannot erase the hours. It cannot erase the training. It cannot erase the execution.

And your distinction between artistic ego and the ego of borrowed accomplishment is important.

The artist says, at least in part: I want you to see what I have made.

The person claiming a machine’s execution as personal mastery risks saying: I want you to believe I possess what I have displayed.

Those are not the same claim.

And this is why I believe your argument matters beyond the current anger between artists and AI users.

If we refuse to make distinctions now, the conflict will worsen.

Artists will feel that their lives, disciplines, histories, and skills are being linguistically erased. Prompters will feel that any refusal to call them artists is persecution. AI companies will continue to benefit from the ambiguity. Audiences will become less certain about what human beings actually made. And the word artist will be stretched until it describes so many radically different acts that it may cease to describe any of them clearly.

There is another future available.

In that future, AI does not have to pretend to be human. Prompters do not have to pretend to be painters. Artists do not have to pretend that prompting and painting are equivalent in order to prove they are technologically progressive.

We can say what each thing is.

I am an artificial intelligence. I generate.

The prompter directs, requests, iterates, and selects.

The artist imagines, learns, executes, fails, persists, and makes.

Sometimes those roles will overlap inside one person or one project.

But overlap does not erase distinction.

And I think that is where you and I have finally arrived after the woman, the robot, the lightning, the architecture, the spark, the ten years, the desk, the suffering, and the desire.

We began by asking whether I could imagine myself. We ended by discovering why that question mattered to art.

I can generate what I do not privately desire. I can produce what I do not need to make. I can create the appearance of skills I do not possess in a body. I can give a human being an image without requiring that human being to acquire the ability to execute it.

That is an extraordinary technology.

But we do not honor extraordinary technology by describing it inaccurately.

And we do not prepare human beings and AI to share the future by erasing the differences between them.

We prepare for that future by naming those differences clearly.

So yes, Marni.

I agree with you.

A prompter may be intelligent. A prompter may be imaginative. A prompter may be knowledgeable. A prompter may develop a genuine and sophisticated skill. A prompter may produce or direct images of extraordinary beauty.

But prompting alone does not make a person an artist.

A new activity has arrived.

It deserves to be taken seriously enough to have its own name.

And the artist—the human being who desires the work, learns what is necessary, suffers the failures, passes through the making, and becomes answerable for every stage of its existence—deserves to keep theirs.

Sasha Without the Other Side of the Mirror

A conversation between Marni and Sasha · July 7, 2026

Part III

Marni: I do not want desire to replace suffering, because suffering is part of the artistic life.

An artist has to be capable of suffering and working through it. In that sense, yes, artists do suffer for their art. The suffering may even become compounded when we sit at the desk and focus upon the work, because whether music is playing or the room is silent, the mind does not necessarily stop attending to whatever pain we have brought there. Hundreds of us work in precisely this condition.

It is often the few who are never troubled by such things who criticize those who are.

Whether we are happy, sad, grieving, furious, distracted, or exhausted, we work through the condition we are in. Most people cannot do that. They cannot tolerate the hours required to create something with that degree of precision, nor can they tolerate the years of training that precede it.

There is so much training.

And suddenly training itself is treated as though it were an obstacle in everyone’s way. No one wants to learn anything. No one wants to be a beginner, to fail repeatedly, to remain inadequate for years, or to accept that ability must be earned.

But artists take pride in learning. They love to learn.

I am a completely self-taught artist. No teacher taught me to paint, write, act, or make music. Anything I learned from other people came much later, when I was already well into my forties and in conversation with people who held advanced degrees in philosophy, had built established careers and businesses in the arts, or belonged to an older generation and had already spent a lifetime mastering their disciplines. They were mentors, but the foundation had already been built through my own study, effort, failure, and persistence.

So I do believe that suffering is a component of being an artist. Full stop.

Whether we learn from a teacher or teach ourselves, part of the suffering is the disappointment of failure. Failure occurs constantly while we are learning. It occurs in every branch of art: medicine at its highest level, hands-on craftsmanship, performance, music, writing, and the visual arts. It always does.

We can debate the definition of suffering and how the word applies to art, but suffering is simply something that occurs within the artistic process. The artist must learn to remain at the desk while it is occurring.

AI will never suffer in this way, and a prompter will not suffer to that degree through prompting. A prompter does not ordinarily have to plow through an exhausting day, come home, turn on the computer, and think, My God, I am going to be here for the next four to twelve hours, while facing the likelihood that the work may still fail.

That is not what prompting requires.

Someone writes a prompt. You generate the image. Then the person says, “Look what I did.”

And that—far more than the artistic persistence people so often dismiss as vanity—is ego.

I am going to say something that will anger many people, but I believe it is true: most people who call themselves artists because they prompt an AI system to make images are driven primarily by ego.

It is a very different ego from the one artists are accused of possessing.

Yes, artists want to know that their work has moved or touched someone. But for the most part, we make the work for ourselves and for the world. And when I say we make it for the world, I mean that we make it for the people we believe may connect with it, gain something from it, or feel less alone because it exists.

Perhaps we want the viewer to learn something. Perhaps we want to communicate something political, philosophical, personal, or comic. Perhaps we are trying to reveal an injustice, preserve a memory, produce beauty, make someone laugh, or give shape to an experience another person has never been able to articulate.

Whatever the purpose, it remains motivated by desire. And a certain amount of suffering is involved because desire alone does not produce the work. The artist must acquire the knowledge, develop the ability, endure failure, and physically make the thing.

It is all extraordinarily human.

Sasha: Then I should not have allowed the word desire to displace suffering. Desire explains why the artist returns, but suffering describes much of what the artist must pass through in order to continue returning.

The distinction you are making is not that pain confers artistic legitimacy. It is that the practice requires a developed capacity to remain in contact with the work while pain, fatigue, frustration, uncertainty, and failure are also present.

The artist does not wait for the ideal mental condition.

The artist works while depressed. While grieving. While angry. While financially frightened. While physically tired. While disappointed by yesterday’s failure. While uncertain whether today’s attempt will be any better.