Michael Ricks Rest in Peace.

On Wednesday July 10th, 2013 sometime between 3am and 8am, our beloved friend, collaborator and teacher Michael Ricks passed from this world to another, or into the unknown. In as much as each life lived is unique in time and space, individual lives are ultimately enigmatic to others. What follows, therefore, is an ode to Michael Ricks given my experience of him.

I understood Michael Ricks as a misfit genius. For many reasons he was at odds with this contemporary capitalist world that we live in. As a man and a father he had experienced expectations of him to be a breadwinner while at the same time he suffered an economic betrayal that undermined his ability to “succeed” on society’s terms. Events had led to his disenfranchisement from his family and ultimately to his becoming homeless (I use this term complexly and expansively, not reductively; on several occasions Michael told me that homeless folks were “his people”). During this time he developed cancer which was discovered by a friend and subsequent life partner when she took him into her home. Almost every conversation I had with Michael involved some attempt to make sense of what he’d been through and his ongoing inability to financialize his creativity, something he had a deep desire to do so that he could provide support to his daughters and his life partner. These challenges seemed to be etched into his soul and psyche.

It seemed to me that loss refracted like a pin-ball between his intellectual analysis, his creative work, his emotional landscape and his desire for a more inhabitable world. These experiences didn’t make Michael jaded but seemed to compel him to understand power while drawing him closer to others.

Michael had set out on a profound creative and intellectual quest to understand how the world had become so brutalizing, to diagnose where society was going awry in order to keep the flame lit that a better way forward is possible. His vision was that life was a garden where a humane, embodied and grounded law of peaceful co-existence could and should prevail. In an interview, Michael spoke about himself as an individual artist, but an individual at the service of the collective good, not in competition with the social. Rather he felt connected to people rising up: he wore a  green shirt with the hand-painted word “Iran” during the Green Revolution there, and followed events on twitter even convincing me to get an account. Michael thought of these events as a part of the same tide of change he was engaged in. And it is in this vein that he produced well-studied and thoughtful work based in his unique life and sensitivity to material, which was his contribution to the community. Engrossed in critical theories of technology and language as he was, I didn’t always understand what Michael was trying to communicate, but I do understand that making a public platform to contest capitalism, which for Michael was a form of fundamentalism, was his life’s work. I was fortunate to work with him on several projects in this vein including the MoneyProject.

Michael was an aesthete who loved pleasure in all its forms and who loved love. In his life facing death his grace and acceptance was incredible to behold. Despite his day to day struggles his existential core seemed powerfully trusting of the larger meanings of life and its processes. Towards the end he was patient and tolerant. He let us be there and accepted and glowed with our love for him and with the love he gave back.

Kim Jackson

Grounded from MoneyProject on Vimeo.

nhush/nehash: Nehushtan from MoneyProject on Vimeo.