The Remarkable Tale of Jean Payens

De: Jake Karnes

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

“If postmodernism killed meaning, who will resurrect it?”
Jean Santiago Payens was one of the last true philosopher-artists of the twentieth century—a poet, painter, and thinker who believed that God was the only foundation strong enough to hold art upright. His ideas were radical, his faith unorthodox, and his life almost completely forgotten.
Jake Karnes, a graduate student drowning in cynicism and debt, stumbles across Payens’s work and decides to make him the subject of his thesis. Their meeting in New York City sparks a strange friendship—a dialogue that becomes both confession and revelation. What begins as research soon turns into a pilgrimage across bars, galleries, and rain-slick streets, where meaning itself seems to flicker between smoke and light.
Together, the old man and the young writer wrestle with truth, beauty, and the collapse of modern art. What follows is part memoir, part philosophical ghost story, and part manifesto for the next great artistic movement—what Payens called post-postmodernism: the return of the sacred to the creative act.
After Payens’s death, Jake’s unfinished notes—found and edited by poet James “Edwards” Stroud—reveal a vision of art that dares to believe again: that beauty and faith are not enemies, but the same heartbeat made visible.