Brainstorm on forging ahead

Hi Bryan,

As requested, your SHOWTIME subscription has been canceled. We’re sorry to lose you. If this request was an error, you can re-activate now. Hope we’ll see you soon! Love, the SHOWTIME team.

It feels good to receive items in the mail. You never know what’s inside: it could be a love letter. Why did you ever date that cable service SHOWTIME? Ah yes, now you remember: it’s because they owned the only copy of the new Twin Peaks.

How does one own an artwork? I guess it’s the same as owning land, water, airwaves . . . Intellectual property. There’s every sort of legal precedent for this type of thing. It’s like God – you just don’t question it.

I remember a movie that I saw long ago. Who cares about the title; it only came to mind because I’m thinking about the art market. The story centered on a painter whose own original compositions failed to attract the admiration of any museum curators, so he got into the business of making forgeries.

Say you have a painting of some bathers on your wall. You love this painting, it gives you pleasure every day when you behold it. Now say a robber breaks into your house and tries to steal the painting, but you are startled awake by a noise, for the robber has stepped on a wine goblet and shattered it; so you walk out into the front room and catch the guy red-handed. And the robber says:

I’m sorry but I needed money to feed my family. My two children are normally so noisy, screaming and banging upon the wall that divides our apartment from Bryan Ray’s place, but now my children are mute and inert from weakness because there’s no food in their dish: and look at the evils that have resulted already from this quandary – Bryan is blogging: the peaceful silence has lulled our neighbor into a contemplative mood, and he has begun to arrange words into nearly intelligible sequences, thus stealing precious focus from the weary eyes of tens of thousands of readers.

And you explain to the thief that, even if he had managed to steal and sell the painting, he wouldn’t have gotten more than a kopek for it anyway, because it’s a forgery. And, to prove this, you point to the signature down in the corner at the lower right: instead of Cézanne, there is scrawled the name of your mother.

Now here’s the ultimate question: Why is the copy nearly worthless, while the original would easily command upwards of ninety million at an art auction? And the answer is this: All the love and pleasure that you felt when regarding those bathers displayed on your wall for those years – it was all just a replication of some other existence. It wasn’t real pleasure; it wasn’t true love. Long ago, the vast human-shaped mirror we call Bad Luck tripped on its own perfection and shattered into upwards of ninety million shards: each worth exactly one kopek.

And, somewhere, a cute little girl is holding the string of a floating balloon. This image will entice more neighbors to beget further children. These children will resemble the aforesaid cute little girl with an accuracy rate of precisely zero point zero. And the parents will hate them.

The main thing to remember, though, is that our world is governed by moral strictures. Now the first and foremost of these directives is this: You should never display your hatred openly and honestly. Especially if you loathe your children because they do not live up to the grand ideal that lured you to produce them in the first place. Instead of expressing your hate and thus giving the urchins a mandate to live their own lives, you must feign love. That way, you can derive much counterfeit pleasure from the sight of them writhing in your web. This web constitutes the way that you have entreated them to live. The righteous way. Vengeance, repression.

II

Is every flame a copy of its forerunner, or are all flames one big flame that has yet to be copied?

I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.

Saint Matthew (3:1-11) tells us that these are the words of John. Which John? You mean my childhood friend John K. of the suburbs of Burnhaven? No, I mean John of the wilderness of Judaea. Codename: The Baptizer. Are you sure you don’t mean the John K. who created Ren and Stimpy? Yes, now shut up. According to Saint Luke, John’s mother was the cousin of the mother of Jesus. But which Jesus? There are approximately ninety million . . .

Translate it.
I have a friend named Jesus
from Mexico.

His father and grandfather are called Jesus too.
They account me a fool with my questions about salvation.
They say they are saving to move to Los Angeles.

That’s the lower half of Anne Carson’s poem called “God’s Christ Theory.” Also consider section 7 from the Gospel of Philip:

Names given to worldly things are very deceptive, since they turn the heart aside from the real to the unreal. And whoever hears the word “god” thinks not of the reality, but has been thinking of what is not real: so also, with the words “father,” “son,” “holy ghost,” “life,” “light,” “resurrection,” “church,” etc . . .

Now tally that with section 17:

“Jesus” is a private name, “Christ” is a public name. Therefore “Jesus” does not exist in any language [ . . . ] But the word for Christ in Syriac is messias, and in Greek is khristos [ . . . ] “The Nazarene” is the public name of the private name.

So when I say “John K. of the suburbs of Burnhaven,” it’s like saying “Jesus K. of the metropolis of Nazareth,” inasmuch as neither can altogether blot from history the fact of their forerunner.

“Pardon me, but your husband is showing.”
—Johnny, to Gilda, in Gilda (1946)

My point is this: Was Jesus the copy of John? Because we see Jesus replicated everywhere, yet John is relatively scarce. I mean, there are plenty of people named John, but they’re not the lone forerunner. Their names all end in K. (John Kricfalusi; Jesus Khristos.) Last names are for understudies; real agents have codenames. As it saith in “Song of Myself” (§20):

. . . conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d.

So I think I am correct in my thesis, that the Jesus of the church is a spinoff of John the Baptizer. He’s like the single-kopek John. For it is written (Gospel of Philip again, §23):

Jesus tricked everyone, for he did not appear as he was, but appeared in such a way that he could be seen.

To appear “as he was” would mean to hang his original self in our world like a portrait. And to appear “in such a way that he could be seen” is to offer only a forgery.

But we continue to display the copy, because it keeps the neighbors quiet. The bad Samaritans. And it provides a diversion for every would-be thief who comes in the night.

Conclusion

Living in the time of the Internet is like being a painter on a sinking battleship. With your masterpiece only half-finished, you’ve got to pack up and dive overboard into the lifeboat. Now you’re trying to add the finishing touches to your painting while being jolted about by the rocky waves. You ask yourself: Why even bother attending to the details of your forgery? For once you finish the work and unveil it to the crew, they’ll be viewing it under exactly the same conditions of violent instability. And here is the answer: You hold out hope for being rescued by another passing battleship. Once aboard, there will be a steady deck, upon whose roughly horizontal planks you can set up your easel, display your masterwork, and collect your accolades. Your face is still a little green from seasickness, but now you can rest assured that things’ll be OK from here on out. Not even the LORD of Jonah can thwart this destiny. The battleship lazily moves from isle to isle; the seafarers take their part in the rapine and slaughter. And you plan your next painting.