Here's the next page of the book of drawing prompts that I received as a gift on Christ's birthday. (See my entry 5 for linx to the others.) The title of this original artwork is "Tree of life".
Dear diary,
Are we getting what we want? Do we want what is good?
Every time I catch myself using that G-word, I think of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. If I am a slave, I am told by my master that certain actions are permitted while others are forbidden. The former are good, the latter are evil. Now instead of trying to figure out who my master might be and what he might want, I’d rather claim master-hood myself and swap out that operative term:
Do we want what will bring the world into a state of harmony?
Thus, I, the master, have defined GOOD as that which will bring the world into a state of harmony.
But what the hell is it, exactly, that I want?
I want the fullness of art, not this void of the market. I know, I gripe about this too much; but it’s central to my being. When I was a child, I wanted friends, fantasy, sweetmeats, entertainment, power... Now that I’m hardened into adulthood, all I want is to escape the marketplace: to show up as a refugee on the shores of the Art World.
What’s the difference? Well the marketplace is all about ownership, whereas the art world is unrestricted love. Is this about the so-called Ten Commandments? I don’t know, let me think about that. Thou shalt not steal. That’s the first one that comes to mind. There’s no theft in the art world:—why, because nobody steals? no: because the concept of theft is nonsensical in a realm without ownership. In the marketplace, stealing is forbidden because supplies are limited; but, in the art world, stealing is simply a compliment to the soul who “gets robbed,” because the imagination is infinite. (Thus, imitation is flattery.) To ape a style is to append oneself to its originator, which increases the “size” of the collective soul who’s snowballing this way.
That’s why ancient writers attributed their scriptures to, say, St. Paul, instead of signing them with their own names. The Joe or Bob from circa Year Zero believed that if they wrote in line with what St. Paul had taught them, then it would be wrong not to call St. Paul the author, even though technically the works were not authored by Paul. Does that make sense? They weren’t lying or trying to pass off a forgery as authentic: they were following a code of morality. Only it wasn’t a moral code, because that implies a sort of bowing under a yoke—no, this was impulsive goodness.
There’s that goddamned word again. Goodness. I mean that the scribes felt instinctively that their spiritual offering emanated from St. Paul’s oeuvre, like an obvious heir; and to claim that Joe or Bob authored their own epistles would be the true crime: the theft would be to say “I Bryan wrote this” when it was obviously the mental property of Zarathustra.
None of what I’m saying is quite right. I’m slipping into explaining why, say, Galatians is an “undoubted letter of Paul” whereas, say, Colossians is a “work of the Pauline school” (I’m quoting these descriptions from a volume of St. Paul’s writings edited by Wayne Meeks – I highly recommend it). My wish—my wayward whim—was to show “believers” or self-styled “Christians” that they should not be offended by modern scholarship’s designations: for the point (when such scholarship spotlights Joe or Bob) is not to deny Paul authorship so as to cast doubt upon the authority of certain texts, but only to parse ancient artworks according to our own iffy age’s intellectual grammar. For the marketplace is like a language, which has its own rules that are determined by usage; and this market-language of ours differs considerably from the language of the earliest Christians.
The school of Isaiah. The school of Valentinus. It’s like: You hang out with scholars at their place of study for a while, you absorb their way of thinking; then, once you’re deemed “mature,” you can sign your own compositions with the name of the master. It’s like earning access to a rubber stamp. Everything I write is the word of Jesus.
Right now I regret not naming this entry (for no reason whatsoever – and, by the way, I wonder: mightn’t this be a nasty example of “victim shaming”?):
“If you don’t want to be kissed, then you shouldn’t pucker your lips.”
Allow me, I beg you, to steer back to contrasting the art world and the marketplace. I only reached the first of the commandments. In the market, I sign my blog “by Jesus” and I’m jailed for forgery; I’m called a fraud, I lose my literature license. Contrariwise, in the Art World, I sign my work “X” and all anyone cares is that the content is vaguely X-like.
And, in truth, nobody even cares all that much—the art world is SO fucking cool. How many punk bands aren’t “really” punk but they call themselves punk! & no one takes them to task for this. Nobody fines them. The perpetrators feel bad enough when they see that their fan base consists of reposeful minds, rather than radicals. Your audience determines your worth.
& not the number but the mettle: the best honor is to earn a happy few who are mental warriors all.
But then we have “Thou shalt not kill.” That’s another popular rule. This is a hard one—I don’t know if I’ll be able to justify ignoring it, but it’ll help that, in the art world, everything is mental: everything is metaphor. So the marketplace is obvious: “Don’t kill,” they say, “because…”
Wait! The marketplace kills all the time. I think I figured out a trick: the market SAYS thou shalt not kill, while MEANING…
I don’t know what the market means. The market is populated by war profiteers—doesn’t that tell us enough? But now let’s look at the art world: What is death in the World of Art? I guess it’s oblivion, forgetfulness, not achieving a place in the heart of futurity. When a book keeps being read with enjoyment by each successive generation, like Don Quixote, it is alive—even immortal; but when a book fades from civilization’s memory, like most of the present bestsellers will do in the next age, it can be said to have died. So, if indifference, obscurity, non-interest equals artistic demise, then how would one go about KILLING in such a death-proof realm? Try to murder an artwork—how do you do it? Tell people “Forget about So-and-so’s collection because the cover is ugly.” What happens then? The opposite of what you intended: People flock to know what the hype is all about. They get their hands on a copy of Mr. Blank’s bad tome, and they read it and weep. They tell their family and friends: murder this book, for it is an abomination to the LORD...
So, no press is bad press. You can’t slay an artwork—it’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. If you want a book to die, all you can do is ignore it. That’s why I don’t list the authors or titles of any of the bestsellers that I disparage: I want them all to die. In the art world, therefore, I am a serial killer, even a mass murderer.
Didn’t Emerson call a foolish consistency the hobgoblin of little minds? Then let me continue to address these commandments. What’s another. We got killing and stealing, those are the easiest to remember. How about: Thou shalt have no gods other than Yahweh. That’s an easy one. The marketplace eats it up. (Is it clear that I’m running through these Ten Commandments and comparing the marketplace’s reaction to the art world’s? I feel like I’m all over the map, so I have to keep reminding you of my main purpose. And by “you” I mean “me”: this weblog’s readership.) The market adheres to the Yahweh-alone command by renaming him laissez faire. As in laissez-faire capitalism; free enterprise; hands-off, nonrestrictive trade. You’ve heard folks reference (in a so-bad-tis-good misreading of poor Adam Smith) “the invisible hand of the market”—that’s Yahweh: neither one exists; it’s just a way for people to get you to bow to their will. “Letting things take their own course, without interfering”—that’s God in action; for God is luck, doom, fate: we attribute to God whatever happens without human meddling, and when humans dare to manipulate their imprisoning reality, we say they’re “playing God.” It’s almost as if to act is inherently divine, which is maybe why Blake says: Everything that lives is holy. AND: God only acts and IS in existing beings and men. AND: All deities reside in the human breast. —So if we add a whole bunch of RULES to protect ourselves from the otherwise “free” market, the fat cats get mad, they say we’re muddying God’s plan; but our “muddying” is actually God in action. The more heavily we regulate our marketplace, the safer we make it for life, and this leads to harmonization, the result of which is that the Art World blossoms: artists flourish under economic justice…
So, again, the world of art defies the commandment. To the notion of “Yahweh alone”, the art world opposes: “Anything BUT Yahweh alone”—tho this does not mean that Yahweh is banished, no, Yahweh is more than welcome, Yahweh is even necessary to achieve the harmonization that sustains the world of art; yet Yahweh needs to take his place in the pantheon, among the rest of creation: what is selfish and controlling in Yahweh must be exorcised, and what stands in Yahweh for the POETIC GENIUS is rightly enthroned.
Next command: The sabbath. Keep one day holy? The marketplace and the art world, for once, agree: this is NOT to be honored. But the market and art reject this in opposite directions. The market says: not a two-day weekend for workers, like the labor movement achieved in the U.S. briefly before the empire’s decline, and not even a one-day “sabbath” as the law of Ten Commandments advises; but NO weekend, NO time off for workers, ever!! Only slavery, perpetual labor for thy holy corporation!! Enslave mankind to keep the market FREE!! —Yeah, that’s what the marketplace shouts against the Sabbath-day commandment. The market is ENTIRELY IN FAVOR OF that ancient-Egyptian-style slavery that the Israelites escaped way back when Moses led them into the wilderness for an entire generation. (Why must We the People always WANDER so long before acquiring what we need?) And the best remedy that Moses could envision is the single-day weekend, which ended up in his tablet of laws that he attributed to God. (For he was a card-holding member of the School of God, thus his work remains the intellectual property of the GOD Corporation; and that’s how Moses finagled access to the divine rubber stamp.)
On the other hand, the Art World saith that every day should be a sabbath. Or that, at the very least, the commandment in question should be inverted, so that instead of laboring for six days and resting on the seventh, all prophets should labor for the equivalent of JUST ONE DAY and then lean and loafe at their ease for the remainder of the week. You could split up the eight hours of your workday and sprinkle them piecemeal throughout the other six; or you could work one full weekday and rest for the rest. Any way you cut it, the art world’s objective is positive: Existence should be overwhelmingly blissful. You should have to try hard to find occasions that’ll make you try hard. Ease should be everywhere, very difficult to escape. Maybe THAT’s the rub: Your only day of work is spent trying to hunt down something challenging.
Poor Hercules, no more labors. All these robots are too helpful.
But how many more commandments do we still have to get through?
- adultery
- bearing false witness
- coveting (neighbor’s wife; house; slaves, animals, & misc. items)
- honor mom-&-pop shops, even if they sell pornography
- no graven images (representational art illegal; only abstract or surrealistic artworks permitted)
- & do not speak lightly of the deity (taking Yahweh’s name “in vain”—cf. any recent U.S. State of the Union address)
Should I skip these last six commandments (HA! oops I almost wrote “sex commandments”), because we already get the picture? (& by the way, the mom-&-pop shop law was instituted because my own maternal grandparents were Strict Puritan Christians who owned a gas station that sold newspapers & periodicals, among which was one notoriously “dirty” magazine, but this publication was always enshrined in black plastic so that only its title could be seen. I still yearn to view its glorious contents.) —I say, should I leave this project half-finished and save the remaining commandments for next entry, so that we can bask in another cliffhanger? Or should I deal with them in one big clump right now, to get this over with?
I’ll either skip ’em or do ’em next time... I’m sick of this shit.
Plus I’m outta time. I gotta go tend to the livestock. Gotta put on my boots and get the slop pail to feed Sparkle, my favorite hog. (I steal this detail from A.R. Ammons’ poem “Hardweed Path Going”.) Put on my puttees and breeches, my belted coat and my loose cap, and get to work making some coops and other appurtenances, out at my carpenter’s bench in the open shed. (Now I’m stealing from D.H. Lawrence’s story “The Fox”.) Gotta heat up some food for the fowls—we have black and white Leghorns, plus two ducks. Then I gotta go find our heifer, for she got out past the fence again and is running wild, trespassing on the neighboring pasture. And I will take my gun, in case I meet that cunning creature who keeps devouring our chickens…
P.S.
[A note from the blogger. Beginning this entry in a sour mood, I wrote a few words, but, on second thought, deleted them, because they seemed TOO negative. Now, on third thought, I’ve decided to copy-&-paste them into this postscript here, although I still don’t “stand by” them, just in order to preserve them, for the sake of stupid truth.]
What difference does it make whether I love or hate the world? I wake up this morning thinking: I hate this world. And it doesn’t matter, does it? The world just goes on as if I don’t exist. My judgment makes no difference to the ongoing-ness. I wonder how many other souls are awake at four in the morning, feeling hate for the world.
But what do I even mean by that phrase “I hate the world”? The word “I” is obvious—it’s the shadow of God. (Or rather the light; for God is the shadow.) But what about these words “hate” and “the world”? By hate I mean that I care intensely, but that my feeling is negative: it’s saying NO, it’s saying THIS IS WRONG – and these outbursts are aimed at all that exists: the way things are: the prevailing (dis)order. And by world I mean the unchangeable exterior, the given, what’s outside of me as opposed to what’s in my mind. What actually IS, rather than what might be. (Yet why exclude my mind from world-membership? Something smells fishy here...)
The parents that I got born to are wrong. The economic system that we all suffer under is wrong. The type of religion that dominates our culture is wrong. The focus of people’s care is ALL WRONG. Cars are wrong. Pets are wrong. Shopping is wrong. Even what people call love is wrong.
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