Does it matter what I title this one?

Dear diary,

Some writers send their writing out to periodicals & publishers, in hopes that these places will accept it & print it. I’ve never attempted to submit my writing to anyone; but, for about one second, I did consider doing so. I investigated the process just enough to read the submission guidelines at a couple of avant-garde magazines, but then I said: Forget it. Writing is fun, but submitting what one has written is a tedious chore.

So I admire all writers who send their writing out to professional readers and editors, etc.—that’s hard to do. It’s like cutting your own heart out of your body.

Actually, no: mailing a manuscript to a publisher is not as hard as vivisecting yourself. But it is like setting up a booth at the local fair to show off livestock that you raised in your own apartment. And some people actually use their phone’s camera to take nude self-portraits and then they apply a filter to make the result look like an oil painting; then they silkscreen this onto blank playing cards...

I remember reading one particular set of submission guidelines: it used the phrase “family and friends”—I don’t remember the exact wording, but the point was something like “Just because your family and friends say they admire your writing doesn’t mean it’s good enough to print in our publication.” The insinuation is that a writer’s family and friends will love that writer’s work as a matter of course: it is expected that one’s family and friends will be biased in support of one’s endeavors. This made me think about my own family and friends, and about their opinions on my artistic experiments. Are they biased in my favor? Do they like what I write? No and no. None of my family or friends have ever read anything, not even one book; thus, they are not interested in what I have written. May they all rot in hell.

Yeah, we live in a stupid world. A bad place. It’s like a nursery filled with bratty children. The adult supervisor sits in the room next to the nursery, keeping no watch on the children but only barely listening – this supervisor, whose name is Mr. God, will only arise from his rocking chair and go to check on the brats if the racket that they’re making exceeds a certain loudness. When this happens, old nanny Mr. God stomps into the nursery and yells “What’s the problem!” And the scene looks like this:

In a back corner of the playroom, one single brat has commandeered all the toys up into his cage, and he won’t let any of the other kids near to touch them; and all the rest of the kids are lying scattered throughout the nursery, weeping and toyless.

That’s exactly what our world has always been like. Except there’s no nanny.

I’ve never asked any of my family and friends what they think about the fact that I write. (Again, I could only ask them their opinion on the fact of my writing’s existence, NOT its contents, because they’re post-literate.) But I can guess what they’d say. They’d say: “O you’re SO smart and you possess SUCH a knack for expressing yourself, language-wise; but I just can’t see why you don’t go to school and get properly trained.”

Now this gets my goat. I’m all for nurture (“proper training”) BUT it must be given at the right time; and since I didn’t receive such guidance in my youth, I’m left relying on NATURE ALONE. I assume the best case would be to get lucky with NURTURE AS WELL. Yet now is not the right time to begin the learning process. Now it’s too late to learn.

You say it’s never too late to learn? OK I’ll elaborate. Just remember, you asked for it...

What I’m trying to say is that I lucked out in the nature department, since I love to expend my energies on art & literature; but I’m sorely lacking in the nurture department, since the parents, teachers, counselors & guardians of my youth all failed: they did not say, “This child is the future, so let’s pay attention to his proclivities, in order to steer him toward the schooling that will best align him with society’s paradigms.” Instead, anyone who had an opportunity to boost my development neglected to do so; thus I’m left having run to seed, like an untended plant—and I know my branches, my leaves, my flowers are unruly: I’m a wild growth. “The pure products of America / go crazy...” (—William Carlos Williams: Spring and All)

So now I’m left with a choice: Either exert great effort to mitigate my inherent waywardness, or FLAUNT this weird-wrong weed. If I choose the former, I’ll be wasting a lot of effort to achieve a state that can’t be better than second-rate; therefore I choose the latter, and try to represent (re-present) as “beautiful” that which society condemns as “strange”.

But can something misshapen be rendered shapely via confidence alone?

Thank goodness society is willing and able to change. That’s how one generations’s outlaws become the next generations’s exemplars.

I’m just trying to explain why my compositions look so goofy. They are unorganized where they “should be” organized… tight where they “should be” loose… nice where they “should be” mean… true where they “should be”…

The truth is that my words are never true.

But I do wonder often: Is it better for me to continue breaking down, to continue melting away the matter before me, like an acid that eats thru whatever it touches? have I gone far enough with primitivism, have I attained the barbaric sweet-spot? Should I leave off charging forth heedlessly and instead begin to hover around this dominion? There’s a time to break down, but there’s also a time to build up. Or is there? I like to align myself with life. Doesn’t life seem perpetually to continue building up? Breaking down is no part of life; that’s the business of death. Or rather it’s what one life does to another: it’s the act of the eater—but the life that is eaten, a wild weed for instance, does not merely remain in the broken-down state: it gets rearranged, revised, and built up into another’s life; so parts of the weed become a little lamb, and likewise the lamb becomes a living lion—at least fragments thereof…

Yet life needs prolonged stability to develop. Too-rapid change kills complex life and leaves only the boring bugs or tiny simpletons like single cells that know nothing but how to whip their tail all day (they can’t compose poetry). I want to play a part in increasing life’s complexity, its depth, its onward-outward potential. If my art is too much like acid, or too much like a radioactive wasteland, it’ll turn off minds that desire to build; it will only appeal to…

Nonthinkers. They’re the target audience for retinal art. I’m taking a concept from Marcel Duchamp: my understanding is that he labeled as “retinal art” any painting that pleased the eye (the retina) while offering zero intellectual nutriment, that is: any visual that looks good/ neat/ fascinating (fill in the positive term of your choice) but contains little or no IDEAS.

Now I wonder: Is there retinal art in the realm of pure text? Perhaps the medium of text is naturally resistant to vapidity, because even “word salad” or an uninspired narrative exist in the imagination and are essentially non-visceral.

Why does the concept of visceral seem so distasteful? I don’t know; I just don’t like it. Visceral, to me, means being trapped in the jungle and having to remain alert thru every atom of your body so as to remain alive. I’d rather lounge in an easy chair and have all my needs met like Mr. God so that I can dream up better jungles. Visceral means being the character in the story; I’d rather be the player than what is played. But admittedly I’m considering only a narrow spectrum of that buzzword’s possible meanings: that’s the maddening pleasure of language: it’s all metaphorical; so a word like visceral can refer to phenomena “of the body” which I dislike because I’m uncomfortable with physicality; yet everything body-related can be employed as a trope for mental things, so the term visceral can also indicate “holy intuition” or “primeval instinct”. I’m all for that! (Those last two phrases are synonymous.)

Can you feel it? This is where music happens, do you understand what I’m saying? In your guts! In your organs!

as Officer Duke explains in the film Wrong Cops (2013).

*

So what have I learned from writing today’s blog entry? I learned that it’s OK to eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols, because idols are un-alive: the only true living divinity resides in one’s mind—the imagination is wholly inward—but since an idol is something to be imagined, any meat that is sacrificed to it poses a genuine threat to the partaker: so it’s better to avoid meat that’s been sacrificed to idols after all; except if fellow worshipers are dining with you, whose awareness is less advanced than yours: in this case, you should indeed consume the idol-cursed meat, since to eschew it might lead your companions to believe that such idols actually do exist somewhere out there—on earth, in the heavens, or under the water—whereas your unconcerned consumption of this meat will prevent your attendants from lending credence to superstition and thus the idols shall remain safely unborn.

And if you’re trapped on a planet of ice—it’s just an ice-ball floating thru space—and you’ve lived here for more than ten thousand generations, and all that you’ve ever eaten is the flesh of goats, because the planet’s landscape consists of nothing but barren mountains with hollow caves everywhere, and there’s a goat hiding at the back of each cave, sadly waiting to die (in one of his sketches, which I read today, Turgenev mentions Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe; that’s why this cave business is on my mind), so you feel that it’s justifiable to slay the goat, since this will put the poor creature out of its agony, and then you eat its flesh, hoping that you don’t get infested with whatever illness was its downfall…

Now imagine that an alien species of articulate super-crabs lands on your ice-ball planet. Being extremely intelligent, they are able to learn your language in an instant; so they greet you peacefully and ask if they might make some paintings of you, using your tundra’s landscape as backdrop: “Would you mind posing with some of your goats in front of yon ice-caves?” For the entirety of this crab nation’s existence is spent traveling the galaxies and making paintings of all the planets and beings that they discover.

So you trap them all in crab traps and then cook one crab in a big pot and eat its crab legs.

What happens next? Does your body accept or reject this new cuisine? Is the change from goat to crab a bridge too far? Do you die as if poisoned? (For your system has thrived on goat flesh since time immemorial; thus this sudden change of provender might prove overwhelming.) Or do you enjoy a sharp boost in mental capacity from this newfangled super-food? Let’s ask a dietitian…

A fiend who has subsisted for eons on nothing but meat that’s been sacrificed to crab-shaped idols will most likely reject the flesh of an actual crab. And by flesh I mean body and blood. But the good news—or gospel—is that the ailment suffered by our ice-ball inhabitant is psychological in nature and thus able to be alleviated with a placebo.

This entry went nowhere.

P.S.

Here’s another old rap demo that I got my friend to produce on his computer. It’s called “Part 2” because it uses the same wooden, lazy chorus that I coaxed my friend (“MCB’s Producer”) to voice on the track that I shared in yesterday’s postscript which is titled “Part 1”.

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/171185296421/uninspired-demo-recorded-in-2004-i-wrote-said