Here’s the next page from my 700 Drawing Prompts book. The prompt for this one was “Carousel”. It is a triptych; I am setting the price of the panels at $900 apiece; but you can buy the whole image for $2500. (That’s a savings of $200!) See the previous page for more info and links to the foregoing etc., etc.…
Dearest diary,
I fear that my thoughts on this day will be repetitions of same-old obsessions, because I’m under a lot of stress trying to fix up my apartment (with the aim of selling it), and I’ve noticed that under tense periods of life, I tend to use these diary entries as a form of escape, to dodge the pressures of daily responsibility; yet later, when the pressure has passed, I’ll go back and re-read what I wrote, and I’ll be struck by the frantic-low quality of my ideas: What I presumed was profound at the time of its composition was in fact only manic, desperate. So let this serve as a disclaimer. Now here are my thoughts:
The cruel thing about life is that you can never escape from it. What I mean is this: Life is exactly like a bad dream, for, if you have a dream that’s bad, you can opt to end it, but then, at the moment of your demise, you will always awake alive and well again: so there’s no use leaving, because being alive and well was the dream that you were trying to flee from. Likewise, in real life, if you lapse your placeholder, you merely enter another predicament. It’s like praying for a job transfer but then receiving, in answer to your prayer, only an alternate position in the same corporation: a different yet similarly windowless office elsewhere in the building. For instance, on ditching angel life, you get sent to a super cool planet with neat-smart aliens, and everything is attractive and you love the prospects of existence; however, at about age six, you realize that you’re never going to get to enjoy any of the good stuff: for, among the aliens, you’re an unlikable nobody.
No, you cannot die. There is no full-stop. “Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.” Those are the words that Wallace Stevens gives Walt Whitman to say, in one of Stevens’ poems. “There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,” as Whitman himself gives himself to say, in “Song of Myself” (45):
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their
surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid
float, it would not avail in the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand…
You can mar the configuration of elements that make up your present form, thus changing it so severely that it’s rendered unlivable; but the elements that comprised that now-deceased form will only rearrange eventually—“Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that…” (Ibid. 45)—and you’ll be just as surprised, at some future point, to find yourself perceiving thru the eyes of a lion, as you are at present to be thinking thru the mind of a liar.
That’s why it’s so important, at least to me (I’m just talking to myself now), to make this bad dream pleasant for everyone else; because I never know when I’m going to BE someone else. I might as easily wind up as them someday, as, yet again, this morning, I wound up as me.
What led you to your current state? (I’m addressing the reader now.) Why are you yourself? How did that happen, the anchoring of your essence to this particular being? Was there choice involved?
I myself think that there was no choice involved in our becoming whoever we are (unless freewill and determinism are one); but, if I’m wrong—if the self really does choose its identity—then why is memory SO hazy about it that the episode can even be questioned? Shouldn’t it be patently absurd, or evidence of severe mental illness, if one were to ask: “Why am I what I am? And what was I before I was this thing?”
Most of us understand what it’s like to be a person. But what is it like to be a place? I now realize, just from asking this, that I’m presupposing that a person is not a place. But what is a place? Isn’t it simply a quantity of spacetime? Thus, people are places. (Furthermore, moods might be even more like places; unless imagination is no part of spacetime.) Yet it still seems right to differentiate between, say, a person like Bryan and, say, a place like Minnesota. Although Bryan is a Minnesotan, and Minnesota is a Bryan-trap, Bryan is not just a fragment of Minnesota:
When I Bryan escape out my back door and enter into Iowa, that state does not scream “The poison of Minnesota has invaded me!” or “Minnesota has infected me with its virus!” for it’s understood that when an individual visits a vacation resort like the glorious Iowan cornfields, she (my soul) temporarily cloaks herself in the environs of her newfound paradise, and it (Iowa’s genius) is absorbed into the pores of her identity – just as the skin of a chameleon glows green when you place it next to the Statue of Liberty, whereas it takes on flesh tones when you remove the Statue’s robe. As it is written:
We will give our daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people. (Genesis 43:16)
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us. (Genesis 3:22)
Two apparently contradictory maxims are hereby reconciled: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”; and “All roads lead to Rome”. For, if every road leads to Rome, then all creatures are Roman citizens intrinsically: One can’t take a road to one’s home without it leading to Rome, therefore one’s home is in Rome; so one cannot DO otherwise than “as the Romans do” because one is oneself a Roman, and every act one commits is thus, by definition, pre-approved by Caesar. (My point is that the soul needs neither to change its color nor its flavor.)
Do we understand the full implication of this? There is one great spirit, and it infests all things: In the parable, Rome and Romans represent the world and its beings. Say that you consider your neighbor an enemy, so you punch his face – this is just as silly as punching yourself in the face: that’s why we teach “Love your enemies”: for you’ll appreciate it when you become your own worst enemy. I mean that literally. And if you object “But the difference between me and my hateful neighbor, who is NOT a Roman, is that when I punch myself in the face, I feel great pain; whereas, when I bomb my enemy, that evil Iowan, I feel no pain at all, not even the pain of pity, for the news networks in Minnesota do not broadcast any of the carnage that results from our decades-long war with that neighboring state.”
I remember once when we offered Iowa a horse—big, hollow, and wooden—and they thought it was a gift: after unwrapping it, they cried “O thank you for making this the best Xmas ever!” Then I, the King of Minnesota, barked: “Open it up.” And they say, “We already did open it: it’s a gift horse – just look at its beautiful wooden teeth.” And I explain, “No, open up the beast itself – it’s got a secret door on its belly: pull that latch.”
And when the state of Iowa slides open the giant wooden horse’s secret door, behold, millions of candy figurines spill out onto the battlefield – they are green in hue and shaped like the Statue of Liberty. (This is the same offering of friendship that, wayback, the U.S. half-rejected from France.) Now Iowa exclaims “I understand! (for I skimmed your blog post from last Tuesday) — this explosion of lime green Martians from the equestrian mothership signifies that you are pregnant with nine malic moulds!” And, sooner or later, all the unfamiliar anti-muses burst from my forehead, where they’ve been patiently gestating; and they’re all fashioned from the same “Athena” candy mold as the Liberty Statues that burst from Pegasus’s uterus; but, instead of dull green with a metallic aftertaste, when beheld, each anti-muse radiates its own unique hue; and plus, when sucked, each flaunts its own flavor.
*
This entry went downhill fast. I began it with the intention of introducing an idea that never made it into the text. So what I really wanted to say must remain unsaid – and that is this:
There is a reason that apartment builders don’t install a toggle switch in your shower which is labeled, on one side, “water”, and on the flipside, “deadly mist”. It’s because too many people would try the latter option; not necessarily due to despair but simply out of curiosity. But the universal allure of convenient expiry is a topic that seemed too morbid to jump into without a lead-in. So I started my lead-in (to be clear, I’m now self-reviewing the manner in which the present entry began) by questioning how we all arrived in these prisons of mortal flesh. But then I got carried away and never made it past the opening stage. So the entry is like a head without a torso, unless I began with the feet… or rather the plinth. (A statue birthed breach.) What really killed it was that, at a certain point, I became fixated on the idea of achieving a callback to that base joke from my previous post—the above-linked entry that I made Iowa claim to have skimmed—which goes “I Bryan recently got pregnant with a baby, by accident, after my trip to the house of ill fame; and the infant is gestating in my forehead—it’ll be a fun surprise when it bursts forth unexpectedly.” I had intended to give birth near the end of that same post from Tuesday the 29th, but then I forgot (blog entries, like humans, tend to slink away from me), and yesterday’s post contained no reference to childbirth, alas, so midway thru this present post, I began to wonder if, after all, maybe I wasn’t pregnant but only potbellied. So when the anti-muses appeared, I felt relieved. By the way, in case you’ve NOT been living in a cave with me for all time, “Nine Malic Moulds” is the title of a work by Marcel Duchamp.
Anything else you wanna add?
Yeah. I was thinking about warfare again today, because every day the World News is just war, war, war. And I remembered the first time I heard that phrase “the war on terror” – how it sounded so obviously wrongheaded that I wondered if someone among the nation’s leadership were just arrogantly teasing the population, not even trying to win us over to their objectives anymore. And then I was talking to a friend who is anti-war, and he was telling me, or rather urging me to get involved with the anti-war movement, to “Do something for peace!” and he said “For too long, nations have been declaring war – it’s time that We the People declare peace!” and he asked me “What are YOU willing to do for peace, dear Bryan?—I’ll give you a list of options separated by the word ‘OR’:
“Are you willing to spread the word about peace, OR to share peace propaganda on the social media, OR to volunteer in our justice outreach thingamajig, OR to contribute tech expertise so that the peace movement can have an enjoyable website (pardon the oxymoron), OR to give financial support to the cause, OR to engage in nonviolent civil resistance, OR to lobby elected officials? Those are the choices.”
So I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be funny if I said “I’m so gung-ho for peace that I’m willing to go to war for it!” —Now the second I write this down, I realize that probably George Orwell or someone like him has already popularized such a notion, but I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read Nineteen Eighty-Four or his Animal Farm novel – I’ve only checked out a few of his essays, which I thought were very good (the reason I didn’t continue on to his famous books is that I kept reading the Bible over and over, and I lost track of time) – so if I’m guilty again of reinventing the wheel, then [insert final words for a good conclusion]. I think that this idea of mine, this wholly original idea that I’m the first to publish, is even better than a war on terror: a war on war. The only way we’ll stop violent combat is to combat it violently: then, it follows that everything’ll become super-peaceful; and we’ll all fall asleep again, even deeper; which is to say: we’ll all wake up in worse positions. The nightmare intensifies…
*
Goddammit. I don’t want to end this this way, but I’m exhausted; so I’ll let it go and hope I do better next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment