The next page from my book of 99 Drawing Prompts is halved by a line and has two prompts printed at the far right: “Light saber” and “Grim Reaper”; so the artist is expected to draw two separate images; but I rounded them up into a single composition, because I am a genius. I priced the work at $476 billion, but it already sold for $1.3 trillion. Therefore it is beautiful. (Check out the previous page if you like clicking links.)
Dear diary,
Buses bring people to jobs. Why? Why did one soul court another, get married in the Christian church, and produce a child? Was it really so that the world could have another bus passenger? What job is this passenger heading to? I bet he works at the mall, selling shoes. Is this what the human form was invented to accomplish—retail sales? Is that why a man has a brain and a voice? Think how stupid the wild animals are, like tygers: they do not know how to hail a cab; they do not know how to sell footwear. If a tyger climbs aboard a public bus…
I’m only talking about this topic because, the moment I sat down to write, I heard a bus rev past on the street nearby. That’s how important the messages are that God gives me to deliver nowadays. The merest background noise gets positioned front and center on my stage.
After forty-one point three four seven six trips around the sun, a man begins to crave stability. Familiarity becomes more attractive than adventure. But instead of peace, one is offered only an increase in barbarity. Instead of the serene haven it was when you moved here years ago, your neighborhood is now rude & noisy; the town is overrun with street gangs. What are you going to do about it? Find a quiet village and move there? But why should we keep running from place to place? Why can’t old Freud remain in his comfortable study? Shouldn’t certain things be above the war, as bankers are above the law? Shouldn’t the imperial cavalry just part in the middle and trot around me, like I’m a pack mule standing in the road with a spine-load of fool’s gold?
For like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee.[—Vincentio, the Duke from Measure for Measure ]
Everywhere Moses went, the Red Sea acknowledged him by splitting and rushing around him: it did not wet him; it deferred to him the right-of-way, because it recognized him as a stubborn old man who is rooted in his habits. Young birds would never dare perch outside on the deck of his apartment and chirp loudly while he’s trying to type a blog entry. If this level of disrespect were to be permitted in nature, in the Forests of the Night, nothing would ever get done; progress would be impossible: the Tygers of Wrath would remain uninstructed – they’d never learn to take the bus to school.
Everything annoys me now. Or, blot the now: Everything annoys me. Full stop. I’ve always felt annoyed: that’s my defining trait. If I die, I’ll be known as the personification of annoyance. Like Jesus was “God in the flesh”, I am irk come alive.
Just think about what kind of mark your own existence would leave, if you were to expire this instant. What streak would your being have made? — I guess it’s easier for those who are mythologized. Prometheus is remembered for his fire. Lucifer, for the rigged primary. Moses, for his commandments. But what about yourself? I say you’ll be remembered for the shoes that you sold. You out-vended your fellows, the other jerks in your sales force, because you were motivated. Your trifold goal was:
- put food on the table for your children;
- clothe your children;
- send your children to a good college.
You wanted your kids to have a better life than you; and since you grew up naked, hungry & uneducated, you set these blanks as the evils to reverse. “I hate loafers,” you said, “but I’ll work my tail off selling them, for the sake of the upcoming generation: the future will be glorious, because of the honest labor of people like me.” And now, behold your accomplishment: your children are wearing t-shirts and sneakers; they eat burgers and fries; and they all earned college degrees in business management and finance.
Now I wonder what your children’s goals will be. How will they plan to improve the next generation? If they reach the age of forty-one point three four seven six too, will they be content to simply feed, clothe & school their own kids, your biological grandchildren, the future of the species? Will they hate their jobs like you did? What if their neighborhood, which was so pleasant when they first moved in, becomes a slum overnight? Will they move from place to place in their old age, constantly fleeing the effects of failing economies? What if they run out of quiet new villages to inhabit? Will they populate Saturn? Let us interview your youngest daughter Bauxita:
Bauxita, that’s an interesting name.
Yes, my father named me after bauxite, the sedimentary rock with a relatively high aluminium content.
Ah, the electrical wires in my apartment are aluminium! I know this because we just finished replacing all the light fixtures. We’re trying to sell the place.
I’d say, compared to the more common copper wiring, an aluminium system is inferior. It’s hazardous, flammable…
Yes, I’m sure my apartment is burning down as we speak.
And what’s your name?
Ray, like sunshine: that’s my last name. My first name is Bryan. My dad named me after his army buddy (pops was compelled to enlist in the military because he performed poorly in college). I didn’t get to christen myself. If I were to choose my own name, it’d be Tertius Radnitsky, as I explained in earlier entires here and there.
And what organization are you from?
Well, none, really. I’m just here to interview you for this diary entry that I’m writing. I was brainstorming about where humankind is going, and I dreampt up this guy who rides the bus to work at a shoe shop…
A cobbler?
No, not a boot mender—just a retail guy, working the sales floor.
Oh you mean that fellow in the short-sleeved collared shirt with the company logo on its pocket who measures your foot and then retreats to the back room to check if there are any more pairs of this type of sandal in your size among the store’s inventory?
That’s right. Forgive me, Bauxita; I made that guy your father. And I dreamt that he grew up in poverty, so his one goal was to propel his offspring out of the lower class and into the lower-middle class.
OK.
And I said that he was successful, so that you and your siblings—his children…
Can we give him a name?
Who—your father?
Yes; can we name him? I’ll fall asleep otherwise.
Sure, go ahead. Name your own father.
I’ll call him Fabuleee. With three E’s at the end.
OK, so I invented this lie about Fabuleee becoming a raving success at the shoe shop. I said that, although he loathes working at the place, he continues to slave away for the sake of his kids—that is, for your own sake. John 3:16 “For Fabuleee so loved his children, that he gave his only life to a rotten career, that whosoever was born to him should not flounder, but have a so-so existence.” Thus Fabuleee fed you and clothed you and sent you to college. And you majored in business management with a minor in finance. All of you kids; I gave you all the same basic stats. (By the way, is that the right way to put it: “majored with a minor”? It sounds fishy. I myself never attended any college, so I’m a wolf out of sheepskin talking about it.)
Fuck if I know. I was born from your thigh. Spiritually speaking.
Well anyway, the whole purpose of this interview is to figure out what YOUR goals are – for your own kids, I mean. Compared to your bio-dad, whose dream for you was simply the attainment of your most basic needs, what are your hopes and desires for your sweet father’s grandchildren?
Well I have two kids: a boy and a girl, ages three and nine. The girl’s name is Keeeeey; and the boy is Pip from the novel Great Expectations. My goals for them are pretty much the same as my dad’s goals were for me. So I guess you don’t have to be starving and naked to value food and clothing. But I don’t much care whether my children attend college – I think that life will be hard for them either way, whether they get an education or remain fresh wild and bold.
And do you like your job?
Of course not.
And what do you do?
Well what I do is laze about, and lean and loaf, and contemplate flowers. That’s what I do. But the labor that I’m forced to perform for pay is a number of part-time jobs: one is bricklaying; one is stocking shelves at a mega retailer (sort of like my dad but I’m not required to worship people’s feet); and I also work in the office at a hospital, where I create spreadsheets that help the doctors know how much to charge for opiates. On the side, I also send spam emails for a couple pyramid schemes. And various political groups pay me to mushroom their talking points throughout the social networks.
*
That’s as much as I imagined about my conversation with Bauxita before my sweetheart interrupted by bursting into the front room and announcing “I’m gonna take out the garbage, OK?” And I answered her: “Alright, but be careful, because there’s always suspicious characters lurking around our courtyard area – I don’t want you to get into any trouble.”
Then she left. She slammed the door on her way out, because she’s not graceful like I am. So here I thought about trying to continue the above nonsense interview with Bauxita, but I’d already lost interest. Then about ten minutes later, my sweetheart returns inside, so I ask: “How was it out there? Scary? Did you run into any ‘bad hombres’?” And she answers cheerily: “No people, no problems! Just a lawnmower.” So, to win the argument, I snapped: “A lawnmower IS a personal problem.”
Now I’ll give my victory speech:
CLOSING CON
I’m basically saying that beauty is a language game. If we leave the term undefined – that is, vaguely informed by common usage – then it remains, like a beam or a mote, in the eye of the beholder. Jesus says:
First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5)
Like the word “God”, if we leave the term “beauty” to define itself, then no one will be able to verify its presence outside the bound of any individual’s mind; whereas, if we define our term sharply, we can render it entirely verifiable; for, to establish something objectively requires that we make a measurement, and the act of measuring requires a standard rule:
I can ask “How tall is that chair in the bedroom?” And anyone can walk into the bedroom and hold up a measuring rod against the chair, then return and tell me their answer: “Two rods tall.” This is possible only because, as a society, we’ve agreed to follow the rule that states: The length of an object shall be given as a ratio of rods.
And if one says “Now tell me: How tall is my soul?” The problem is not that the soul is immeasurable but rather that the soul is undefined. If we define the soul as “One’s physical manifestation from crown to hoof”, then a lab worker can assure me objectively: “Your soul is six rods tall.”
The same goes for beauty. If we ask: “Is that painting of a chair beautiful?” No one can answer, beyond giving a personal, subjective impression: “It seems beautiful to me,” or “I’m not particularly moved by it—so my opinion is that it is not beautiful.” But if we define beauty as “anything that contains the likeness of a chair”, then when our voice booms over the lab intercom: “Is your boss’s painting beautiful?” the workforce can answer as one: “Yes, provably so.” (All that remains subjective about this answer is the onslaught of unspoken expletives that each respective mind aims at our image.) As it is written:
Man is a changeable beast, and words change their meanings with him, and things are not what they seemed, and what’s what becomes what isn’t, and if we think we know where we are it’s only because we are so rapidly being translated to somewhere else.
[—from “Pornography and Obscenity” by D.H. Lawrence]
In sum: the more precisely we define our terms, the more objectively verifiable our judgments will be, yet the less thrilling the entire experience shall prove. For it is the subjective element, the only-half-knowable aspect, the slippery realm of rhetorical persuasion and impressionism that allures us: these “messy” enigmas attract us most to art.
And there’s the rub. Since “Nature Herself” offers no such givens, no definitions, no instruction manual; and since humankind has carelessly (or perhaps with accidental genius) allowed art and beauty to remain such hazy concepts, the power of one’s own definitions is limited by the scope of one’s influence. And, as artists who care about humanity, soul, beauty, art, etc., the amount of influence we currently wield is slight. I stress that word “currently”, however; for, in the future, our influence might be enormous. Either way, we’re in good company, with Jesus of Nazareth. And anyone who thinks that Jesus wielded influence in his day should consider that, before the majority of humans had heard his name, his contemporaries had already killed his body, and the Apostle Paul had already killed his spirit.
Yet if it ends up that we solve the present mystery, all is not lost; for one problem that we can look forward to is this: Instead of a chair, we can paint a picture of Yahweh God standing upon the subjective-objective borderline and clutching his rod; then we can ask our laboratory assistants “How deep is the Devil?” You see: our lab assistants will not know whether to measure the subject according to the rod that exists inside the painting, OR to use a measuring rod from our actual world outside, to determine the truth. So that’s the first of many splendors that will still exist, even if we prove wise.
Thus he shewed me: and, behold, the LORD stood upon a wall made by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand. (Amos 7:7)
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