Before I shout my world-famous speech, here is the next page from my book of 3,000 Ugly Drawing Prompts. The prompt for this one was "Medusa", as you can see if you levitate sideways into the top right corner. And I'm legally obliged, for archival purposes, also to provide a link to the previous page – thanks for your patience.
Dear diary,
Isn’t it funny, how I want these entries to be good? Why would I want them to be good? Am I writing to please others, or to please myself alone? And why must it be either-or? Why can’t I please myself AND others with these public-private diary entries? Because I’m not one of those lucky ducks who’s gifted with the knack of... I own no knacks. My only spiritual gift is provocation. I’m good at frustrating. But I don’t try to annoy—it just comes natural; that’s how you know it’s a gift.
And yet always, before writing one of these here thought-text-blobs, I say to myself: Let’s make this a good one. Let’s make this entry one of those pieces of literature that is held up as a paragon for the ages. Like Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which my encyclopedia calls “one of the best-known diary entries in American history.” Even my favorite filmmaker David Lynch allows an entity from his miniseries DumbLand to quote Lincoln’s post: the unctuous salesman from the 2nd episode, after having his head dislocated, displays his memorization skills by reciting it. So now I’ll try to plagiarize by rote:
One century ago, our ancestors—giant squids—climbed up out of the ocean onto this land. They grew feet, to help them walk; and lungs, so that they could breathe the infra-thin air. They looked to the right and to the left and saw no one else in existence – no other creatures: zip; nada. So they began to mold life forms. They created squirrels and crows; and caused fur to grow upon them, and feathers: each material made to fit the character of the soul that it would drape. And they fashioned grizzly bears, which they immediately decided to kill off, along with all buffaloes, in a worldwide flood of bullets. What I’m trying to say is that they—our squidly foreparents—launched yet another tribal regime. And it was conceived NOT in liberty but in entrepreneurialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created individually rugged. They also made dogs out of wolves: man’s best friend from man’s fiercest predator, in accordance with the commandment “Love your enemies, & make them join your gang cuz they can’t beat it.”
Now, on this afternoon of Thursday, July 5th, 2018 Anno Domini Dada, exactly 155 years after Monsieur Abram wrote his note-to-self in that plastic pink journal with the heart-shaped lock, gold and broken, we are again engaged in a very civil war, because the Central Intelligence Agency does not like our current Figurehead, and our Figurehead does not like the Corporate Media Empire, and the Corporate Media Empire does not like We the People, while We the People only half-like our terminal poverty, which is exacerbated by all the above; and the six multibillionaires who actually have the power to do something about this mess are presently napping. So folks are understandably miffed. And now I wonder: How long can our weapons-based economy endure world peace? At some point, isn’t someone going to be forced to admit that, yes, we need some conflicts to continue, otherwise the music stops and we lose our high chair at the slave trade? Therefore I suggest that we set aside a modicum, just a small corner, of the free market’s ad space, to serve as a mass grave for those who gave their lives to sustain Capitalism. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
However, when you die for a cause, all the people who remain alive mistake the reason for your death. Like, when Jesus died thinking “Ha ha, now the whole world will know that I was so firmly against the money system that I’d rather expire on the cross than participate in this filthy evil marketplace,” before his corpse had time to decay, St. Paul told everyone: “O look, Jesus died so that you can avoid the bad afterlife that I dreamt up and instead float forever in the vaguely defined alternative that I dreamt up.” And think about the soldiers who die in combat, in any war in any country: How many of those soldiers really know what they are dying for? (And who’s to say?) Also consider the multitudes who live on after the death of all these soldiers: How closely does any given civilian’s understanding of the “meaning” of any given casualty of war resemble the “meaning” held by the mind of the soul who died? CAN these thoughts coincide? (Have they ever?)
I think there are too many loopholes in the game of martyrdom. Too many loose ends. You don’t have enough control over your story, once you’re dead. The contemplation of intention and significance, with regard to a slain warrior, interests me greatly because I see in it an echo or analog to my concern with art:
You’re a soldier; you die; you assume you’ll be remembered for “fighting the good fight”, that is: Cause X; and yet the people, after being propagandized by fill-in-the-blank, chalk up your death as a point for Cause Y. The same goes for literature: Your intention in writing, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is A thru M plus O thru Z, but posterity garbles your aim as exclusively N.
Yet this is fair: it was the name of the game when you chose to play: you knew the rules were ever-changing: you knew that “the spectator completes the work”: Duchamp always told you this, when you would dine with him in the ancient South; you two would converse in a mixture of English and French – and if we modern Yanks might travel backwards in time, to the age of King Arthur, and eavesdrop on the discussion coming from your table, it would sound to us like songbirds in a silver mine.
So, yeah, you can’t edit your own obituary. Others are going to make of you what they want. Remember what Hamlet exclaimed, as he lay dying: In a nutshell, he begs his friend Horatio “Don’t do me like Paul did Jesus”.
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
& then Lincoln butts in and argues: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say in our battlefield speeches, but it can never forget what Hamlet did in Act V. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who endured self-slaughter have thus far advanced. You and I, Horatio, must remain dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from this noble prince (alas, now late – but O! how early still) we take increased devotion to that cause for which he gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that his death shall not have been in vain. Bryan Ray (the composer of this blog post, this dark opprobrious den of shame where we find ourselves imprisoned) claims that Jesus of Nazareth died to fight money; and he no doubt thinks that Hamlet did as well—but that’s baloney: neither hero gave a hoot about lucre, whether for or against it. These modern bloggers don’t see that their careless theorizing is itself the crime that they are attempting to admonish! For how is Bryan’s assertion that Christ took up the cross to kill capital ANY different than the lie that his nemesis Saint Paul broadcast to profit off the very same prophet? In fact, it’s clear to any reasonable person that both Lord and Prince—Jesus and Hamlet (which I almost just misspelled “ham melt”)—gave their lives to UNITE this nation, these States of Andronica, under God (my God not yours), and to give its populace a New Birth of Freedom, either that or an Old Death of Slavery (in practice, these notions prove interchangeable)—and that government OF, BY, and FOR transnational corporations, shall not perish from the universe.”
P.S.
I add this postscript to remind my future self, when I re-read the above, that this was the entry where I intended to record my own take on Star Wars – all the controversy about its ups and downs, what I know about its origins and where it has ended up. I swear, from the first sentence, it was my aim to arrive at that subject, which is why I started out musing on my desire to write something likable: the subject of a cinematic franchise appeals to me because I hope I’ll be able, by simply mentioning it, to siphon its fame. Or make that mega-fame. So I’m glad I didn’t do that. That would’ve been cheap, vulgar. Maybe I’ll do that next time.
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