PRE-MORAL: All I know is that I know more & less than I know.
Dear diary,
It is raining as I write this, and I am in my new house, so of course I begin to worry about my basement leaking; because I’ve only inhabited this place a couple weeks, and it hasn’t rained till now, so I don’t know how the foundation will handle the moisture. I fear that when I head downstairs, I’ll see more than two meters of rising water. And, since all of our belongings are down there (we still haven’t unpacked anything after our move) our stuff will be ruined.
Plus there will probly be like eight million mosquito eggs hatching.
CONCLUSION:
Water is life, and it ruins everything.
Yet why should I worry? As I said, the worst that will happen is that I lose all my belongings. Who cares about belongings? Who needs them? Most of what I possess are books, and even if the pages get wet & swell up & then dry wrinkled, the text will still be readable. The only problem is if a deadly mold begins to grow on the paper, and I inhale a bunch of spores & germs plus bacteria & viruses; then I’ll break out in spots, & I’ll shiver & lose my appetite & expire. I’ll either climb up onto the dinner table and die, or I’ll slink from my chair down onto the ground and die.
I think I remember a scene in one of Herzog’s movies where there’s lengthy dinner tables positioned in the street outside of the houses of the city during a plague. That’s where I’ll probably catch my death. And all because it rained.
*
Now I am thinking about the entry that I posted yesterday. I don’t like how it begins. I tried to tell a simple fact, but I botched it. I wanted to say plainly that we discovered a number of wasps going in and out of a hole in the soffit of our house, and so we called an exterminator. But instead of stating these facts clearly, I embellished the account and ended up overwriting, so it’s annoyingly obscure. Am I wrong? Here’s the opening sentence:
There were ten thousand troops of wasps outside our front door yesterday; so we phoned Angel Slayer Insect Service and scheduled a house call.
Hmm... Now that I re-read it, it doesn’t seem so bad. But that’s cuz I already explained, in a simple fashion, here above, what we should expect from the communication, before giving the quote about what the passage is about. So maybe…
*
When you make a movie, you can play it for an audience and gauge, by how they react, whether or not they like it. For instance, if your film is a comedy, and the audience laughs, then you’ve got yourself a hit. Or if it’s a thriller, and the audience gasps a lot during key scenes, and pees their pants in fright; and then they give the film a standing ovation when the credits roll: again, this signals success. Or if you make a sad drama, and there’s not a dry eye in the house.
My point is that you can test your piggy before taking it to the market. If you tried to make a serious tale consisting of war propaganda, but the audience giggles throughout the picture, then you can go back and re-edit the thing, and test it again, and only release it once it’s perfected.
But does there exist a test audience for writing (plain drab text, as opposed to 4-D movies)? I suppose you could compose a novel and give it to a friend: “Read this, friendo, and tell me what you think.” But what if your friend has really bad taste? It’s easier to trust a whole room of people enjoying a movie together, because ninety-nine customers aren’t going to be able to lie to you as easy as one friend who’s notoriously dishonest. But let’s say this friend of yours claims to love your story. “It’s great!” he says. So you send the text off to a publishing house, and they reluctantly print and market your book and then send you on a tour to promote the thing. Now, right when you’re in the middle of a radio interview, you notice, on the table in front of you, an ancient (ink-&-paper) news rag: it happens to be open to the Book Review section, and your novel is the subject of the topmost article. OK, so, on one hand, you have your friend assuring you that your book is good, and, on the other hand, you have this reviewer, who is the paper’s finest critic, describing your book as “indubitably bad.”
Who gets the last word, in these matters? If only each individual (each smart and sexy reader) were to trust her own mind (her own damn taste and judgment) then we wouldn’t need critics and priests to lead us and guide us.
But we’re all mortal, which is to say, we have a limited amount of time to waste on bad artworks; therefore we appreciate anyone who can get us to the good stuff FAST. Yet again, what if the critic makes a mistake? For nobody’s perfect.
Well if the movie audience is right about half of the time, and your friend is almost always wrong, and the critics are trustworthy at a rate of about fifty-seven percent…
I’m trying to arrive at this oasis: In comparison to any given age, the subsequent age will possess the benefit of hindsight. As they say: “Hindsight is 20/20”; meaning that it can see clearly, at any vantage, what should normally be perceived at that distance. The insinuation is that the Present can only view its own artistic productions thru a warped lens; so its judgments about itself remain blurry and skewed; whereas the Future judges the Past’s works always correctly.
But here’s my point: Don’t we need a whole roomful of futures, to provide the most trustworthy judgment? Or rather, a movie-theatreful of coming-soon critics? For just one single future is like your stupid friend who has faulty opinions; plus every future is some present’s past, & even the truest future is its own present – cuz at least some poor fool has to live inside it, otherwise its fiats are non-applicable.
So just as the newspaper’s critic overturned the iron law of your childhood friend, so the furthest-off caboose of impending futures overturns the artistic fashions of all middle and past futures. Thus, to be slow-moving is an advantage. If you can perpetually avoid arriving on the scene, you have a chance of being the ultimate judge: they saved the best for last. (Read: They saved the best for never.) That’s why I’m not so much pro abortion as I am anti conception. Because an untimely birth has come & gone—it’s a known quantity, guaranteed to come down with successors—whereas one who cannot get born just might be God.
*
I heard a stand-up comedian remark: “I don’t understand poetry; it’s like a joke without the punchline.” But you could also say that stand-up comedy is like painting a canvas in accordance with the rule that your picture must end up entirely red. But what’s funny is that, each time you begin a new work, you start out with indigo, then you try yellow, then you paint green orange and blue etc. until you arrive at red: eureka! then you paint the whole rest of the canvas with that last color, & stand back & nod in pride at what you accomplished.
No, that’s not fair; it’s not true: comedy’s not like painting only red. I’m being simplistically hyperbolic. Also somewhat hyperbolically simplistic. But I’ll let the passage stand, because I believe that bad analogies are just as important as good ones.
What’s my problem with stand-ups, by the way? Why am I always trying to belittle them? Am I jealous?
YES,
but I just wish that comedians would graduate past Joke Class & into the Antinomian Realm. Because we here need friends.
One last thought (let this serve as a pre-postscript) about houses and homeownership. When my sweetheart and I first moved into this new place, it was half-scary and half-freeing. Now, just a single week later, it’s ONLY scary. Nothing freeing about it anymore. The freeing aspect came from the fact that our situation was unfamiliar: all the neighbors knew that we were strangers, thus no one could blame us for any of the ills associated with this abode: the ugly color of its siding; its yard’s overgrown weeds, etc... But one week is ample time to become established; therefore, NOW, if the place starts on fire, or if our garage collapses, or if one of our lanky trees falls on someone’s truck, I myself am to blame. This leaves me petrified. I really hate responsibility.
P.S.
Here’s one detail of this post’s obligatory artwork that was lost when its image got cropped:
[100% pure freshness guaranteed ground beef original pork sausage]
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