Here's the next pic from my sketchbook of 300 Drawing Prompts. I have not shared an image from this book for more than twelve weeks (the last one was on date such-&-such) because I packed the book away while we were moving to our new house, and it took us more than X full months to relocate. Anyway, as I said before, this sketchbook features, in some place of each blank page, a prompt, printed in a font that seems handwritten, which gives you (the author/artist) the subject of a picture that you must draw, as well as its title, in case you choose to sell it on the market. This latest one is "Blue prints", as you can see from the top left corner.
Dear diary,
I notice that here in the U.S. we have very many entertainers and not too many philosophers. I should add that I’m observing this from the bad year 2018. But maybe I’m wrong about this: maybe there are actually more philosophers than entertainers here, because the apex of philosophy is to forgo serious thot so as to entertain others.
Now I understand that my real complaint is: When everyone else is amused, I am not amused. Could it be that I’m really so different? Or are people lying when they appear to laugh at jokes? Perhaps they’re fake-laughing; maybe they are no more amused than I am. But then I wonder: Why am I the only one who’s complaining? Maybe I’m just a poor sport.
I look out upon the landscape of the arts, and I consider what the most creative minds are doing and saying. Then I consider what I wish that I myself were doing and saying. Then I compare it to what I am currently doing and saying. At present I spend each morning sitting on a couch and recording my worries about this new house. What a bore. If you could travel way up high in the virgil-vator (the elevator invented by Dante’s Virgil) to the fifth heaven—the one three above where the Apostle Paul is lodged—and meet Picasso, and all he wanted to talk about is how his new house needs extensive repairs (removal of multiple trees; three new entry doors; a concrete apron for its sunken driveway; and all new windows), would your respect for his genius increase or decrease? Mine would decrease, if all Picasso did was fret about home repair. I would prefer to hear him talk about the women that he’s lusting after.
I can’t decide if the pornographic element in art should be expanded to the point of domination, so that almost every painting you view is lucious nude flesh and healthy robust fornication, OR, instead, if all pornography should be eliminated from the art world entirely (voluntarily, of course, by the mature decision of each artist – I’m not talking about censorship). I think the real problem is that there’s a good way and a bad way to do pornography. Or instead of “good” & “bad” we might say “mentally sophisticated, boundless, exuberant” versus…
I can only think of what we might call the good. I get stuck defining bad because every first impulse in my shame-naming seems, on second thot, redeemable .
But if we divide this concept, and build, using hammer and nails, two sturdy wooden bins, and label the first bin “porn” and the second bin “art”, then I want to spend all my time in the art bin, and you can have the porn bin for yourself, dear angel or priest. My art bin is replete with erotic marvels: it’s wholly sensual and sexed-up to the max. The only thing that your porn bin has which my art bin lacks is a certain foul scientific realism.
I’m not doing the job of clarifying my opinion very well. That’s OK. I’ll leave my attempt as it is, lazy and unconvincing. Maybe it will have the effect of luring porn back to art. Why shouldn’t the twain become one, after all? We’ll all be dead soon enough.
So, yeah, I gotta replace 3 doors in my house: the main entryway, the service door that connects the garage to the kitchen, and the one that leads to the backyard. My chief worry about these tasks is that I’ll encounter infestations of insects behind each door’s frame when I remove it. Plus I fear that I’ll do a shoddy job.
But as for the driveway apron and the tree removals, we’ll hire specialists to do those projects. And I’ll look into changing out the windows myself, but I’m leaning towards hiring a company.
But why am I droning on about myself? I should ask my reader a question:
If you could freeze your body before it expires, and get thawed out by the people of the future, so that your flesh and organs could be kept alive in roughly their current formation, and be made to continue living either forever or at least for a very long time, would you opt to do so?
Some people answer YES enthusiastically. They desire to continue for an unlimited extent within the body that they currently possess. They apparently like who they are; and I assume that they either appreciate the way the world feels when experienced thru their eyes ears and mind, or that their fear of the awfulness that might engulf them on the heels of death outweighs their hatred for this life. I myself am an optimist, at least in this regard, because I feel certain that whatever might occur to “me” (I put that word in hooks right here, because something about it smells fishy) post-expiry cannot be worse than my present existence. To be clear, I mean it cannot be permanently worse. It’s not hard for me to imagine that a Bryan beyond Bryan will be so miserable that this Future-ex-Bryan will long for the days when it was mere miserable blogger Bryan of the bad year 2018. But I do not believe that life stops, or that life can be arrested – in other words, I don’t believe in death.
Imagine being locked in a stasis, a changelessness, a sameness, for great durations. I am more afraid of THAT than rapid change. And that’s all death is: a change. And with change comes potential. Yes, a changeable up implies an inevitable down; but if there’s any chance of “steering” this ride that we’re on – that is, as long as it’s not like a roller coaster with a fixed track, but more like a relationship that we can augment by acting & that will respond to our efforts, then there’s a chance of moving the whole up-down oscillation heavenward and harmonyward.
All of us are able to grasp the gist about existence, that, although we are obviously individuals, which endure many minor beginnings and ends within one major beginning-&-end (which is itself a fragment of endlessness, a lie within truth, and thus an admirable feat, for, as it is written: Eternity is in love with the productions of time), we can each say “I am not this body alone but more truly ongoingness.” No atom that comprises your current self was not used to make some previous form: you and I are 100% recycled material. What does this tell us about matter? It doesn’t matter. Or it matters only insofar as it is tuning itself to the entirety. If you are now a configuration of particles that existed in countless different places last century; then, next century, you’ll most likely be a configuration of other particles that are presently whithersoever. Or you’ll be no configuration of particles. Or you’ll be all particles. Who knows? All we can say is that we are what we are, at the moment we’re speaking; and right now I am Bryan the most miserable blogger of the bad year 2018. I think 2018 is maybe the worst year ever to exist, just because God seems to have soured. Congealed and gone rancid. When I say God I mean good luck. I prefer good luck to flow freely, like sunshine that covers everything; or, better yet, darkness: because you can’t beat darkness: it was there before light was born, and it’ll be there long after light gives up the ghost.
So it seems that luck cooled down & got stuck in a pipe somewhere.
Maybe other beings, who are alive at this very moment, see the world as inviting: as a realm of wonder that promises friendship and gladness of heart. I see the world as a pit, a funnel, whose mouth is doom and whose essence is pain, and you can either dive, of your own accord, to this end, which is inescapable, or you can get slowly and forcefully dragged thereto. Either way, you’re going down.
The only nice aspect of this scary trap is the interactions that you can have with fellow fallers. That’s why I side with the leftists, politically speaking – I see the cooperative, compassionate, people-based, life-centered structures that are associated with the left as the most promising way of achieving paradise.
That’s another belief of mine: We living beings ourselves must bring about paradise; God shall never come and do it for us. God only acts and is in existing beings. We fill the God-suit: let us act accordingly.
The funny thing is that those who say “God is somewhere out there, in the heavens, separate, judging us from the sky” – these so-called believers are sorely lacking in belief. If my finger were to go numb and stop working, I’d be frustrated with it. In this same way, God is frustrated with modern faith·mongers. Yet now my finger explains: “I’m not Bryan; I’m just a lowly finger: it’s obvious that I am not the entire body; I just work here; the real body is actually too vast for me to perceive; and, rumor has it, it’s too big to fail; so I worship this body, whose name is Bryan the blogger of 2018 (such a bad year, ain’t it?) and watch and wait for its shape to appear—for, if my hunch is correct, Bryan should someday hover forth from beyond the horizon of my two senses, in the form of a giant finger of perfect proportions and fair agility. So that’s why I went numb and stopped listening to the lies of the brain-ball, who lives up the neck from me: this brain-ball keeps telling me to point here, press this, touch that: No, I say! You thots are of the devil. Only Bryan is Bryan. As I said, I’m just a lowly finger. Thus lacking any appendages of my own, I cannot fold my hands together in prayer; so, in lieu of praying to Bryan, I just went numb.”
And my left hand’s finger comes and faces its print upon the print of its counterpart and rubs the following reply: “Bryan only acts and is in all of us organs. You are not Bryan, that is true, for Bryan is bigger than both of us, but we are both parts of Bryan; and if we relinquish our ability to point, to press, to touch, then we deprive Bryan of these vital bodily functions: without us fingers, he’s basically just a ginormous doll with stupid motionless meaty mittens for tentacles. He can’t feel a thing; he can’t pick up his quill pen or type on his keyboard. Just because we fingers cannot speak or think, since we lost our larynx and don’t have very big brain-balls, doesn’t mean that we serve no part in Bryan’s thinking and speaking. Therefore I say unto thee, awake! tingle back into full perception! and come follow me: there’s many people out there in the world whose foreheads need poking. (It’s extremely effective, during key points in your sales pitch, to jab or prod your listener’s head, when selling religion.)
“Plus there’s many fabrics from huge piles of tailor-made shirts that need to be felt; and we fingers are good at feeling shirts, especially when they’re made from expensive material. I’ll approach from the left, since I live on the left hand, and you can come at each garment from the right, and we’ll clutch them and stroke them, while our body’s eyes weep.
“Lastly, there’s windows to be pointed at: When our body walks past a house behind whose window someone is disrobing or standing unclothed, it is best to point and remark to the general environs ‘Arise, fair sun!’ and ‘O, that I were a glove upon that hand!’ But don’t worry about the actual verbal recital; yon mouth will take care of the speaking of any words; and also of kissing, with lips and tongue, if it comes to that.”
Afterword
So (now I speak as Bryan, no longer only as my finger), dear diary, when you take the concept of God like this, what part of God’s body do you see yourself as being? I strongly suspect that I’m a cell of the mind. But not of the memory; I think I’m part of the imagination. I’m definitely not a leg or a wing: for I lack physical prowess; I’m too clumsy and unbalanced. Unless God’s a klutz or a wino. But I think God must be a dancer. So I’m part of the creative mind of God, that’s for sure. But think of how you yourself use your imagination: you’re most often forced to repress your creative thots, to say to them “No! Down, Simba!” (Simba’s the name of this particular thot, which is a lion thot.) “Stop that, Simba! I need to concentrate on saving this patient, whose mind I am operating upon: I must concentrate—this is no time for the fandango.” So claiming that one is part of the divinity’s imagination is neither a boast nor something to be ashamed of. It just means that you’re in your element when God’s having fun. So the fact that I’m so often miserable proves that God’s in a slump. And this is YOUR fault, all ye who are predominantly corporal and not very childlike. Get your act together.
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