Low lumens

Here's the next page from my book of 900 Drawing Prompts (the last of which appeared on ten fourteen) – now, on with the entry...

Dear diary,

That’s what I want: low lumens. We spent a great deal of yesterday shopping for light fixtures for our brand new old shitty house. As I understand it (HINT: I probably don’t understand it) True Science measures light intensity in lumens; so I want only lights that emit low lumens. Everyone else in the world wants bright lights, flood lights: incandescence outshining the sun: DROWN THE GALAXY IN PHOTONS!!!!! – but not me: I myself prefer low dim shady murky half-light, in which I can skulk and lurk and mutter sweet nothings at God.

Shall not the day of the LORD be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it? (Amos 5:20)

I also like tinted “party lights” and lava lamps. Did you know this about me? I feel like I must’ve mentioned all this here in this pink plastic public-private diary that glows indistinctly, cuz I’ve been pondering these same mysteries for ages now. It’s hard for me to keep track of what I’ve said and what I’ve only semi-said, versus what I’ve merely thot, and what I’ve got on the docket, ready to launch out into the blank and become words on the page. (Or even words made flesh.) I’ve been writing too much, of late: indulging my vulgar instinct to blab, instead of honing my speech and crafting my ideas to make them presentable. For, if you economize your speech, it hardens into poetry. Or instead of hardens maybe I should say blossoms. Better yet: transmogrifies.

He was transmogrified before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.
(Matthew 17:2)

So I like low lumens. I am against brightness and brilliance, in sight and speech. I like to keep the visible a little hard to see. That’s why I love music: you can’t quite tell what it looks like. Thus the aural realm benefits from boldness of definition. To review: sight as well as speech should be made subject to dimmer switches, whereas sound improves with clarity. I love when music is obvious. Contra this bad age in which I live, I favor melody and rhythm. I don’t want any moody brooding.

I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. (Amos 5:21)

Let us harness a ruthlessly clownish percussion vibe that can clutch people’s souls. I’ll then visit my family and play them this track and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” And their souls will get sucked into the black hole boom box.

I visited my siblings at our mother’s house again on Saturday. That’s why I’m not talking about it. I’m trying to say anything other than what happened. Not because something bad happened that night – honestly, not a single thing happened at all: the goings-on were regular tame boilerplate: standard ad copy – but I’m ashamed that I care so very much about nothing. My conversation… I should say: My attempts at conversation are like fishing in a part of the lake where the fish are not biting. (Imagine phoning your boss & saying “I can’t attend this morning’s office meeting because I’m currently engaged in a whale-hunting expedition,” but then the corresponding video from the restroom’s security camera shows you poised there with a harpoon jabbing guppies in the sink.) And matters are further complicated by the fact that my brother and his wife now have this newborn baby. So of course everyone wants to fawn on the infant, but the infant can’t fawn back—it can’t even talk. So there’s no possibility of intellectual exchange coming from that direction. Yet I want to be supportive of new life; I want to be loving and…

If you have to say “I want to be loving,” you’re likely not loving. For, when you love something, you simply love it: there’s no choice involved; it just comes automatically. Even unwantedly: like when a man falls in love with his neighbor’s wife. Usually you don’t set out to commit adultery; you don’t plan it like an immaculate conception, like Mary with Jesus. It’s more like an unexpected, premarital pregnancy: a nuisance caused by the Life Force going awry; like Mary with Jesus. Love has a mind of its own. And we gladly give ourselves up to it, when it accords with the dictates of propriety; whereas we RESIST love’s wiles and trickery, when its ends are inconvenient.

It’s as if we know better than love. Love is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Sometimes it is absent, so you must act as if it’s present: you must sham love, in hopes that the real thing is simply running late and may soon make its genuine appearance. Think of a mother who’s repulsed by her own child & yet keeps sincerely trying to succor the brat. (That’s the story of my own mother, incidentally.) Contrariwise, love often exists and you need to shun it, like in the foregoing example where your neighbor’s wife, during dinner, clandestinely placed her soft hand under your thigh, thus arousing in your soul a feeling of everlasting allegiance.

And the time drew nigh that Israel must die: and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him, “If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: but I will lie with my fathers.” (Genesis 47:29)

MORAL: Should love strike when the hour is inopportune, bat it back, lest it beguile you into discovering that you are one of the unblind gods.

Now if we people, at least by way of our mores and norms, with regard to decision-making, are superior to love, then I wonder why love exists at all. It’s sort of like pain, in that sometimes you thank it for saving you from grave danger, but sometimes you curse it for leading you into temptation.

So there are loves bidden and forbidden. And, among all, there are certain loves that appear universal. I mean, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t love a good beefsteak. Yet now consider what it is like to exist as an outlier: imagine feeling no magnetic pull toward these common subjects of affection. For instance, all humans feel a natural love of infants, yet I myself lack such. Am I therefore inhuman? Yes. But I don’t hate infants: hate is but the flip-side of love – I’m rather dispassionate. I see an infant and shrug: I wish it no harm; even the opposite: I wish it strength and health and a wonderful life; but I can barely feign love for the cute little pup. I can’t force myself to dote on it. Some people’s eyes grow big as saucers and they gasp and exclaim “Ooh a baby!” like this is the first child ever borne by human loins.

& who was the first child borne by human loins? Cain the murderer. That’s the truth. It was neither Adam nor Eve – they were created; that is: handcrafted. (Lord Yahweh did not birth them via his pelvis.)

And Adam blanked Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, “I have gotten a man from Jehovah.” And she again bare his brother Abel. And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. (Genesis 4:1-8)

So the original fruit of sexual congress was Cain the murderer. He nipped his brother Abel’s whole line in the bud. For, when you take a life, you don’t take that life alone; you additionally take all the lives that would have sprung from that life. Thus every slaying is infinite: an eternal act. You’re basically one with GOD when you slay your brother, yet the same goes for when you save your brother. As it is written “I kill, & I make alive.” That’s why certain lost souls become serial murderers, and it’s also why many churchgoers get addicted to childbearing. You see some Christian couples bearing twelve and thirteen kids. Why? Does the world face a shortage of business managers and weasels? Is Earth in danger of becoming under-populated? Is humankind in a sort of brainstorm phase, where we must quickly keep throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks – no time to hone, to harmonize, to blossom into poetry?

There was a city that got walled-in and besieged, and this brought on a great famine. Now the king was passing by upon the city’s wall—it was a big, beautiful wall—and there cried a woman unto him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king.”

And the king said unto her, “What aileth thee?”

And she answered, “This woman said unto me, ‘Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow.’ So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, ‘Give thy son, that we may eat him’: yet she hath hid her son.”

When the king heard the words of the woman, he ripped his pants. Then he passed by upon the big beautiful wall, and the people looked up, and, behold, the king had on sackcloth undergarments. (II Kings 6:25-30)

I wish I wouldn’t have quoted that bible passage, but it popped into mind, so I followed my bliss. I wish that instead I would have ended my last paragraph after the question about the average churchgoers’ planned parenthood and just left it unanswered, so that the gentle reader would be lured to find its relevance to what follows. So, I’ll try to have my cake and eat it too, by repeating the statement: You see some Xian couples bearing upwards of a baker’s dozen children – why must this be?

Think of a weedy patch. We have this patch of land behind our backyard, on the other side of our fence, which is overgrown with ugly small trees and weeds and poisonous verdure. There are two old broken-down bird houses and one filthy birdbath. I am not sure whether this mess belongs to my neighbor or to me. As I said, it’s outside of my fence; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t own it: for it’s conventional to build fences a few meters back from one’s property line. Anyway, if the above mess is MY mess, then it’s something I rather inherited than originated. Like, if that Christian woman, who brought forth so many children, dies, & bequeaths her litter to ME, then I, even I, will have been punked in similar fashion.

Is it not cool to make an ORIGINAL mess anymore? Every mess I’ve ever seen was inherited. True: Lil’ W (the second Bush Prez) made a mess of Iraq; and all subsequent prezzes keep making messes of other countries, not to mention all the previous prezzes who made messes that bore further messes; but the actual human class of souls in this world only ever are thrown into messes made by their betters.

I suppose the important thing is that the innocent get to shoulder the blame. To be blamed for a mess is as posh as having caused it.