Explaining to fail my explainures

Here's the next page from my book called 900 Drawing Prompts. (The previous page can be found here.) A phrase is written in the top left corner of each blank page of the book. This urges you, the artist, to create an illustration in oil paints, using the technique of photorealism. As you can see, the prompt for this latest painting was "A bright idea".

Dear diary,

Before I turned 30, I had read a lot of books, but I hadn’t figured out a way to write a book of my own. Why was any of this important to me — in an age dominated by computers and electronic screens, why did I want to read text and participate in literature? The books that I read were mostly novels, poetry, and essays. Also literary criticism, but not the boring stuff: I mean the titans, John Ruskin, Walter Pater... of course Samuel Johnson — I’d even add Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde...

I also loved rap music. (I know I’ve told you all this stuff before, but I’m seeing if I mention it again from the top, & at a different angle of attack, I might crack the hard nut of my mystery and at last become normal: a real boy made out of wood and not this half-robot half-alien thing that scares the spacefolk.) What do you make of a teen who loves rap and yet reads creative literature?

It’s easy for me to break this down, because I am the character in question. If I weren’t the character, I’d have to ask you what its author intended. And the fact that no one authored me doesn’t complicate matters, because I always assume that God authored me, and since we all collectively (we living creatures who possess imagination) created God in our own image, the idea of authorship with regard to my character is canceled out. Does that make sense? No? OK, good.

So I was born in a bad time when the powers that be (U.S. corporations) had stupided the culture; and they did this in order to make us kids better slaves and less critical consumers. So there was a time when I hadn’t read any creative texts: all I knew was what teleplays were playing on the television, and what rock was being repeated on the radio.

Mostly I felt humdrum about everything that I encountered in entertainment. (What eternity calls art, corporate stupid-cult calls entertainment.) But then I heard rap. Rap transfixed me because of its freshness: it was too new to have rules, so everyone who performed rap was forced to be in tune with their intuition. This makes for interesting art. So, in the case of rap, art had snuck into entertainment, like when the Nth generation of Eve and Adam’s bloodline snuck back into Yahweh’s garden and stole his flame-sword. I’m just trying to say that something personal and alive and cerebral and celebratory and mentally rebellious and even (in a healthy way) dangerous appealed to me in rap music.

Early rap music is the only kind I like, tho. I always stress this: the stuff that came out during the last quarter of the 20th century, and a little bit after the year 2000, is my cup of tea. After that period, the magic faded away from the genre, for the most part, because the moneymen got their mitts on the process and stupided it. That’s why all rap sux now.

But my point was to illuminate my individual development, not to cast a final judgment on an art form. (I would forgive rap for its sins, if it would just be friendly again.) I turned to text, while still a fan of rap, because I noticed that text was a very ancient medium. When I first began to read the big books of what they call The School of the Ages (the make-believe institute that transcends any particular country or generation: it contains the best works from all humans), like the Iliad and Dante’s Commedia and the Hebrew Bible, I encountered in them a superabundance of what I loved so much in rap: I felt I had struck upon the motherlode of aesthetic dignity; and, to this day, I agree with that assessment.

So my falling in love with rap, as well as my seeking out and finding the wider world of creative literature, is part of the same quest to Escape from Stupid Land. That’s why I care about books in an age when nobody reads: it’s not cuz I think I’m better or smarter than anyone else — in fact, I wish that all the computer-lovers of the world would wonder why I Bryan never returned to e-camp, and I wish they would then come searching for me and find me reclining under a forbidden tree reading poetry (from an actual paperback, not an e-book), and snatch the book from my hands and say “What’s this trash that has lured you astray!” and read a few lines and fall under its spell and join me so that we can all just lean and loafe at our ease in the grass here.