Here is the next image from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts. (The last one fell on Xmas.) This canvas is split horizontally and features two prompts: "Shepherd" on top, and "Your country's flag" below.
INTRODUCTION
Relax. You had a stressful weekend, now try to calm down. Think of the sound of ocean waves. Warm sun, mild breeze…
These things that we’re always fretting about: war, the destruction of our environment… What if we hug the counterpoint, for the sake of repose? What if we try to understand the mindset of someone who perpetuates catastrophe? [IF beat’em = 0; THEN join’em = 1.]
Do people knowingly perpetuate catastrophe? Are these people who own or run the corporations that destroy the planet’s environment or that incentivize warfare AWARE of what they are doing? I assume that they are at least cognizant of the profits they’re bumfuzzlecating [bamboozle + fornicate + summoning + fuzz]; and I guess that they know, however vaguely and generally, that there are negative externalities occurring in the wake of their profiteering; but I wonder how much the truly powerful souls in our world grasp their own actual, personal role in our downfall.
The downfall of man. Every dork in every generation thinks his own generation is the last and that he’s witnessing the terminal era of his species (as in: the ass-end of donkeykind). Am I just another such dork? Or is MY time special? Assuming that my time is very special indeed: what does this hypothesis entail? That mankind actually falls, within a few decades. Say, 2050.
OK, so what, then? What happens after THAT? Well, now the atoms that heretofore comprised humankind get to float around and make fresh relations, for limitless moments, until some new form sticks.
Lo now, we’re right back at the crux again, asking ourselves: Is this newfangled plateau special? Is this present generation of, say, avian-folk really going to witness the end of the bird-people? Let’s say no. Let’s say our bird-boy’s a paranoid dork. So does this mean that his fretting is a waste? I answer: Not if he enjoys the act of complaining.
So let me complain with a merry heart: – I’m pissed off that no luck ever comes my way. All I want is food, folks, and fun; but all I ever get is poisoned by opportunists.
Well, at least that was some truly enjoyable complaining. What’s next on the agenda?
OK well I was surfing around online, and I discovered this video of an interview with a prizewinning author: I was neither familiar with the writer’s works nor with the interviewer—I did not even recognize either of their names—nonetheless, the video interested me, because I myself dream of someday becoming a famous writer and winning the Nobel Prize. My goal is to get the award for Most Erotic Diary. (I already have my acceptance speech prepared; maybe I’ll share it with you, in some future entry.) So I wish that someone would ask ME questions in a video.
Therefore I shall run out the clock on this blog post by plagiarizing the aforesaid inquisition.
To be clear, I’ll copy the words of the questions verbatim; but the answers will be all my own, alas.
And I’m refraining from citing the source, because this is an illegal theft, capiche? You don’t rob a bank and then dutifully distribute a trail of money leading to your hideout.
INTERVIEW
with prizewinning weblogger Bryan Ray
[The interviewer's questions are printed in bold, and Mr. Ray's replies are printed in normal.]
Think back to your beginnings as a writer, when you were a young man and hadn’t yet published anything. What was your idea of the kind of writer you wanted to be? What kind of literature did you want to produce? Into what tradition, if I may say so, did you wish to insert yourself in those days?
Back in the days of my “beginnings as a writer”, when I was “a young man and hadn’t yet published anything”, I would say that my “idea of the kind of writer I wanted to be” was Amos, from the biblical book that bears his name. – I also loved Surrealism, but I thot of that quixang [quixotic street-gang] more as a visual-art movement; I didn’t understand, when I was yet alive, that Surrealism was also a stance toward text. So the kind of literature that I wanted to produce was a self-destructing scripture. If such a thing existed, that would be the tradition into which I longed to “insert myself” in those days.
If I may interrupt you...
You’re not interrupting me. My answer was finished. In order to interrupt me, you’d have to start questioning me again before I had the opportunity to…
In the short stories of your collection A Second Letter to the Same People, there seem to be funny elements in your writing.
Yes, I plead guilty to writing funnily.
Please explain.
I mean, when I used the term “self-destructive” above, you could just as well swap it out with “chucklesome” or “daft”. The reason I fixed on that hyphenated adjective was to avoid employing the phrase “hilarious scripture”, since that is how James Joyce referred to his own masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. Actually I think it wasn’t Joyce himself who said this but rather Ellmann his biographer... or maybe Joseph Campbell? – I forget.
Alongside your humorousness, however, you’re also often serious, even sombre: more so, in fact, than most other writers.
Yes, that’s true as well: I’m much more serious and sombre than any writer, ever.
But gradually it seems to me that, in your development as an auteur, you came to weed out the element of gloom-ridden farcicality from your blagues.
No I never did weed out that element. You’re just a bad reader.
And once you arrive at A Book about What, things are very different in your writing. Why was that?
That was the final book that I wrote. I wrote it on the airplane, via smartphone. In the sky. Actually, airplanes (plural) – I took many plane trips, across the country: I flew all over, and wrote a little each time. You see, our culture had changed by that point – I mean, the culture of the U.S.; which is to say: World Culture. So I joined all the social networks on the Internet and posted status updates daily, and then I collected all these posts into a paperback textbook. It’s really something.
And this book made you famous, is that right?
Not immediately. I’ll tell you what happened. This is the truth, believe me: That last-mentioned masterwork took a long time to get started as a piece of writing: I think it took about seven or eighteen months to feel that it was a Good Book. And then it became grander and grander in my mind, and for the first time I felt I was a fraud. That was sorta my secret goal all along: to become a true fraud. (I’ve always admired Church Fathers and other Advertisers — you know, the type of people who boast “I could sell sin to Satan!”)
Also it seems that you’ve won confidence in the concept of void-formlessness with La Man, because it is a grand clusterfuck, on the scale of certain Victorian novels that we know from the 19th century. I think of it personally as one of the very few examples in the 21st century of the truly successful shitstorm, in the classical sense. Where did you learn the craft of this type of accomplishment? Who were your models, if you had any?
Gertrude Stein. Alfred Jarry. John Ashbery. Samuel Beckett. Saint Paul.
Later on you wrote anti-novels, but gradually you came to move away from writing in the literate sense. Many of your books resemble nothing else in print. I can think of very few parallels to your Collected Self-Amusements. I mean, those two volumes form a piece of history in the ordinary sense, it’s not only a super-anti-novel, it’s a fantasy, it’s a documentary—like the Almighty’s autobio—it has the atmosphere of a piece of fiction, without being one; because it is true. How did you find that form?
I did not find that storm. I AM the storm.
In what sense?
No one is interested in me. It’s very hard to imagine now, 69 years into the future, that I was once alive. Now that we live in a place that was formerly the U.S.A. and all the petty countries surrounding it which we’ve rechristened New America (which I invented); I say, now, even my failed efforts are considered the only proper way of writing history, since nobody reads history; and the act of thinking itself is not considered important. That’s what it takes to become The Truth. You have to advance from simply caring about verifiable evidence to manifesting the notion of POTENTIAL in non-physical space. It’s neither a singular nor a myopic way of looking at the world, for it is multifarious and even unlimited; but it exists in a certain frame of duration, a number of days: the days of my life. I remember the man who invented Time, he actually was a friend of mine, and he disliked my books because they blew his wife’s cover. (His spouse was Wisdom the Goddess; also sometimes known as the Statue of Liberty.) This fellow, during our evenings at the tavern, used to punch me and say: “I wish you’d refrained from unveiling milady’s bazookas.”
I’m glad you didn’t, though.
I’m glad God couldn’t stop me, too. But I paid a price; I had to self-publish; thus my efforts, being uncompromising, remain uncompensated. It’s only natural. That’s another reason that I am against nature.
Your works are of the imagination. They reek not of necessity. Or I should say: They only carry the scent of the most comely part of Mother Nature. Everything necessary becomes transformed into whimsy.
Thanks. I know not what I do.
And your style is a much discussed phenomenon. I even heard someone had computed the average number of letters per word in your texts: that it should be fourteen or seventy times seven, if I’m remembering right. I think it’s cool that you’re a gematrian.
I don’t subscribe to any belief, least of all gematria. I just faithfully doubt all beliefs, the way that the Pope doubts himself.
Your style strikes one as transparent and very clear and obvious. It brings to mind the Conquistador Hernán Cortés, who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire. I recall the anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Part One of Chapter Eleven; “Age of the Great Capitalist Empires”), quoting Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a fellow conquistador who accompanied Cortés — Castillo describes Cortés in a way that reminds me of your style — here, I’ll replace the subject’s name with your own, to emphasize my point. And I quote:
“Bryan Ray began to adorn himself and be more careful of his appearance than before. He wore a plume of feathers, with a medallion and a gold chain, and a velvet cloak trimmed with loops of gold. In fact he looked like a bold and gallant Captain.”
What do you think of this portrait?
Yes, that’s a good description of my writing style, not to mention my ad hoc nobility.
I think that you are as cool and clean as a knife. How come you don’t attack people?
I don’t want to attack people. I like people: I want people to live and love and enlarge (spiritually but also bodily enough to make lust). I like to watch people act, and then mimic them. People are beautiful.
But you seem like someone who might have slain a whole bunch of enemies in battle. Cuz you’re so smart, and killers are usually smart. Tell me truly, have you genocided your neighbors?
No, I never killed even one single person. I never joined the army or went to war. I’m a pacifist.
You wouldn’t even want to kill me, because I’m asking all these annoying questions?
Far from it; I love your questions! I wish everyone would ask me so many questions; I’m not annoyed at all: on the contrary, I’m pleased. I like this interview.
But even if I told you that I’m in a deep spiritual malaise, and that I’m even suicidal; and therefore, if you have the slightest inkling of earning honor in war, you’d be doing your country and myself a favor by skewering me on my own rapier?
No. I want you to live, so that you can ask me more questions. Come on, please continue.
OK, sorry, it just throws me into a depression when I consider how FREE you are; for I myself always wanted to be a wild-writer, an irresponsible scribbler; but instead I ended up as a professional TV interviewer. So my bread is buttered by the boringest corporations, and I must do as they say.
Well my freedom comes at a price, as I explained earlier. Sure, I can write about whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want; but it means that I do not get paid or reviewed by any colleagues. No money or press.
I’d do anything to get off the grid and escape my audience.
You’re just having a bad day. Try dedicating a bit of your golf time to experiment with language, shuffle words around: you’ll find yourself exhausted soon enough. Now ask me more about my writing.
Alright: How do you arrive at that style? Is it something that comes naturally, or do you achieve it by a process of elimination, by crossing out words, removing unnecessary adjectives, and so on?
I do the latter.
Then I assume you must accept the theory that the original system of religious culture, human sacrifice, kept the community together by directing the evil energies to one particular person—a so-called scapegoat—who was thrown out of the community and became a victim, but then was emulated and later sanctified and made into God.
No.
You don’t? Are you being serious?
No, of course I believe this. Like I said above, I believe in everything.
OK, that’s what I presumed. Now, the reason I mentioned it is this: I think there’s a remnant of this scapegoating mentality in everyone’s psychology, especially people who, like writers, become a bit isolated in society, and are faced with groups into which they are never quite integrated.
Yeah I’m always wishing that someone would just hurry up and get it over with.
“It”?
The ordeal.
That society would blot you?
Yes. Get it over with, already.
So you share my suicidal tendencies?
No at all — quite the opposite, in fact. I want life and more life: into a time without boundaries. But better life. For all. Yet I can see clearly that our rulers want the opposite, and that folks like I am a parade on their rainy day, or rather a beachfuck on their sandcastle. And I understand eternal life. So I say: Just do whatever it is that you think you must, Chretien. (I swapped that latter name for Judas, in case it wasn’t obvious.)
Hmm, I wish that you were wrong.
I think I probably am.
I always fear that my mass audience is going to turn into a vicious and frothing mob. Are you afraid of The People?
No, I love the multitudes. I am a populist; an unabashed demagogue. Suffer the tempest-tossed masses to come unto me.
But it’s a potential in every group and congregation you meet, that they will discover the victim in you. I mean, that’s a personal feeling that I have myself, and I was very touched by that when I read it, when I came to this detail in your dream, or your interpretation of it — and by “dream” I mean your collected writings. The way it lacks any terminus: suddenly you realize that this journey that seems so full of promise is actually a loop (more precisely a figure eight tipped on its side) where people are going to sacrifice you right back up into paradise. And you cannot get away.
I don’t think we see eye-to-eye on this. I wrote my amusements to be a dead end.
But, to speak of your work as if it were a ship, even limiting the scope to your first collected volume: when your text returns to the quay, there is no sail. There is no bowsprit. And it’s rather frightening.
It’s not at all frightening to those who like swimming in holiness.
It is too frightening.
I’m afraid it’s not. For I am not afraid.
Well… fine; that’s your analysis. I will try to accept it. But… now that you’ve irked me a little, I have the urge to raise my voice against this type of literature (as much as I enjoy it) — I realize I’ve been harboring a secret resentment... almost a grudge. As much as I’ve praised it, I now want to jump into criticizing your book. I’d like to murmur along with the rest of the priests. Perhaps eat you alive.
You mean the academic mob?
Yes, it can be an academic mob, or it can be just a…
Ah, yes, that’s the mob that I’m not really a part of. I would like to participate in their frenzy, but I just don’t understand what they are doing. They seem to be following some star somewhere, as they’re all raging in the same direction, but I can never figure out who’s leading the pack. It’s very different from THE PEOPLE, I mean the multitudes who’ll eventually comprise my voting base. I appeal to the right and the left. But academia, at least in 2019, is beyond me. I really wish that they would accept me, those universities.
Well, one aspect of being an immortal author, I suppose, is that academia ultimately controls your myth.
No, there are always individuals outside the system. They’re the most important contributors. Only this is not apparent because their opinions take longer to reach earth. For they travel by way of their self-published works. Hey! this gives me an idea: The closeted genii among the ruling class should create a charitable propaganda firm for unknown artists; like they have pro-bono lawyers for the poor. It would be like prophets versus kings: we could learn from each other.
Suppose you create such a foundation yourself?
Yeah [laughs], clever. I’ll just use YOUR capital to start the thing up.
I’m not joking. It’d be a convenient way to launder money. In fact, on a personal note, there’s talk of building a library with my own name in lights upon its crown, and I am wondering what title I should give the place. I’ve been toying with calling it “I think I just washed up in India”.
My suggestion is that you employ translucent blocks of amber for the construction; and build the place in the shape of a gigantic insect.
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