Here is the next page from my book of $9.99 Drawing Prompts. (I shared the last page on 05 FEB, remember?—it was the smoking furnace & burning lamp from Genesis 15:17.) The prompt for this current drawing, as you can tell, was "Koala bear".
Dear diary,
Language is kinda-logical, the flipside of which is kinda-illogical. Logic implies reasoning from rules. So language is like surfing between the planes of rules and rule-breaking. It's the place where sin and purity make amends. And modern "computers" run wholly on rules. That's why there will never be a perfect auto-translator.
But aren't humans computers? And aren't we perfect translators? Well, there's no such thing as perfection in the realm of translation, because, being a language-soaked concept, it too is parked halfway between logic and illogic; therefore: YES, humans are perfect translators, because we make all speech our own. And, yes, human beings are computers, but we're wet computers. We have blood and other juices instead of raw wires.
Have you ever noticed that computers in the 21st century are totally desiccated? All their parts are hard and dry: plastic, silicon, various metals, one cup of flour, and uncooked macaroni. Just wait until scientists dare to put something gooey into the mix. THEN we can begin to fear our overthrow. A computing device that's made from slimy, squishy material will understand both rules AND rule-breaking. Not only will that computer be able to auto-translate perfectly; it'll also be able to auto-compose strong poetry. Personal, visionary, sublime.
On this idea of soft and hard, I'm still fascinated how the gods created the human form: they chose to make us not just one thing or the other, but a marriage of both; for we have hard elements, like our bones, inside of our casing (note how elastic and shiny our casing is, by the way; and I don't wanna speak for you, gentle reader, but my own personal skin is extremely greasy); then, as a sort of counterpoint to our skeletal system, we have all sorts of soft organs, even liquid, right side-by-side in great tension with the hard stuff. Our heart is soft; our brain is soft; our liver is soft; our stomach is elastic like our skin; our eyes are basically jelly; and our tongue, undoubtedly our most important organ, is constantly getting bitten by our teeth. Then, like I said, we have genuine liquids, too: saliva, tears; I already mentioned blood; and even stuff that looks like canola oil.
Moreover, think about fat. The mentioning of canola oil lured me to imagine olive oil, which brought to mind antibacterial soap; and I've heard that soap is somehow made from animal fat; so, ultimately, fat took over my mind. Fat is something between solid and liquid; it's neither an ice nor a vapor; it's squishy but it's also rather firm, or at least when it's enclosed within skin it feels nice & firm: of course I'm talking about the fat of the female breast. Since there is no more attractive concept in nature than the breast, one might conclude that fat is the finest decor in the whole human house. But consider how much fat is also ridiculed:
Altho we've made great strides as a society in tamping down the negative and prejudicial falsehoods associated with fat, still it's not uncommon to hear the word "fat" employed as an insult. How could this be? Why were rotund nudes fashionable for centuries, yet now, all of a sudden, slim folks get to usurp voguishness? The answer, I think, is as follows:
Food was scarcer in the past, so a fat nude implied that the body's owner was capable of storing enough nutriment to generate a sizable militia (what we would call today a "family"); also most infants did not survive more than a fortnight, so it was important to possess sturdy childbearing hips, vast nurturing breasts, and enough extra weight to be able to support the endless stream of combatants that spring from one's loins.
But now, modern science has lowered the infant mortality rate and caused foodstuff to grow plentiful, even abundant, at least to lighter-skinned people in the global north, so the artistic fads now change in relation to these new norms, and thinness becomes sought-after, as it's perceived as being indicative of higher metabolism, self-control (the ability to resist the temptation to eat everything in sight), and easy access to cocaine or diamorphine.
Actually, this notion of the artistic fashions evolving with time is incorrect. It's just a rumor; a bit of bad guesswork. What really happened is that art itself expired. By "art" here I mean painting. Allow me to explain:
In olden times, a family would commission a local artist to capture their image by brushing paints upon canvas. Then photography was invented; but this didn't kill off painting entirely, because people still found something amusingly quaint about the art: it contained that crucial element of rule-breaking that photography seemed to lack. But then surrealists like Man Ray stormed onstage and showed how photos could be every bit as wrong as traditional painting. Then radio was invented, which was painting's death knell; for why would you want a mere image of your family, when you could listen to President Roosevelt's fireside chats? The only thing better than THAT would be if Science would hurry up and invent a special postcard that could hold 280 characters at once, so that some Future Prez could send his thots directly to your telephone.
Then movies arose, which are basically portraits whose eyeballs can follow you. So families began to take down the paintings from their walls and hang up motion pictures instead. And later Orson Welles broadcast his adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds, and everyone immediately assumed that our universe was dead meat. That really slew painting. There's no recovering from a fully realized apocalypse. Painters simply closed up their suitcases and went to lie down on the train tracks. That was when my grandpa got a job with the railroad, working as an engineer.
Seriously tho, what I was trying to say is that people don't even have the same use for art, because culture has changed so drastically; just think of what video games and virtual reality have done to human perception. — Is it true that everything recently just grew boring? Or are we like a gigantic child who's been eating nothing but pure cane sugar for years. We now expect images to react to our presence. A fresco painting is like a scientist frozen in ice; whereas a game of electronic pinball is like a modern-day scientist who's thawed out and is now willing to pretend to make love to the screen that you're watching, for a reasonable fee.
I talked about the invention of television above. I purposely did not mention the advent of the Internet. I wanted to save that for last, which is associated with least. I wanted to end this entry with a whimper; to go out in style.
So about 3 or 4 years ago the Internet came to dominate existence. It's not uncommon to hear people exclaim, shell-shocked with awe, "Everything's online now!" First of all, that's not true: I can't find Emerson's unabridged journals, and just about every film or song I love is not available in this country; but I grasp what these folks are getting at with their loud pleasure-groans. Before the Internet, one would have to feed a portion of one's own oats to one's ailing horse in order to visit one's friends overseas; because, otherwise, who is going to pull the buggy? But now all one's friends are online, in little boxes on tiny screens. So one can let Vico starve in the stable; and all other creatures can go extinct, too: we have no further need for their services. Bees; aquatic creatures in general... Only mastodons have a place in our improved reality, as they're easily cartoonified.
But, like I was saying, everything that the modern mind desires is able to be found nowadays on our miniature visual displays, which represent the Internet's treasure trove. If you enjoy tiny frames and buttons, faint hieroglyphics, baby-babble chitchat, a trembling little arrow to represent your intention, and an interface that half-listens; if you like clicking tapping swiping and diddling your touchscreen, then year 2019 is the Plinko slot for you. (Plinko is a game that involves dropping a round chip down the side of a board with pegs. The chip eventually settles into a slot, which determines the fate of the player's soul; that is: what type of existence she shall suffer, and the strength of the religious net from which she must free herself.) Yes, the Internet and all its tiny little e-blanks reminds me of another line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
Hey, we've reached the end! Now I'm proud of us for finishing this entry without even once having to mention Iran or Venezuela.
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