On being asked, “Why do you keep the previous homeowner's artworks hanging on your walls?”

A note on the obligatory image: I stole a junk-ad photo of people sitting in a car shown from above, and I taped two other clippings on top of that: at the left, a picture of a bespectacled Lincoln, and, at the right, a family smiling near a numeral. My aim was not to produce a scene that is pretty or clever or funny; I only liked how easy it was to obscure the clarity of the original ad and emphasize its chaos of lines and color. Before manipulating it, the photo made me think only of “a car with people inside”; whereas now, because its content is confusing and harbors no obvious point or narrative, it lures me see it as an abstraction, almost like a Jackson Pollock “drip painting”. And I do not intend this last observation as a compliment: I’m not a big fan of Pollock, tho I like and respect him.

Dear diary,

Well, we’ve been living in this new-old house for about a year now, and I still haven’t removed or replaced a single artwork on its walls. I don’t mean that the walls are bare: on the contrary, they’re filled with hangings (I’m trying to avoid using the word painting because they’re not all paintings; some are photographs, some are posters...) — but these works came pre-displayed. Here, let me explain:

On the morn when we were scheduled to close the purchase deal, we came to inspect the house. This is a normal thing to do when buying a house: you give it a final lookover before signing the paperwork, to make sure that nothing is amiss. So we were expecting to walk thru empty rooms with bare walls; but when we opened the front door, lo: clutter was everywhere; the same ugly heavy furniture, well-worn from the previous owner, filled every room; even giant hideous beds and bedside tables in each bedroom, and there were pictures all over the walls.

I suppose we could’ve made a fuss legally or even called the deal off; but I’m the opposite of litigious (that’s why I make such a lousy capitalist); I’d rather smooth over troubles, even at my own expense, than to add to the discord that is our native element. Conflict is what we beings of this dimension are born into, it’s like water is to fish; so my refusal to play the game of clashing and one-upmanship is like a fish saying to its aquatic brethren: Let us seek a finer substance to live within: I know that we can do it: the atmosphere of this ocean is dense and sluggish: let us abandon its liquid for aether: I say we strive to infiltrate the upper world: let us grow legs and lungs, even wings and fly! For, in the immortal words of our Lord, Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses:

. . . my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, & the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Also I like what he says elsewhere in the same poem — that his “gray spirit” yearns with desire . . .

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

So we decided against taking any kind of legal action or interrupting the purchase meeting on that day (now I’m returning to the subject of our acquisition of this house that came brimful of the previous owner’s dreck). Instead, we decided to begin the task of clearing out the place ourselves; so we rented a large truck with a spacious trailer and basically moved the old owner out so that we could move in. We brought all that hideous, heavy furniture to charity redistributors or whatever they’re called, so that nothing went to waste (everything eventually goes to waste, I know; please just bear with my earth-lingo); but we saved the framed art alive. We left the hangings on the walls — I suppose our reasoning was that they could stay, since, not taking up any floor-space, they weren’t in the way while we hauled in our own furniture: for pictures just lie flat against the wall; “We can goddamn them later,” I probably said.

But as we got situated and the days began to pass, I just kicked the can down the road; in other words: I continued to put off swapping out these existing artworks with our own visual hangings. I kept our own paintings packed up in storage, and left on the wall the ones that simply came with the house. They’re not my style, these images that we inherited, not by a long shot: they’re promo placards for famous baseball games; quaint scenes of fly-fishermen (one thickly framed picture even has an actual, physical, fishing lure displayed within the glass of its front panel); watercolors of sailboats docked at the bay; blown-up photos of antlered deer (I suspect this previous owner was a hunter); and acrylic paintings of milquetoast golfers — I’m not joking; we possess multiple instances of the latter.

It has taken a lot of hemming and hawing to get here, but my point in writing about this is very simple. I wish to convey the reason for my allowing these foreign artworks to remain displayed in our abode instead of replacing them with art that represents my own interests. At first it was due to convenience, and maybe a little laziness, but, since then, my stance has matured: I now have acquired a taste for — even to the point of being able to savor — this feeling that I’m occupying somebody else’s domain.

Daily I awake before sunrise, after a half-night of non-sleep. I walk from the bedroom down the hallway, into the basement, and sit at my writer’s desk; and the sight of all those lousy pictures that I pass along the way bolsters the fantasy that I’ve stolen someone else’s existence; or at least that I commandeered their living quarters.

Say that, while wandering thru the forest, you encounter a hut. Tho the place is uninhabited, it shows signs of being recently occupied. What if you just made yourself at home? (Possession is nine-tenths of the law.)

That’s how I feel, every day: as if I rode my bicycle leisurely to a suburban area, and parked in front of a house at random, and found the door unlocked, and decided to stay there.

Now I wonder: Will the owner ever return?

This is how Goldilocks must have felt in the story about the bears, where they leave on vacation and then she enters their house and sleeps in each of their beds and even drinks all their vodka. Yet, becuz it reminds her of this devious sin that she’s committing simply by existing, she allows their framed artworks to remain on the walls:

There’s a snapshot of Papa Bear at a ballgame; pastels of Mama Bear spearfishing (“A nice sized salmon!” reads the caption); a watercolor of Baby Bear on his ark of bulrushes in the flags by the river’s brink, with Sister Bear standing by the dock of the bay in the foreground; a still frame from the 2013 film Wrong Cops showing a deer grazing among headstones in a cemetery; and acrylic paintings of each Bear Family Member playing golf: Mama Bear in mid-swing; Papa Bear in mid-swing; Sister Bear in mid-swing; & Baby Bear posing awkwardly with a plastic putter on a mini-golf course.

*

I hope that this answers your question (“How come all the framed art in your house is SO ugly?”); but, notwithstanding whether it did or not, I’m going to stop here. For it often happens that, when I write these types of themed posts, I regret that I stuck to my subject, and this is one of those times. What’s worse is that I fear I’m only repeating myself; for I vaguely recall addressing this issue before, and telling this same story (of our struggle with the house seller’s leftovers, and our decision to let the wall hangings remain); I should search back thru the pages of this journal and read the entries from around that time, about a year ago, when we first moved into our present address. I think I mentioned all this same stuff back then and even made the same dull jokes. I wonder if these absentminded rehashings will be ranked hot or not by my future readers.

There are echoes and repeats running thru the Hebrew Bible, and I think that some are intriguing while some are tedious. The doubling that occurs in the story portions of Genesis-Exodus-Numbers tends to please me, because it fosters new enigmas; but the more obvious repeat tellings (the reworkings of material from Samuel & Kings) in the books of Chronicles mostly weary me: they’re only interesting insofar as they show the tendentious process of re-writing, of editing and redacting, of propagandizing, which occurs behind-the-scenes among the biblical authors, yet which is usually hidden or made subtler by whoever’s revising the text, in a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” type of way: I mean, how the original poets’ tales are bent to serve the wants and ends of the priests and scribes who collect and present the Holy Scriptures, and who thereby seize veto-power over what is deemed sacred. Here’s one example:

The 2nd Book of Samuel and the 1st Book of Chronicles both purport to be histories of ancient Israel, so the material that they deal with overlaps. My understanding is that Samuel was written first & then Kings; and those two accounts were published together as a two- or four-volume collection. Then an age passed & a state of dismal woe, after which Chronicles was published as a revised, updated version of the Samuel-Kings histories. Now, here’s what I find curious:

Near the end of the 2nd Book of Samuel, we are told that, at a certain point along the timeline of ancient Israel, King David was inspired to take a census of his populace:

And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say: Go, number Israel ...that I may know the number of the people. (2 Sam. 24:1)

Then the story of this same event is also told in the First Book of Chronicles:

And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel. (1 Chronicles 21:1)

Note the change that the author of Chronicles has made. In Samuel, it is the LORD who makes David do this, whereas, in Chronicles, it is Satan. The only way that we could avoid calling this a major altering of the source material — in other words, the only way that we could reconcile these two passages and say they do not contradict — is if the LORD and Satan are the selfsame entity.

So it’s a win-win situation for the readership: either way, we find this amusing; whether the authors of these books are at odds, and one is attempting to correct the other; OR if they’re both in agreement but the latter historian is attempting to bring out a nuanced truth: that our owner is our adversary (the LORD is our Satan).

Now, to return to my own attempts at scripture: I wonder if similar shifts in tone or meaning will be found when I read over my own confessions — rather, if the discrepancies will prove provocative or negligible; for I’m sure they’ll exist: they can’t not! My memory is not a bank vault but a melting pot. I don’t even own a memory: it’s rather a section of my overactive fancy that is slightly less overactive. I lie to myself every instant of each day. It’s like that old joke . . .

QUESTION: How can one tell if Bryan is lying to himself?
ANSWER: His brain is thinking.