Here's the next page from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts (the previous page appeared a couple of days ago); the prompt for this drawing was "Robot".
Dear diary,
Today, I would like to waste time. Walt Whitman begins section 26 of his “Song of Myself” like so:
Now I will do nothing but listen.
In the following entry, I would like to follow Whitman’s lead, while replacing that word “listen” with the phrase “waste time”. Thus, let me see if I can rattle off a few words in accordance with an idea that I brainstormed in an earlier entry (in short, there’s this book that I’ve been reading — The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan — on a page of which I found the list of topics that I used for the title of this entry: initially I intended to write a separate essay for every single topic; but that seemed too hard, so now I aim instead to toss a half-thot at each one, real fast, noncomittally); for this strikes me as a passable time-waster. . . .
[Also, before beginning, I want to note that all the following text originally was written in the same sitting as my diary post from 2019 AUG 13, but I whisked it away from that place, for reasons known only to my daemon, and replaced it with the text that now follows the asterisk there. This is worth mentioning, since portions the following micro-essays wink references at some content of that foregoing entry.]
What-is-Truth
Truth is real, that’s for sure; but no one’s ever seen it. It’s something we can only infer. We know that our own respective experience is real to us but not entirely available to others; so we deduce from our fragment the existence of a whole. The opposite of a truth is a lie. Lying is funner; additionally, truth is suspicious, because, if it’s really monolithic, then how can it possibly make sense to reference, as I did just above, “a truth” — shouldn’t it be laughable to say anything other than “the truth”? Or is truth divisible? Maybe it’s like a mountain, that is wholly integral but must be viewed piecemeal on account of its vastitude. And maybe the reason truth is so hard to explain is that language itself consists solely of lies. (Thanks to Pilate from the Gospel of John 18:38 for this question.)
Pilate asked him, “Are you a Christ then?”
Jesus answered, “You’re the one who’s calling me a Christ; I myself made no such assertion. Here’s the reason that I entered this broken world: to bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth hears my voice.”
Then Pilate, rolling his eyes, mutters: “What is truth.”
TOPIC #2: Art-for-Art’s-Sake
Art means “fake”: it is the root of the word “artificial”. When you create a falsehood, you use portions of the truth which surrounds you. We call this encompassing source of truth “the world”. All art is therefore collage: a redistribution of various sub-truths in service of lying. The pursuit of art is basically the attempt to fashion a lie as an alternate truth, but failing miserably & having a blast while doing so.
In the olden days, any given artist would craft a work of art for a specific customer, because nothing was done that was not done for profit. So a paying customer would appear and say, “Paint a portrait of me and my family playing golf.” This is an example of art-for-commerce’s-sake. Eventually, however, the aquatic artists crept up out of the ocean, which was their hell where Jehovah had thrown them after the Great Battle for Heaven, and they grew legs and lungs (the aquatic artists did, not Jehovah) and began to abstain from offering all their art up unto the LORD exclusively but instead started making art-for-art’s-sake: or self-amusements.
On being asked “What exactly is the meaning, reason, and purpose of all these pretty growths in this field here?” Ralph Waldo Emerson, turning to address one particular flower, poured forth these words:
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
Thy charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
So you don’t have to worry about how many copies your book has sold, or how high your painting is priced at the museum auction — for that would be art-for-profit’s-sake. We’re talking here about a superior purposelessness. Just put your entire mind into something, invest your whole self, and let genius fall where it may.
Religion
Religion is what happens when control-freaks seize upon a poem (which is essentially an instance of whimsy) and hold it up high to the mobs & announce thru clenched teeth: “This poem’s meaning is thus-&-so, therefore you should obey whatever we priests instruct.”
Religion is allowing JUST ONE SINGLE interpretation of a poem to have authority over the poem itself. (See: Fascism.)
Religion is what happens when a poem dies. Behold: an animal in the wild possesses a beating heart and quivering flesh, and it frolics about; but then when the creature expires, it becomes stiff and motionless, because churchmen have mummified it: now its eyes stare straight forward (they have been replaced with glass marbles in the skull sockets). This is what happens when you make a poem into a religion. As William Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell under the proverb “Enough! or Too much”:
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
I should also add that religion is quite a bit more enjoyable than science, because, if you remember everything that we learned above, then you will know that art is funner than truth because it is fake, and religion, being taxidermied poetry, is a subsection of art.
TOPIC 4: Sex
Sex is poles and holes. That is all. These items come in various sizes, but all poles are square and all holes are round. That’s why the U.S. White House has a room called “The Oval Office”, cuz sex has very much to do with modern politics, and it’s always uncomfortable. I’m only joking about that last sentence: I’m trying to lighten the mood from this too-sober topic. Really, the word sex can refer to either of two unrelated injustices: a devil’s action, or her gender. The sex act is what is employed to fashion devils from devils, so that someday they can form The Devil OF Devils, which is the aforementioned Integral Truth (the best lie ever); basically it’s what happens when one non-sexual being gets tired of reproducing itself exactly, all by its lonesome, so it coaxes another being into sharing blueprints, thus these two separate beings get their identities all mixed up, using the lab’s mixing facility, via conversation between the pole and the hole, which results in an alien offspring, or “evil spawn”, that resembles neither of its progenitors. (If you’re lucky, it’s a stillbirth; becuz, by the time you read this, the Prince of the Sky will have re-prohibited abortion.)
War-vs-Peace
War is essentially the state of peace made vulgar. In peacetime, people’s imaginations run wild: they think of things like hate & envy; boilerplate exuberance. When these thots advance beyond the state of simmering, they begin to desire to become perceivable artworks (since art means fake, this last phrase means sincere falsehoods); that is: they aspire to pose as a fancy, which all minds outside of their own might feel the force of. But what happens is that your average person denies her own intuitions. As it is written (in Blake’s aforesaid book): “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” So people say “NO!” and “DOWN, SIMBA!” to their creative instincts, and instead of fornicating divinely, they begin to craft weapons. Soon they stockpile an arsenal of nuclear bombs. Then they atomize each other. Whereupon their atoms must rise up to tidy the aftermath, and all the roads and schools must be repaired; and the intuition-deniers are happy to do this, because, instead of writing in their journal and creating wild art, they’ve started multinational businesses, which botch construction projects for profit. This is known as business-for-business’s-sake. It’s the same thing I was talking about before:
When I enter the topmost floor of any dark tower, I feel terrified that it might topple over if I lean against its sides; for, altho I’m aware that these structures are engineered according to the soundest principles of physics, I know the company that actually builds them has zero interest in following instructions; thus, where they’re supposed to be employing galvanized steel, they substitute aluminum; & when the plan calls for concrete, they use unsweetened oatmeal.
Also war makes money for savvy entrepreneurs who manufacture stuff that they can sell to each side in the fight. It’s good for business. We might even say that all commercial transactions aspire to the condition of warfare. Thus, perpetual bloodshed is preferable to Peace on Earth. I’m talkin’ war-for-war’s-sake.
Freud-vs-Marx
Freud wrote books and Marx wrote books. Freud’s books attempted to explain why the mind moves to and fro in the earth, and walks up and down in it (Job 1:7), whereas the queen can move diagonally as well. Marx wrote about how our economy’s locomotive is doomed to derail if we keep taking the turns of this track at such high speeds blindfolded.
Tips on Dating
What’s your end goal? Marriage? Or just a one-night stand? Maybe fool around in a non-serious relationship while you’re bored, during your first few years of college, or out in the workforce? Are you a boy or a man? Do you aspire to own a hunting rifle? Are you decent at plumbing? How many babies do you want in your house? How many fireplaces? What if some punk author coasts readerward on his bike and just enters your mind and stays there, and doesn’t even remove your paintings? What are you gonna do about it, tough guy?
Here’s the deal. Buy a rose. I don’t care if you’re a pole-owner or hole-bearer, or anything in between, from infra to ultra. Just buy the damn rose. A rose is a weed: it signifies love. What’s better than love? Exactly: nothing. Therefore you can avoid fighting a war on your first date with your intended spouse, if you come equipped with this gift. Kill ’em with kindness. You’ve heard of an olive branch? The rose is superior, due to its thorns (which are secret weapons). Yea, kill ’em with kindness. That way, your date shall bear limitless offspring for you; and you can train the resultant children to serve as your army. They’ll secure your homeland. Also, hire some samurai. Take your opponent to a decent restaurant and order the best dish on the menu, because this is what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life: most married couples dine expensively every evening of each banking day. It’s important for you to spend as much time practicing whatever your usual, quotidian routine will consist of, for your relationship to bring forth fruit in the celestial realm. You have to ask yourself: Are we savages or civilized? Globally unified or tribal-competitive? Do we believe in open borders? Are not all men our brothers, and all the women ever born our sisters and lovers? Also: how long do we really wanna keep living? For, at a certain point, even we and the fam — our beloved spouse and dear litter of children, who “lived happily ever after” — must kiss Death on the mouth. And her lipstick is red and her fangs are…
[Time’s up; gotta go to breakfast!]
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