(I beg my country to adopt this image as its flag.)
Dear diary,
If a goddess were to tell you that your house looks pretty, what would she mean? Of course it would depend on who this goddess is: If she is one of those goddesses who sells real estate for a living, it might mean that when she looks at your bare white walls, she sees visions of coins, paper dollars, and radiant treasure chests (the kind that pirates yearn to steal); perhaps she even hears that hackneyed “cha-ching” noise of the cash register, signifying that, in the current market, she believes she’ll have no trouble making a quick buck on your home: she’ll just palm it off to some newborn sucker. But what if this goddess has nothing to do with any marketplace, and she beholds your abode from the perspective of, say, a designer of clothing. In that case, her remark (“Ooh, you have a pretty house!”) would mean that she sees something in the layout of your building that resembles an outfit that might look good on a fashion model.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
[—from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”]
But my preferred type of goddess would label “pretty” any house that has plywood nailed over its smashed windows and wild graffiti over its interior and exterior.
So my point is: I don’t understand why everything always has to be so plain and dull. Why do we paint everything beige, all the time? Why must every door merely open and shut, like a lazy wooden doll that cannot will itself to come alive and dash outside to labor in the rice fields?
As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed.
[—from the biblical book of Proverbs (26:14)]
I just wish that we would reach the point where doors would no longer have knobs that one must turn to open them, but instead would make zapping sounds when you pass thru their very essence, because they’re constructed from a new metal that was discovered floating in outer space, and there’s no need to open or close anything anymore: only ghosts or phantom-people need to bother with lifting the slab physically upwards or downwards. And most of them get crushed when trying to pass thru, because they’re not nearly nimble enough to please Darwin. Darwin shouts: “He’s unfit; crush him!” (Darwin is addressing the metallic slab, which possesses manmade wit, with regard to the stately spirit of the angel of the LORD.) Nothing should survive that isn’t half-decently sprightly.
No, but I like two things: Science fiction vehicles and alien beings and foreign planets, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, I like dilapidated modernity, yet thru the lens of imagination. What I mean by that last statement is that I don’t fancy walking thru actual houses or factories that are rundown and now overrun by desert-and-island escapees; but I love dreaming about walking thru such accomplishments.
Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein: and it shall be no more inhabited for ever; neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation. (Jeremiah 50:39)
So it’s a peculiarity of my nature that I’m attracted to disparate phenomena.
- A clean, silver spaceship whose jet black frame is human-permeable.
- A dirty, livid apartment whose broken windows are rodent-permeable.
As long as we’re simply daydreaming, I’m equally interested in purchasing either place. So name your price.
And I wish that when we sneak into the hardware store after hours, the screws were shinier and available in bright colors, so that we could feel more lust for them. There’s no reason that all screws must be born the same gray shade. At least manufacture them out of space-metal that comes in seven colors. I wouldn’t want to use ALL these options, for that would result in rainbow patterns encircling my existence; I would instead rather choose just one color, like exclusively scarlet screws with rotund heads, to indicate a ferocious temperament; so that everywhere you look, when you break into my house, you see a dazzling display.
Also, people should bash their own houses down and rebuild them, every so often. Say, once a decade. There’s no reason that anyone should have a house that outlives that damozel whom Dante loved. This tradition of periodically planned home-wrecking will help us all maintain what is most poignant in this life at the front of our mind.
But I really do like the thot of forcefully obliterating my house. Even by way of a lowly baseball bat. (I mention that detail only to stress that this is not just another cheap excuse to use power tools like jackhammers and dive-bombers: I’m genuinely enthused by destruction-for-destruction’s-sake, even if we must start at a grassroots level.) This reminds me of that one scene from the movie Citizen Kane (1941), where Kane enters a room and just swings his fists and knocks all the decor onto the ground; and he rips out the shelving. Whenever I watch it, I always think: Hey! some Hollywood carpenter built that set, in the sweat of his brow and in sorrow, yet now here’s Mr. Kane destroying it like he’s the LORD of this film — somebody should compose a message relaying this evil so as to inform the director, and/or the co-screenwriter: perhaps they can invent and edit in a mutant lizard such as Godzilla or something great like Satan to protect the working class’s property!
Kane’s butler Raymond recounts that, after his wife Susan leaves him, Kane violently demolishes the contents of her bedroom. But he suddenly calms down when he sees a snow globe and whispers the word “Rosebud”.
[—from Wikipedia’s plot summary of Citizen Kane]
Now stupid folk assume that this whispered “Rosebud” symbolizes for Charles Foster Kane the memory of his lost childhood. But smart people remember that chapter 91 of the book Moby-Dick is a much prettier way to end this essay. So I’ll let Melville’s text provide the key to our map:
A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.
[ . . . ]
Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.
[ . . . ]
Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the first.
[ . . . ]
By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him.
“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!”
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