Here's the next page from my book of 295 Drawing Prompts. (The previous page appeared in early February.) The prompt for this present drawing was "Stained glass window".
Dear diary,
The idea of the sacred. That’s what I woke up thinking about today. Sacred books.
I envy people who were raised as non-believers, as atheists. But I’m also not too upset that I was raised as a fool, because the book that I was taught to hold as sacred is actually pretty good.
But what do I mean by declaring “The Bible is a good book”? Do I mean this morally or aesthetically? I mean it aesthetically. Yet aren’t statements about goodness or badness subjective; aren’t aesthetic judgments and opinions regarding beauty, like judgments about morality, valid only in the eye of the beholder; as opposed to evidence-based, objective, scientific findings, which are true for all?
Yes, that’s a correct assessment. But who cares. I’m just writing to get a paycheck. I say these things for two simple reasons: to earn dollars, and to kill time while I wait for posthumous fame. The more words I write down here, the bigger my bank account gets. Or rather fuller, not bigger: for if it gets bigger, then it makes the money that fills it look less bulging. It is seriously overflowing. For I get paid by the alphabetic character, not the strength or depth or accuracy of my thots. Therefore my only goal is: dirty the paper. And nowadays they use computer screens instead of actual papyrus, because…
Frankly, I don’t know why we switched to glowing screens instead of ink on physical codices. I think that was a mistake.
But note the coincidence that ancient scrolls have the same problem as modern weblogs: they both lack pages — I mean there’s no “end of the page”: you can just keep unrolling them forever.
But back to the subject: Sacred texts. Here’s what I find interesting:
When you read a text that the people who feed and protect you have told you is sacred, you just assume that it’s the best possible writing, even before you’ve perceived its style. Anything that you naturally dislike about the text while reading it, you blame upon your own shortcoming as a reader. That’s different from how you would read a popular novel: if the latter failed to move you, you’d blame the author; you’d say “This book sux. Who wrote it, some outer-space chimpanzee?” But if an actual chimp from the outer spaces comes down to earth in his throne-ship and delivers a scroll to Ezekiel (a strange nickname that is simply long for “Zeek”), saying “This is my holy word; now here’s a treat for you,” and he tosses old Zeek a prophet-snack, thus earning Zeek’s trust, then years later some little boy named Bryan Ray alias Me Myself will wake up and find his soul trapped in a nightmare world where two dopey parents are telling him “Zeek’s book is perfect, you should say that you like it before you have skimmed it.”
So the Bible contains really boring passages, and stupid things that nobody would ever care about if they could read with discernment; but the problem is that they’ve been told to turn off their brain-case prior to reading, and to begin with an overdose of prejudice. And the only people who tout the Bible are these pre-judgers. The other kids whose parents brought them up as infidels hate the Bible and think it’s a sham.
But I’ve been a believer and an unbeliever. So I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve seen both yards, and they’re both pretty nice. The lawns are well-kept, in either case. The atheists have a crisp, green, healthy, airy backyard to romp around in; and it’s really enjoyable. But the religious folk have a cool waterslide in their backyard, and their grass is green too, and they have two trees whose fruit you can eat: the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so that place is pleasant to play in too.
Now a teacher at a university might tell his class that the best way to write a story is to situate it in a fishery; then cause two female characters to meet and become friends, so that the one gives the other a talking parrot as a gift: now they move into the same house together, but then they each engage in a scandalous affair with the same magician, who lives in the middle of the town, in an apartment with his assistant, and the parrot blabs the whole truth about both affairs to each woman, thus creating the story’s conflict, and then the drama reaches its climax: there’s a chase scene, and a nude scene (also known as a love scene), and then a tearjerker ending: that’s the proper template for a story.
Then one of the students in this class might raise her hand to ask a searing question:
“I just read the book of Exodus in the Bible, which is a sacred scripture & therefore not only the best possible structure but also infallible, & it didn’t have any parrots or scenes of pleasure, neither lovemaking girl-on-girl nor girl-on-magician. Explain thyself.”
What would you answer back to this whippersnapper, if you were the Professor of Tall Tale Telling at Ubu University? Would you say:
“You’re mistaken, Janice, for the Bible is written poorly; go tell God that he should have revised it a couple more times.”
Or would you say:
“Holy moly, I think you’re on to something, dear Janice — for the Bible is, by definition, the best book in the world, and therefore all other stories should pattern themselves after its stories; and I need to revise my own style of teaching — I should be more socratic, and I should engage in more on-the-job boozing.”
The above two answers are the only ways that you could address your student’s inquiry sincerely, without raising your voice while drawing your pistol.
So the idea is that if you can create an authority, which cannot be gainsaid and must be obeyed, then you don’t have to worry about your artwork being judged negatively by critics: the form of your piece will be held as the exemplar, no matter what. (Spectators will bend their own taste to accommodate any eccentricities your triumph possesses: they will acclimatize themselves to your mental environs, rather than you having to learn how to dance to please them. And this serves them right, the finicky blockheads.) That’s why I recommend to my own students that they always begin their fibs with a preface declaring that the following epic is the work of a hairless primate from Jupiter who arrived on a spacecraft and therefore is trustworthy. Nobody in their right mind will question such a plausible foundation.
But did you ever think about how people who work in the motion-picture business must be comfortable in their own skin? I was thinking about that this morning:
If your job is to perform the sacrament of copulation with a fellow professional actor in front of a camera, then you better not be shy about how you look. When the director yells “ACTION!” you can’t say:
“Wait a minute; I’m not pleased with the way that my upper body and lower body appear when the lights are on; can we therefore turn off all the lights, so that I can have privacy while I undress and perform my scene?”
Cuz then the director will say:
“But this is the love scene; are you proposing that we film you and your co-star at a greater distance away from the bed, while you both remain under the covers? If that’s what you’re proposing, then I could have saved a lot of money by just hiring a few dogs to chase their own tales underneath the bed-sheets — because the audience will not be able to see what is beneath the covers anyway; they’ll just see the bed, and the sheets all a-rustle, and they’ll assume that two humans who look gorgeous are making sweet love to each other; in other words, they’ll never guess that it’s actually a pack of canines frisking about.”
And then if you say “Well you don’t have to substitute dogs for humans; I’m sure that you could find a monkey who’ll charge less, because he’s from a different planet.”
Now you’re caught in your own contradictory logic, cuz one of the stagehands who’s in control of the lighting yells from the back:
“All of the habitable places in our solar system pay their employees better than Hollywood; it would actually be easier for a human actor to make a fortune starring in erotic films on Jupiter than it would be for us to find even a grass-eating quadruped like Nebuchadnezzar to work for less than a living wage, here in Tinseltown.”
King Nebuchadnezzar sat in the palace, upon the throne of Babylon, and he spake, saying: “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”
Yet while the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying: “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, for a span of time, until thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will.”
And the very same hour this thing was fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.
(Daniel 4:28-33)
I only quoted this passage here to explain why our heckler above, the lighting technician, called Nebuchadnezzar a quadruped. But now that I’ve re-read the scripture, I realize that maybe he should have referred to him as avian.
In closing, however, I really am serious about this idea of nakedness: we think of animals as being unclothed; but aren’t their feathers and fur a type of attire? If you take the pantsuit off a businesswoman, we call her a “graceful nude” or a “goddess”; but if we take the sweater off a basset hound, it’s still just a regular dog. It’s like you’d have to shave a chimpanzee to make it naked. So their clothes are inbuilt. Animals are much smarter than us. If we want to remove our white collared button-up shirt, we should have to go thru a period of molting, which might take many weeks, during which we’d need to shelter ourselves at the back of a cave, perhaps next to a dying goat, to avoid being photographed. We’d be extremely camera-shy. The erotic film industry would want nothing to do with us.
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