Let the waters settle

Dear diary,

I like that part in “Song of Myself” where Whitman sez: “Now I will do nothing but listen,” and then he tells you all the things that he is hearing.

Yesterday I was interviewing the movie director Werner Herzog, and he was making remarks about the use of sound in film. At a certain point in our talk he said:

Get a microphone and some recording equipment, and go camp out in the woods all night.

Now the reason I don’t take Mr. Herzog’s advice is that every time I try to spend the night in the woods, I fall asleep beneath a tree and get eaten by Cerberus.

So I prefer to just purchase a dilapidated house, like the one I own now (actually it’s the bank who owns it: the bank owns everything), because a house in need of repairs will have a crack in the glass of the window that’s just above the head of your bed. So this window is noise-permeable; thus you can listen to the sounds of the outdoor world every morning. You can hear the birds when they start singing before the sun rises. They sound like phaser blasts from an alien video-game.

But I recommend awaking before the birds have a chance to shoot you. Go to your desk and begin to write. Once you’re writing, you’ll tune out all the sounds of the world. The world could actually be coming to its end, with bombs bursting in air, all around, yet you would not notice — that’s how intensely you are able to concentrate when you’re praying.

I used the word “praying” instead of “composing an entry in your journal” because this type of journalism is just like prayer, except no God exists to receive your message; therefore your prayer remains unanswered. So, upon review, it is exactly like praying.

*

I like film, I like music, I like poetry. In short, I like art. And what is it that attracts me to art? I can tell you: It is the fact that art has no rules and no point. You can do whatever you want, and nobody has ever figured out why or what or how it’s done. It’s totally lawless, even evil; but it’s not quite punishable. The way that humankind has found to stop folks from becoming addicted to art is to make it non-monetizable. So you can do it, but you’ll starve. That’s the price of being an artist.

But what about the artists who were lucrative, who found a way to get paid for their work? Great artists, even the GREATEST POETS, like William Shakespeare, made truckloads of cash and were able to retire early and spend the rest of their life on a tropical island in a mansion shaped like the Parthenon.

This is not paradoxical or contradictory in any way. Art never earns a cent; but those who seem to have gotten rich off art have simply found a way to (as it were) sell the box that art is shipped in. If you don’t understand this figure of speech, go pleasure yourself.

I also think it is funny to teach the unteachable. To say: Here are guidelines to help you master what is guideline-resistant. That is why I approve of anyone who attempts to teach art. For Jesus said: Love thy enemy.

*

Speak of the devil!—here we have the holiday of Easter. I am writing this on the 12th of April in the year 2020. I live in Minnesota, and our weather forecast sez that we should expect a snowstorm. This, I argue, is God’s way of telling us that his son Jesus never did wake up after falling asleep:

The argument from the church is that God begat Jesus upon an unmarried damsel, and that she underwent an extremely late-term abortion, but the lad then rose from the dead. So what God does, instead of speaking plain English like his Apostles, is make snow to fall and cover the entire landscape, for just this one day. Spring is supposed to signify rebirth, cuz all the plants are now re-sprouting; but instead God has given us his final answer, in a last and terrible judgment — and this Newfangled Testament reminds us that winter signifies Eternal Death.

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

That’s from “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens. But, on second thot, for the sake of dallying with false surmise, let me suspend my disbelief: Let me pretend to disagree with Mr. Stevens and, again, to side with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (as I most truly do), which, in section 38, sez:

The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves,
Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.

I troop forth replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession,
Inland and sea-coast we go, and pass all boundary lines…

Now THIS I like best.

I’m just trying to admit that I think it’s better to rise from the grave than to allow it to digest you. Yes, I’d rather buy the goods that religion is trying to sell me, than to haggle about the price and then walk away tropeless.

*

So this post had no aim, but it ended up hitting its mark. It started out just listening to the annoying birds, and it ended with a boom, with skeletons dancing like Halloween or Walpurgisnacht. — Here’s a quote from the encyclopedia:

Saint Walpurga was hailed by Christians for battling “pest, rabies, whooping cough, and witchcraft.”

(I resisted the urge to change “whooping cough” to “coronavirus”.) That’s pretty good; I don’t dislike where this entry went.