Most of us know the biblical story of Lot and his incestuous daughters. Fine. But I wonder what, in this painting by the Surrealist Max Ernst, the scary-looking lady just got done doing ... Was she torturing him with a long slow tease? Did she sit on his face until he nearly passed out? Did she make him kiss her feet as he begged for release? It seems to me that cruel women (who rarely exist in the real world) serve (paradoxically) as a subtext for the best of art.
I read Ego by Ayn Rand recently. Perhaps I've included this in other posts. But I'm a drunk and I forget things. Anyway ... The birth of self-consciousness through material invention is a capitalistic myth that I find highly offensive. The notion of self that emerges from the bubbling cauldron of childhood and congeals into the sickly self of adulthood is the product of one thing only: the desire to control one's environment. Power is the key; we all seek it. I don't want to sit in a sewer and "create" a light bulb: I want to hold sway over an empire of whimpering slaves who praise my name because they are afraid not to do so. The greatest accomplishment a person can achieve is to overcome this selfish desire and find love amidst one's fellows.
As St. Augustine remarked in Book 1 of the Confessions: “no one is free from sin in [God's] sight, not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day”. Indeed, for we all seek power, from the day of our birth; whether it is refusing to share a toy, or desiring to possess a country -- we all feel this way. To learn to love, however, is a virtue, and not necessarily a Christian one -- for we all know that Christians are often the most intolerant of fools.
In my best moments, I want to extend my love even to the most deliberately debased beings; in my worst moments, I want to breed fear and discord -- and control it. It is a sad version of humanity that remains in the latter state for the span of life. I feel I'm losing my touch, for the very reason that I'm stuck in the former. It is time to reconnect with what matters: poetry, Music, the arts ... I don't want to become inhuman. I might die soon, and so be it ... But I want to die a Man.
Ulysses awoke from a violent dream
Penelope comforted him with soft warm hands
Yet the sea beckoned
Life is motion
There is no stasis
The more we seek the comfort of home
The less we arrive at GNOTHE AUTON
End of life is frightening and comforting
Depending upon how we end
My end has already passed
What remains is a waiting
A slow painful waiting
… if oratory be the art of speaking well, its object and ultimate end must be to speak well.
~ Quintilian
At the first station I took a leak, at the second, I bought a watch.
The third, there was a stand selling plush kitties, at the final, there was the car waiting.
Art is always expectant, imperfect, ephemeral. We don’t wonder too much about it.
The warmth of the crotch is always eternal, spiraling into the memory like a worm.
A bore, an ice-fostered whisper, a bore, a drill, a bore, a breaking-point.
Thank you.
So, the first art: THEOLOGY.
A slut that rapes sweetly.
I remember a conversation about five summers ago when I sought to show my lady that my grasp of a certain concept was not quite like the grasp that the others had, that it was harder and softer (paradoxically) at the same time and quite the thing to be desired … to find at the foot of the bed, red, horny, and ready for the end … oh yeah! To find the source of All. It’s not hard. It’s now. Myself. Take it or leave it. That’s what IT says.
Thank you.
Now, the second art: PHILOSOPHY.
An irredeemable purveyor of anxious thought.
Someone who orders books, someone one cannot trust. Someone … that’s it.
A one.
A footstep in the hallway as one tries to sleep. A plan for the future all fallen to hell. A plague, a stylish nymph, a tribe of women slavering like hounds.
Fuck philosophy! Too many toads. I’d push her out the window, if I were Bukowski, but like him, I’d only have that devil HER crawl back again.
Suck the Triad: POETRY.
Demotion recollected in tranquility. Devolution tortured by its opposite. Demonstration of the lust for life that renders pointless the fangs of the omnipotent ONE.
My teeth want to bite but I’ve a calcium deficiency.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear~ T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
A prompt ending is preferable. But much of life persists, against our wishes. And what is a wish but a specter or phantasm of reason? At many levels reason fails. It is not at the level of the impersonal that such failure sends the person into an abyss of self-doubt, despair, and finally: the terror of dissolution. No. It is at the level of the personal, the part of us connected with this vibrating world of factuality and the dehydrating self-concern of others, that we finally see, with two eyes (and with infinite loathing), nothing but reflections of the hideous form that is desire.
If the above paragraph sounds out-dated and Romantic, it is because all that needs to be said has already been said – one needs only to listen. One can waste time teaching Bataille, the Situationist movement, the post-modern monsters who seek only to create more text for university classrooms, etc. (and we’ll have a Blast doing it!); but to do so is to ignore the fact that it’s all over. We are done. We have had done … with everything. The end of the story is this: there is no story, there is only the specter of a soul seeking salvation. And – dear God! – there is no such thing. Nothing at all.
The ignoble smile of a woman, which promises only future disappointment, is a far more bitter and organ-grinding poison to me than alcohol! I’d rather rot poisonously from inside, the gin coursing through my veins, than crumble alone in the darkness of a woman’s apathy. Her eyes do not appear! Whatever they were. I no longer remember the warmth of her gaze: only the harsh glare of her own personal – to me impersonal – light.
When one stands upon a hill of power, a point from which the world is observed and all is planned … When one stands such, it is hard to believe that the mind is finite. It is hard to imagine that humankind ever conceived of something so absurd as the Infinite. Damp cellars and dry brains seem more like it … a conglomeration of the human condition.
I remember an afternoon in Liverpool, fine ale pouring from casks beneath a well-worn counter. The stench of ages, and all that … But so what?
I remember a morning in New Orleans, fire under my feet and terror in my veins. The glory of dying youth!
I remember an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and eyes and infinite future and love and clandestine sex and prompt reciprocation of my emotions and a glorious revelation of shared ideals and promises and something that must be written and the power of a man and a woman contra naturam (speaking Latin as we went) and a sign and a signal and a whiff of life and lips and kisses on a subway platform not willing to say goodnight … I remember all this and die like a monster writhing in its own filth
... Though I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be beloved of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire,
What I see excellent in good, or fair,
Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.
Milton, Paradise Regained
Liberalism, in thought and life, is a virtue. The dim green mists of Merovingian or Carolingian spaces give way to the porcelain perfection of an English countryside, and finally to a clapboard puritanical hometown where everybody knows your name. To be recognized immediately for what you are (as Christ recognized Satan in Paradise Regained)rather than for Who you are, is to be dragged onto a cumbersome subway platform at 2:00 AM by some weirdo who needs a place to stay and a little swig of whatever you've got in your laptop bag. She demands a prose kinema, indeed. Sapphic charms and Attic graces notwithstanding, when there is snow on the ground and liquor in the pouch, it takes little effort to induce a confession of love. All who draw breath beneath this sickly sun desire love, and all who desire love fear death. Nothing novel about that! Once in the bluest of moons, however, we encounter a force that rends us, and forces a view of primordial notions unconnected to the personality. The peace of the materialist - for whom all emotion is but an outpouring of chemicals - gives way to the war of the idealist: for whom Life is a series of steps, on the way to a firm platform from which to address eternity. Only, there is no eternity, just as there is no "I". I used to think so. I used to pretend that I had something to say, a message for the world. I used to think that art would subdue idiocy; that idiocy would give up its chaotic secrets, and lend to art some unpredictable something that would permit originality, once again. Not hardly. Faulkner said it well, in his little Nobel Prize speech:
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
Over what, exactly? Over what will we prevail? I look about me and see no enemy but the deception of my own nature. Sartre was wrong: there IS such a thing as human nature. It is in our nature to selfishly draw others into our cocoon of comfort, where we feel all will be well, if only enough people would place their rubber stamp upon our decree of autonomy, and fall in line with our will. Everyone does this. Parents want children who will mirror them; men want women who will praise them to the stars ... and women want the same from men. The heroic life is a necessary myth. An enemy is necessary. To be liberal means to grant freedom of action to all, and to glory in the diversity of this egregious globe.
una salus victis nullam sperare salutem
~ Virgil
