"Post-modernism is mouse on stilts offering you the chance to buy a used World War I tank. When you buy it and climb inside it for the first time, you realize it's made of bread."
We wonder sometimes if it would make sense to write this blog on anything but an actual computer keyboard. It's the lexical equivalent of using something other than a hammer and chisel to kill a vampire. Altering your state alters your perspective. What if we typed just on a BlackBerry (which we don't have)? What if we just wrote and drew everything on an iPad touchscreen (which, again, we don't have). Modern humans fight the self-canceling advantage of rapid typing on a daily basis. We create, inhabit, and interpret what we're hammering out in tandem, and that's going to eventually be an issue. The QWERTY keyboard was invented on typewriters to slow down typing speed so the hammers wouldn't jam. What are we missing when our fingers start moving faster than our brains and our words move faster than human logic?
Paradise Lost by John Milton is the greatest fucking thing ever written down on paper. The guy was blind and he had to dictate it to somebody (his daughter? I don't recall right at this second, but that sounds right). The words -- lyrics, really -- were hypnotically recited by a man without vision, spoken, seen in the mind's eye of the scribe, and put to the page. Imagine the trust and the confidence required on both sides for this to work. Every line inhabited the mind, the spoken voice, and page at the same time while it was being written. And it came out slowly. It came out slowly because it had to be imagined up first. The very process of writing this epic poem was art. How could it not be?
There will never be anything like it ever again. A blind man reciting his interpretation of the Fall of Eden in verse to another person of the course of many years. Count the variables in that sentence. Most importantly of all, is the question of "For whom?" Milton answers this plainly: to justify the ways of God to men. This is a thing that could never exist in our current modern age. It would be clouded, laughed off, ignored, degraded, and escaped. The identity of its writer would be questioned. Its purpose would be questioned. Art can't stand on one leg.
Correct art has to exist in obscurity. It's not a required to be a mystery. It's best when it possesses ambiguity. It needn't be deliberately complex, but it wins points if it makes somebody over-think. Conscious deliberation is difficult to capture at 125 words per minute.
What if a writer existed as a living myth? What if the lines between what was written and created became blurred with what was lived in reality? What if the stories of non-fiction were as deliberately planned as those on the page? What if the method wasn't really madness? It's no longer a story that you inhabit, it then begins to inhabit you. Always a step ahead. Would anybody even bother to examine the truth? Would the writer, the artist care? Is that part of the plan?
Post-modernism is retarded. Post-modernism is mouse on stilts offering you the chance to buy a used World War I tank. When you buy it and climb inside it for the first time, you realize it's made of bread. There's no reason. It exists so the artist can collect enough money so he or she can buy a telescope. The telescope can be pointed in any direction and the artist gets the lulz every time they look through it. That's not art. That's sticking your dick in tube of your roommates toothpaste.
The purpose of art is to incite spirited conversation that eventually matriculates into luminous thoughts. Count the variables in that sentence. Imagine you stare at a Monet for days or years. You never tell anybody that you stared at that painting for as long as you did, that's something you keep inside. Decades later, you still don't get it, but you take a nap in the sun, call your grandson, and drink a bottle of local beer. Monet doesn't win, but he's very glad that you have.
We'll never tell you where we're going.
(click to embiggen)
-- Ghost Little
on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF
No comments:
Post a Comment