Dear Art, I Am Having Trouble Going...
Hey, don't worry, the following isn't a poem, isn't trying to BE a poem, or wouldn't know a poem if it crawled from its bowels growling, "I will arise and go nowwwww." So sit back and relax. Smoke em if you got em.
I called the police on the police last night. I was so so tired, and about to shut my whole being off when...one of those effing harrassing HELLicopters came down over the house and started circling the block (of which we are apparently in the center). They circled for over a half an hour until after 1 a.m. I went outside in my pajamas all squinty eyed and mad as haides. They beamed their light on me flipping them off. I think it flustered them because they circled more tightly around the property and beamed the light at me (hard!) and all over the pool area again and again, almost in a frantic kind of way. So I went inside and called the police. It didn't matter of course. The lady who talked down to me was too calm about it. Said some felon was running around my neighborhood with a gun or something. Armed, I think she said, or dangerous, or both. I said, “That may BE, but do they have to shine their lights in my yard!” (like, “c’mon maaaaan”). I couldn't sleep for hours after, so I read the rest of my uncomfortable and bizarre novel by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, yes, it's been months). It wasn’t satisfying. First whole book of fiction I’ve actually finsihed in a long time. What now? Back to the Dr. Bronners bottle.
Today I am struggling to get through student essay evaluations, while trying to keep my guests happy. We have a full house at Casa and I'm helping everyone off and on with random needs. Folks want to chat, stand in the sun and chat, drop names and titles of books and more names and chat, and there are the telephone calls. Nonstop. There's no room for uninterrupted concentration. I want to tell all the kids, you are fine. Don’t let them ef you up with details. Read a lot. What do you want? What will you do with your dreams? What do you care about? Know what you care about. Care about something, someone, some place! And I want to burn all my books of poetry.
I saw the movie Art School Confidential. I have been waiting for months for this movie to come out on DVD so I could get it in the mail from Netflix. I can’t tell you whether it sucked or rocked. I’m still on the fence about it. I mean, John Malkovich as a failed artist cum art teacher working in an urban legend of a deteriorating art institute in the middle of a ghetto where a serial strangler is on the loose? C’mon, it works. It was wonderful too see art portrayed as its all so vague and stupefying self. I know I wanted to be made fun of. I wanted everyone to be made fun of, but harder than they did it. Not to say the movie doesn’t make fun of art. It’s not the kind of fun making though that makes you double over in laughter-pain, but more like fidget in your chair and worry about your entire life—has it all been an effing waste?
What do you write when you realize you aren't a writer? After years and years and years of loving it and doing it and loving the moment you do it? No matter how hard you love language, how deeply, how interested you are in it...if you are not good at it, you should quit. Who can keep up with all the intellectual mumbo jumbo frustrating the digital miles between minds?
Art is so crazily tempting and gorgeous and arguable. Art on the page, canvas, chickenwire, whatever! I say to myself, You. You should do something else. What if you don't have something to say? Something to add? Something earth shatteringly good? What are you doing but cluttering the landscape with nonsense? That's how I feel right now. Increasingly as the days drag on. This is clutter. These words are clutter. How long have I felt this way? Since the 1600’s? (I can’t seem to stop though!)All these years and I still can't quit you.
I keep trying to get out of it, and it keeps coming back. The hunger, the ego, the pursuably disparate matrix. The pursuit is something isn’t it? For what? I keep trying toward it, and yet I fall back here. Every day I get closer though. I buy an online subscription to a streaming video game website. I play games. I blow off friends. I don’t go out, but I don’t go in either. I smoke two entire cigarettes before I move from my chair toward the kitchen to refresh my coffee, get sidetracked in the house and start doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, the bathroom, reorganizing the CD’s in the TV cabinet. I read the news for two hours, and then go in the house and watch it on the TV. I hate TV. I hate myself for watching it. I get up and check the mail. Maybe a rejection slip. Good, I tell myself, this helps. Hopefully, I’ll stop making empty threats soon, and will actually jump off that ledge into a total mundanity of insanity. In that loveless place where pulling weeds becomes a holy act—listening to the neighbor drone on about his dead chickens—
yelling at kids tagging your wall and pissing on your trash cans—calling the cops on the cops because, damnitt, you are just not going to take it anymore!
Tolstoy said: “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”
What? Tolstoy is dead too, lest I forget.
The funniest thing I read today was an article in Harpers (in my reading sanctuary, known to some as "the shitter" [people are so creative, i love them])--anyway, some guy actually delivered a paper on how to determine the number of prayer times and how to find the correct direction to pray (toward Mecca) from space. An excerpt: "As trips to space become commonplace, human civilization will no longer be tied to the surface of the earth. But Muslims, wherever they are, whether on earth or in space--are bound by duty to perform the obligations of worship." It goes on to speak in psuedo-mathematical and semi-technical terms about how, even though you are approximately some millions of miles away from earth, you don't have to increase the number of times you pray. 5 will suffice. Allah's creation is ordered. "A user-friendly portable Muslims in Space calculator could determine the direction of [The Rock] [in space]." What an excellent art installation THAT would be!! A SUPER-USER FRIENDLY PORTABLE MUSLIM PRAYER DIRECTION FROM SPACE CALCULATOR!
Art is an effing accident. And by that I do mean, act of god.
I called the police on the police last night. I was so so tired, and about to shut my whole being off when...one of those effing harrassing HELLicopters came down over the house and started circling the block (of which we are apparently in the center). They circled for over a half an hour until after 1 a.m. I went outside in my pajamas all squinty eyed and mad as haides. They beamed their light on me flipping them off. I think it flustered them because they circled more tightly around the property and beamed the light at me (hard!) and all over the pool area again and again, almost in a frantic kind of way. So I went inside and called the police. It didn't matter of course. The lady who talked down to me was too calm about it. Said some felon was running around my neighborhood with a gun or something. Armed, I think she said, or dangerous, or both. I said, “That may BE, but do they have to shine their lights in my yard!” (like, “c’mon maaaaan”). I couldn't sleep for hours after, so I read the rest of my uncomfortable and bizarre novel by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, yes, it's been months). It wasn’t satisfying. First whole book of fiction I’ve actually finsihed in a long time. What now? Back to the Dr. Bronners bottle.
Today I am struggling to get through student essay evaluations, while trying to keep my guests happy. We have a full house at Casa and I'm helping everyone off and on with random needs. Folks want to chat, stand in the sun and chat, drop names and titles of books and more names and chat, and there are the telephone calls. Nonstop. There's no room for uninterrupted concentration. I want to tell all the kids, you are fine. Don’t let them ef you up with details. Read a lot. What do you want? What will you do with your dreams? What do you care about? Know what you care about. Care about something, someone, some place! And I want to burn all my books of poetry.
I saw the movie Art School Confidential. I have been waiting for months for this movie to come out on DVD so I could get it in the mail from Netflix. I can’t tell you whether it sucked or rocked. I’m still on the fence about it. I mean, John Malkovich as a failed artist cum art teacher working in an urban legend of a deteriorating art institute in the middle of a ghetto where a serial strangler is on the loose? C’mon, it works. It was wonderful too see art portrayed as its all so vague and stupefying self. I know I wanted to be made fun of. I wanted everyone to be made fun of, but harder than they did it. Not to say the movie doesn’t make fun of art. It’s not the kind of fun making though that makes you double over in laughter-pain, but more like fidget in your chair and worry about your entire life—has it all been an effing waste?
What do you write when you realize you aren't a writer? After years and years and years of loving it and doing it and loving the moment you do it? No matter how hard you love language, how deeply, how interested you are in it...if you are not good at it, you should quit. Who can keep up with all the intellectual mumbo jumbo frustrating the digital miles between minds?
Art is so crazily tempting and gorgeous and arguable. Art on the page, canvas, chickenwire, whatever! I say to myself, You. You should do something else. What if you don't have something to say? Something to add? Something earth shatteringly good? What are you doing but cluttering the landscape with nonsense? That's how I feel right now. Increasingly as the days drag on. This is clutter. These words are clutter. How long have I felt this way? Since the 1600’s? (I can’t seem to stop though!)All these years and I still can't quit you.
I keep trying to get out of it, and it keeps coming back. The hunger, the ego, the pursuably disparate matrix. The pursuit is something isn’t it? For what? I keep trying toward it, and yet I fall back here. Every day I get closer though. I buy an online subscription to a streaming video game website. I play games. I blow off friends. I don’t go out, but I don’t go in either. I smoke two entire cigarettes before I move from my chair toward the kitchen to refresh my coffee, get sidetracked in the house and start doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, the bathroom, reorganizing the CD’s in the TV cabinet. I read the news for two hours, and then go in the house and watch it on the TV. I hate TV. I hate myself for watching it. I get up and check the mail. Maybe a rejection slip. Good, I tell myself, this helps. Hopefully, I’ll stop making empty threats soon, and will actually jump off that ledge into a total mundanity of insanity. In that loveless place where pulling weeds becomes a holy act—listening to the neighbor drone on about his dead chickens—
yelling at kids tagging your wall and pissing on your trash cans—calling the cops on the cops because, damnitt, you are just not going to take it anymore!
Tolstoy said: “Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”
What? Tolstoy is dead too, lest I forget.
The funniest thing I read today was an article in Harpers (in my reading sanctuary, known to some as "the shitter" [people are so creative, i love them])--anyway, some guy actually delivered a paper on how to determine the number of prayer times and how to find the correct direction to pray (toward Mecca) from space. An excerpt: "As trips to space become commonplace, human civilization will no longer be tied to the surface of the earth. But Muslims, wherever they are, whether on earth or in space--are bound by duty to perform the obligations of worship." It goes on to speak in psuedo-mathematical and semi-technical terms about how, even though you are approximately some millions of miles away from earth, you don't have to increase the number of times you pray. 5 will suffice. Allah's creation is ordered. "A user-friendly portable Muslims in Space calculator could determine the direction of [The Rock] [in space]." What an excellent art installation THAT would be!! A SUPER-USER FRIENDLY PORTABLE MUSLIM PRAYER DIRECTION FROM SPACE CALCULATOR!
Art is an effing accident. And by that I do mean, act of god.
posted by name at 3:58:00 PM
6 Comments:
This is big and I have this small little box to write in, in courier new, and I know before writing this comment that this—this box, this font, these words–will be inadequate. Appropriate perhaps in a post-modern way, but embarassing because I will spell words wrong here and will not bother to "post my post into Word" and spell check. I would like to take that phrase and shoot it into the past fifty years and call it art. What I really want to say is, "Write your poems, Love." That is not a command. It is more a statement whispered with my lips up close to your lips, my tounge waiting to be in your mouth.
Hey, that sounds private! You.
woo-hoo. this is getting spicy!
Sommer, turn around.
Sommer, come take pictures ;)
Kristen?! Stop. (it's so funny, the word verification letters I have to type in to post this are: jewzbb. Cool word)
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