Legalize Marijuana!

He just sort of smirks at me, well maybe half smirk, half ‘you-are-destroying-the-world’.

Okay, i admit, maybe i’m being a bit antagonistic.

Still the half “you’re crazy” / “you’ll kill us all” look.

Isn’t art the reflection of the values of a society!?! I insist he answer…

None can deny the correlations between the rise of atonality and post world war 2 social angst, the Greek love of forms reflected in sculpture.  What kind of art does a society that values bare bones efficiency deserve?  We have no use for art, and not that that’s a bad thing (have you heard of microsoft songsmith?).

He nods a bit now.  I must have hit a chord.

If art is dead, who will hold up the lantern and point toward a future for those pitiful few still clinging to beauty as a drowning man clings to a oar when his canoe sinks.  What will become of the artist?

At this he stares at me with the excitement  of a prisoner who really cant believe his freedom.

Artists never die, and nor does art, he says simply.  They just change hats.

“Wrong” he says sharply and grins.  “Climbing a mountain is much better.”

He wipes the sweat off his forehead and squirts some water in his mouth.  He turns and starts to walk again and says.  “The thing I love about mountains, is that there is no doubt when your objective is achieved.  Once you get to the top of a mountain, you have succeeded.  None of that artistic doubt shit.”

The mountain slopes gently here, not like before.  It is easier but we are tired.

“I mean, how could anyone write a book anyway.  There is no doubt that a book could always be better.  You could always tweek that one word to make a sentence truly spectacular, always can make it more spectacular.  When we get to the top of this mountain, we will have accomplished something.  Don’t you see how incredible that is?  We will be at the top!  There is no way we could climb higher!”

“There are always more mountains though,” I say but I don’t think he hears me.

My question is what will the new art be.  I think that, as an insider studying in a music conservatory, the state of what we think of as art and specifically music (as it is my specialty) is akin to a car running on fumes without hope of refueling, while us who desperatly love and depend on it get out of the car in increasing numbers and try to push.  I dont mean that in a negative way, it is just an observation.  What we think of as art, being defined in the disciplines of music, sculpture, literature, etc, seems to be increasingly denied by the premise of of our developing culture.  I have always believed that artist define culture, but it seems to me more and more that is it more of a dialogue and less of a definition.

My question is not about the value of music, or the potential for its longevity.  My question in the nature of art and its future. The foundation of art is innovation, but the innovations of the successful artist are not as a composer but as a marketer, a salesman, a technocrat.  They think of new ways to sell their art, new markets to export it to.  Yes there are many competitions and commissions available to the “serious” composers, and some with enormous remuneration attached.  But these do little to advance the creation of art as art and even more to further the degradation of the artist.  For we know what is expected of us to win, and we can choose (though not always conciously) to innovate and starve or conform and win from time to time.  And our winnings are like those of the compulsive slot machine player – it is enough to sustain our belief that the system works, it is enough to make the financiers believe they care about “culture,” about “the humanities”, a can of gasoline found by the road that takes our car another few miles towards its futility.
So my question is where can art go from here?  Can we radically redefine what art might mean?  Can the chairman of a board compose business deals like symphonies?  Can a stock broker direct his subsidiaries walking the fine line between prosperity/genius and bankruptcy/rubbish like a ballet dancer dancing the Rite?   Who can create the new art if not the movers of a culture, the cornerstones of its progress?    Every human desires to create, who is to delimit the boundaries of what is “artistic” and what is not?

there are just

a few drops

quietly

like voices that have forgotten their purpose

they flop – cautiously,

pensively

they bite thier lips – what is it that we cant remember that we might have forgotten?

ker-plop go the thoughts like bubbles at a parade

floating above the flowers and candy

offering a different kind of sweetness

splash go the drops, slapping pavement
and grass alike with their rejuvenated,

resurrected

curiosity

Why is the world-
they ask shrubs and rooftops

who is this watery being-
they ask oceans and sidewalks

ker-plippity-plop
they start to gain momentum and they ask each other

why not me?

they ask the graying sky and its inhabitants -
from where does your morality come?
Whom does your morality serve?
Why does your morality exist?

They climax

and it is maybe too soon

and the drops patter

off into a whisper

of mist hanging around

and none can tell

if

they’re maybe gone

or

were ever here

at

all

And a shout like the heart of a god breaking tears open the sky again

and the drops fall faster and larger
asking – why is living wrong?
asking – why is charity just?

asking – what kindness is there in giving what I have earned?

ker ploppitty plop say the drops to forests and ponchos

to star gazers and priests and night shift gas station attendants

ker plottpitty plop plop

they ask the summits of mountains and the homeless people huddled under bus stops

why am i not to love my life-

why am i to be secretly ashamed of successes,

why am i to scrape a living off scraps from God’s table?

why can I not shape the world myself-

they demand the salty sacred air that rushes to great them on their perilous plippity plip plopping.

Give me where to stand, they bellow as one mighty clap of the hooves of beasts of burden no longer, and I will move the earth they crash into millions of lifetimes and furrowed brows and light up the darkening sky again and again while the plastic people gaze out their windows, awed by the power, but afraid of the wetness
stirred by the sacrifice of these unwilling accomplices
stayed by the shelter they themselves had cast

and from deluge, to patter, to drippity drop ker ploppity plop they fall

slower and softer,

like the whispered laments at the funeral of a dictator

like a wave from a loved one you may or may not see again,

ker plop say the steady, unstateable power

sleeping in a million muscles waiting to be stretched

plip plop
and the clouds are passing,

so think the kings and cowards

living on the strength of others

plop – laughs the drops

there will be no rainbow.

“These stones are burdens.”  My pastor says.  She pauses and dramtically looks over the water.  The trees whisper about something or other far above me.  “VRROOOOOM” says a motor boat far away.  “Cast them into the lake,” her voice is gentle and sincere. 

You fool, I think, Don’t you realize how beautiful these stones are.  She sits down sincerely and people shuffle into line.  “Ker-plink,” says the first stone.  Its ripples spread out like Jewish people after a Babylonian invasion and eventually crash into a beach somewhere in mexico.

They keep us from floating into the sky. They keep us out of heaven.

There are many “Ker-plinks” now.  My sister doesn’t move though, nor does my friend the writer.

“Lay my burden down – My burden is all I have.” My sister whispers to me.  Her fist is clenched.  “After this do we get to cut off our feet as well.” 

“Why don’t we glue ours to our foreheads,” I say to her.  “Everyone can see them and congratulate us.”  I whisper back.  She has to bite down on her lips to keep from laughing. 

“Or,” she snorts a bit, “we could find a bunch more stones lying around and make a mosaic.”  The people sitting next to us glance over in disapproval. 

A loud chuckle escapes my lips and I cover my mouth and then  look around, unabashed. 

I will never be rid of it, I think.

“Never,” my sister says under her breath.

“Ker-plink” says my shiny black stone as it begins its peacefull descent to the bottom of the lake.

God damn peer pressure.

Their eyes burn me on my walk of shame – or it is triumph that I feel.

But where are all the palm leaves?

“You!”  The pastor’s eyes are angry and sincere. “You haven’t set your burden down.”  She glares harder.  “Set your god damn burden down”

Now painting – that is a worthy “art”.  None of that development nonsense, no plot lines or recapitulating like its lesser cousins.

Just beauty.

Colors work together – they compliment or clash or fight and convey but they don’t try to narrate, to explain.  They just present.

I am.

Painting need not posit the existence of some hypothetical “time” nor justify its existence with some foolish motivic recurrence.  It just colors the light and leaves well enough alone.

But looking at art is of course more difficult that creating it.  How I tire of the phrase, “My kindergartener could have finger painted that.”

People should be arrested for scoffing at art they presume to understand – they should be put into art sensitivity class and taught respect for that which is incomprehensible.

The not-yet-understood is the greatest gift the Gods ever gave us.

Perhaps In the twentieth century prejudice against the new will eclipse prejudice against the misunderstood, both between people and thier creations, as the greatest moral transgression plaguing the world.

People will burn Mondrian – calling him pointless, cold, juvenile.

People will sacrifice those few artists who have an honest passion for inquiry and risk for safer, nicer smelling, paint-by-numbers dreck.

People will canonize such trivialities such as the “modern” orchestra, the “post-modern” movement, “futurist” architecture, while never noticing the pioneers of human discovery have abandoned their posts fortifying the cornerstone fortresses that have defined “art” for centuries.  The pioneers of human decency have all moved on to frontiers no one can see but them. The pioneers of human existence will stage rescue missions to museums and come out with the art that will save our drowning civilization tucked under their arms and rolled up in their pant legs.

They will jump into windowless vans and speed away before the torch-bearing mobs arrive.  They will be called “thieves” and “terrorists” and they will stash this worthless art in basements and attics and maybe smuggle it to Canada where those loyal to what it means to be human will rally and burn down the perfect buildings of public welfare and the pristine mausoleums of the artistic avant-garde.

“This is” will be their rally cry, and they will win.

While attending the lecture on what it means to be a good person, my humble reader, seated in the third row, wearing a green pull over sweater and khaki pants, who had a 16 oz porterhouse for dinner, and has been dating the brunette in the seat next to him for several years,  asks, “what does it mean to be a philosopher.”  As a response the furious Piere LeGlace raves:

“Philosophers!  They will choose a golden box over a rusty knife every time.  Rather be a thief who takes the knife and then the box from the robe of the philosopher.”

“The philosopher will talk loudly of the sun and the moon and the mountains and will engrave a world of red pleasure with his deafening chisel.  The thief will write nothing, but rather bleed words.  They will seep silently out of his dreaming skull and pollute the world with their weightless evil.

“The philosopher will revise his prose, weigh it down and destroy it.  The thief will offer his blood as dreams and stars and will be ridiculed for it.  The philosopher will discover a thousands ass’ and keep them in his backyard for the whole world to gaze at and commend him for his husbandry.  The thief will steal a single ass and ride him to his own execution.

“The  Philosopher fears words he doesn’t know and would rather talk with broken off pieces of his body.  If he comes across a word he has not met before he will eat it and pass it through his intestines before daring approach it, or conversing with it.  After digestion, however, he will refer to it as a lifetime acquaintance and take it with him everywhere.”

Too long has art been enslaved with an austere separateness.    Whether you realize it or not, art happens inside of you.  Your reaction to it is as much of the experience as whatever may have caused the reaction. 

Perhaps I should just become a solipsist, then things would be much easier. 

The only way to teach anyone anything, whispers my teacher, is with a cattle prod.  If you tell, ears will close, if you pull, hands will claw the passing earth in desperation, if you push, people will topple and skin their knees.

I pity authors.  Trying to tame the wilds beasts that are words is like trying to dry sand with a hair dryer between waves.  “Whoosh” they say.  “Wouldn’t you be better off with a nice cozy job”  They say.

Words are never the same twice.  Words are dynamic, evolving, growing.  Take the word good. To Aristotle, good is a statue – an unmovable, untenable obelisk, distant, austere.  It can be seen, knelt before, offered to.  Our good is closer to “proper,” to “comfortable” to “nice-smelling”

Their meaning has shifted like the rising tide – slow, constant and deadly to the unobservant.  Words of course have no inherent meaning.  Only the pale shadows we tape to them.  What shall we do when the tape gets old and breaks and a million concepts swirl around the ocean like bait for sharks? 

Now, good is the wind blowing our hair lovingly, filling the sails of our warships, carrying away the flatulence of our neighbors.  Good is a measuring stick – you must be this happy to be alive, if not, please step into this line for prozak, raise your hand for paxil. 

Good and Evil have become words of marketing.  They are words of justification – why we do what we do.   Don’t look at the eclipse – that’s bad.  Don’t question the government, the government is good.  Depression is bad.  Discomfort is bad.  Sunshine is good! Cut flowers wrapped in green tissue paper with a card that says “Be my valentine”, are good!  A college degree is good!  There is so much good in the world! Hurray!