2002 Reminder Art
Remind me of what I want to be. No more illustrative descriptions of what is wrong.
I want to be a cricket forever. Remembering that brain chill in those quick moments when you realize death and that you end. It goes from the back, to the front.
Remembering the ubiquity of your situations; during the vast majority of your life you are experiencing the exact sensations, feelings and thoughts that the vast majority of other people have felt in the same place as you.
Remembering that there is a part of your brain whose sole purpose is to self destruct and to recede from life.
Remembering again, that you really will die.
Feeling in general is a pleasure. Smile when you pee. But some lovely things will be gone forever. Big pieces of me. It is so merry Christmas today.
Poets who have nothing to say but only things to write should be shot and gutted. Or at the very least ignored. Poetic Description is no better than a television advertisement for life insurance or a psychological medication, full of sentimental appeals and promises of peace and happiness if you do things just this way. Or it is used to describe suffering and pain, and if this comes from a white person’s mouth, this is usually a bunch of laughable shit. Or we preach to the choir. You’d think if poetry was any good it could convince Rush Limbaugh of the benefits of a semi-socialist economy. But it can’t. Or it’s a bunch of disjointed stream-of-consciousness crap that a three-year-old could do but didn’t. Father of the fog eating berries in buttons under cowardly crippled leaves of dew and thundering howls of nonsensical mouth scribbles, utterance of most futile futility, sucking slurping – this part, northward, fellowship shoot-outs under siege of clouds and rain. AKA bullshit. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re going to read poetry you should have something useful to say – and yes beauty can be useful, but so can a television commercial and toilet paper. I don’t care about your personal thoughts or your clever reactions and your super-sexy responses to the shit life threw your way. If people aren’t laughing or pissed or dead quiet when you’re done reading, you’re just masturbating with your mouth. Clapping is a bunch of shit. Poetry needs an enema. Art needs an enema. I probably need an enema. Or wait, this shit isn’t about change, my fault, my misunderstanding, this shit is about escape. That’s why Art is listed next to Entertainment. Sorry, wrong meeting.
What I’m saying is, the arts are suffering in America. And only partly because a lot of the art sucks. And only partly because of the structure and history of our culture. I think it’s mainly because of me, I haven’t been supportive enough. We’re almost out of oxygen. Those silly cyanobacteria. The real reason art has been sucking in America is because that everyone has forgotten that the original and only reason and purpose of art has been and is to humiliate people in the sense of humility and in more artistic terms to remind them that they suck, or their lives suck, or that something sucks. But we need not be afraid of this suck, for this suck empties us of our over bloated egos and pumps all of it back into external things, into a sculpture, or a movement, or a sound – art is there to externalize inner beauties, because that shit don’t belong in there, and as a matter of fact it never really was there, you see art is there to distract us from our imperfections, which are really who we are since all individuality, identity and self are really only the deviations from the ideal perfect norm which if ever actually achieved in any sense would freeze in icy non-existence because don’t you know that the only time you need to be awake is when you’re doing something, and the only time you need to do anything is because something is not perfect, so when the world is perfect you sleep, and if anything was perfect you would be asleep to it, and it would therefore be invisible, and timeless. And since we don’t see these things, and because we are so embarrassed of the sheer ugliness and death and decay of the reality of our bodies and who we are, we pay a lot of attention to ourselves and don’t look outside so much and we forget, we forget, we forget that the human animal is only beautiful when looked at in the context of the canopy of life, the externality – and so art distracts us from ourselves by making the invisible, perfect and timeless things for tiny little moments and for long lasting decades – visible, powerfully in front of us, and we remember how stupid and useless we really are, but not in the introverted sense as normal, but in the sense of how stupid and useless a leaf may be for raking a lawn.
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