Revving the Engine

Rip Van Winkle slept in the mountains for twenty years.  As he slept, he had many strange dreams, wherein ghostly sailors sent heavy bowling balls crashing into gargantuan pins.  The symbolic meaning of this dream is not well understood, but it sounds mostly entertaining.

The author of this blog slept for sixty two days, which is not as impressive, though arguably just as worrisome for his friends and loved ones.  It's certainly shy of the record, and he likely will not make another attempt.

This blogger also had many strange dreams.  Some were pleasant, and some were sad, but all hinted at a life better lived awake.

He dreamt that he flew for thousands of miles to the heart of the country, to reunite with family and say goodbye to one who will be greatly missed.  It was a beautiful week of spring weather and thriving nature, set against the backdrop of a shimmering blue lake and populated by weirdly courageous deer.

He dreamt of meeting a beautiful girl, who brightened his days and lent hope to his future, and then disappeared into the mist (where she was possibly eaten by a tiger).  He brooded a while on a windswept mountaintop, then came back down to write some poems.

He dreamt that he was back at school, with graduation day fast approaching.  Anticipation for summer was high in the air, and it was all that he could do to keep everyone from fleeing for sunshine and neglecting their studies.  Also there was a talent show, and this one girl played the drums like a maniac.

He dreamt that he saw a great city, where people dressed in strange costumes and roamed the streets in search of pocky, which is strange because pocky isn't found in the streets.  The people welcomed him as one of their own, but soon ignored him, consumed as they were with an all-encompassing passion for stale, imported chocolate.

He also had a really awesome dream where he could slide down the interstate for miles upon miles on some sort of rocket sled.  Such a machine would likely kill at least sixty per cent of its users, yet it is a crime against the human spirit that it has not been invented.

All of this he dreamed, and when he awoke much around him had changed.  Not very much, but much.  Osama bin Ladin is dead now, and that probably makes a difference.  Yet the world still turns around much as it always has, in spite of certain predictions to the contrary.  The sleeper has awoken, and it's time to get things turning again.

____________

OK, I wasn't really sleeping.  Well, I was, but only for about eight to ten hours of each of those sixty two days.  There isn't really a good reason that I wasn't blogging, except that I hadn't written very much and didn't really have anything to say.  Hopefully, that changes this week.

The plan is to have the final, chilling installment of The Wolf of Albright completed this Thursday, thus bringing an end to my experiment with the horror genre.  Once again, I apologize if it isn't very scary!  We're all learning something here.

After that, I've got another batch of my poetical output to unleash on the world, thereby raising everyone's sadly contemplative quotient by at least three per cent.  It's important to have goals.

Lastly, a word about Memorial Day.  I'm not sure how it keeps sneaking up on me, but it seems like as good a day as any for a cheeseburger.  I have a single priority for the day: produce and consume a cheeseburger.  I suggest you do the same, within the limits of your own dietary regulations and habits.

Adventures in Modern Art

People generally like art, if their consumption of aesthetic objects is any indication.  Artists of many traditions from all over the world have spent many centuries crafting images depicting the beauty of nature and the human form, and classical masterpieces remain the gold standard of virtuosity.  But for many, the landscape of modern art is often a strange and confusing place, populated by statues that look like melting rock formations and portraits that look like paint shop accidents.  To some people, it's art with an asterisk, requiring footnotes to be fully understood and appreciated.  And who's got time to do the research necessary to fully appreciate the nuances and complexities of a woman with eyes on the same side of her face?

Well, I don't know about you, but I love asterisks*.  And though the extent of my knowledge is not exactly omniscient, I have a deep intellectual affection for the goals, methods, and theories of modern art.  Modern art, by the way, is not merely a synonym for contemporary of 20th century art; it's a distinct mode of creativity that emphasizes experimentation and a search for new symbolic languages.  It's not the only way of doing art in the modern era, and it exists alongside both traditional methods and postmodern art (more on that later), but it is for my money the most interesting and fun to experience and enjoy. 

*Love 'em!

So, with a recent visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I decided to share my love of modern art with you (whoever you are).  Here is an abbreviated guided tour of some of my favorite pieces within the walls of MOMA, with commentary and fuzzy reproductions from my horrible, horrible camera.  Do not be afraid of the weirdness.
_________________

The work of Henri Matisse demonstrates that modern art, as a whole, is not necessarily beyond comprehension: although it uses some experimental techniques with color to create a more engaging image, this really is nothing more than a still life of flowers.  I think.  I may be missing something (it happens a lot with this sort of art). 

Georges Braque was a cubist painter, and nobody knows it, because the word "cubism" is linked to Pablo Picasso in the public mind by some sort of insidious Pavlovian mechanism, even though Braque had as much to do with developing the style as Picasso did.  This painting is also essentially a still life, this time of a violin: the only difference is that, through the magic of cubism, we can see all sides of the violin at once.  Maybe you never wanted to see all sides of a violin at once, but now you have, and you have to admit it's kind of cool.

Speaking of Picasso, I have no idea what's going on in this picture, apart from an apparently deliberate attempt to drive the viewer insane with its impossible angles and that large lobe-thing coming from the blue woman's pelvis.  Kudos to anyone who can tell me what the hell that thing is, because it's creeping me out.

This is a painting by Diego Rivera, husband of Frida Kahlo and portrayer of Latin American working people, as rendered in broad colors and prominent geometric shapes.  That basket looks incredibly heavy; heavier, I imagine, than if the scene had been painted more realistically.  As for the fruits in the basket, they look delicious.

George Orwell once wrote, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."  Witness now two fleshy, irregularly shaped objects spurting tiny streams of blood.  That faint humanoid shadow is apparently my reflection, and you should ignore it, unless you want to call it my first ever collaboration with Salvador Dalí.

 Most of Joan Miró's work looks busier than this, with lots of distorted shapes and animals running around in an attempt to disturb the bourgeoisie and their superficial lifestyles.  Here, he seems to be in a more relaxed mood, or at least that beady-eyed moon does.  Paintings like this are more about shape than content, which is good because I have no idea how to explain this content.  But I love Miró's shapes all the same.

Jackson Pollock is best known for "drip paintings," complete abstractions based on seemingly random paint splotches.  Here we see that there was more to the artist than that, as this piece clearly contains some images that sort of look like things.  There's some sort of secret code scrawled in the center rectangle, which if I had to guess translates into nothing particularly important.

This sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, is one of the most famous and influential artworks of the 20th century.  Actually, it isn't, because this sculpture is not the original Fountain.  It's just a urinal.  The original Fountain is lost forever, because it too was just a urinal, and was probably thrown into the garbage once it was finished being scandalous.

Duchamp represents a type of art called Dada, which has been called the first postmodern art movement, because its central purpose was to remind museum-goers that everything they saw hanging reverently on the wall was bullshit.  And really it is, but so's everything else.  Let's look at more art.

MOMA has a room permanently dedicated to the art of Clyfford Still, presumably because he lived and worked in the Bay Area.  Most of the paintings in this room are very large and look like this, and are principally about color rather than shape.  Don't ask me how I decided that this one was my favorite; when all you have to go on is color, taste becomes inexplicable.

This painting by Robert Rauschenberg is an example of pop art, which uses elements of popular art in a "fine art" context for the sake of driving art critics crazy.  It's almost impossible to see in this picture, but embedded under the paint in this rather large multimedia collage are clippings from newspaper articles and funny pages.  Most of the comics are really obscure, but I'm fairly sure I found a few panels of Gasoline Alley.

Sometimes, an object is art because it is beautiful.  Sometimes, it's art just because the artist says it is (see Duchamp's work for more on that).  In the case, I was led to understand that this sculpture by Jackie Winsor, a complicated and impractical collection of sticks and yarn balls, is art because it was really, really hard to make.  And yes, I imagine that it was.

Janine Antoni made two identical busts of herself: one of chocolate, the other of soap.  She then deformed them both, licking the surface of the chocolate one with her own tongue, lathering the soap one in order to smooth out its features, in a commentary on the perceived dual nature of women in contemporary culture.  I think she could have gone a step further in switching the processes, but I guess nobody wants to lick soap, even if it is for the sake of art.

This is Robert Gober's pile of newspapers from 1992.  If you lean in closely, you can read articles about Bill Clinton being confronted by anti-abortion protesters.  This is the sort of the thing that history majors like me are intrigued by, though possibly not in the way that Gober intended.

There's actually a whole series of these on a wall in the gallery hosting works by Tobi Wong, a running commentary on gender relations in close quarters.  It's one thing to talk academically about how men and women interact in terms of power dynamics and expectations: the brilliance of modern art is in showing, rather than telling.  It's also in the production of insanely awesome novelty items like socially conscious His and Hers towels, which instantly become kitsch the moment someone has the bright idea to sell them.

This is a picture of a computer monitor, which shows footage from a robotic security camera hanging above the museum lobby.  Installed by Marie Sester and part of a larger exhibit on voyeurism, the robot shines a spotlight on the lobby floor and follows randomly selected individuals as they move about the room (or, if the viewer prefers, a target can be examined manually).  It's hard to see it here, but on this particular day the camera had a rather interesting subject: a couple stood in the lobby for hours, making out incessantly as fellow patrons wondered whether they were being punked.  There's no telling what the surveillance robot thought, but I can imagine the spotlight fell on them multiple times.

WFJ Book Club #6: Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

I imagine that most ordinary people do not miss the Cold War, particularly those who lived through it.  There's plenty of nostalgia for the idyllic 50s, the revolutionary 60s, the celebratory 70s; even the grimy, soulless 80's.  But I'm fairly certain there'd be even more nostalgia if not for the constant, invisible threat of fiery nuclear death.  Whatever the comforting symmetries of a bipolar world of super powers and proxy wars, the fact that it could all be brought down to distressingly symmetrical annihilation in about forty minutes is not the sort of thing most people dwell upon fondly.

It takes a special sort of mind to recall the Cold War as a joyous time; or maybe just a special sort of personality.  If there's one person who really enjoyed himself in the midst of a clash between two nuclear-armed alliances, living for the cause of one without fearing reprisal from the other, it must have been Che Guevara.  In his eyes, the Earth of the last century was the setting of a great adventure, and he had the honor of being one of its greatest heroes.  In his eyes, the transformation of not only the world's political system, but the common culture of humanity, was an achievable goal.  In his eyes, nuclear war was a small price to pay for the triumph of a beautiful idea.

It's often beyond our power to understand, but the Cold War was not merely a battle between two entrenched political ideologies.  There was another dimension to the conflict: between revolution and the status quo.  Politically, the Cold War ended dramatically in favor of the United States and its allies, but in the course of the century the status quo that those countries defended came mercilessly unraveled.  For the most part, this change was undirected, and brought the world a collection of petty monarchies and dictatorships.  But underneath all this was a force pushing for a unified, worldwide, and socialist revolution that would change the fate of humanity for the better.  Che was a part of that force, by his own intention, and if anyone could have made it happen it could have been him.  Unfortunately for him, in most cases it was the forces of chaos that prevailed.

Jon Lee Anderson, the author of the book I had the pleasure of reading, is a lucky biographer: the kind who has the opportunity of writing about a fantastic subject, a public figure with extensive documentation who nonetheless defies easy categorization.  Che embodies that sort of figure very well; in fact, he does it better than any one person really should be able to.  It may not be settled in the record whether Che was a good guy or a bad guy, but I gathered the distinct impression that he must have been one or the other - and that is peculiar.  Heroes and villains are constructions of fiction, defined completely by their motivations: actual human beings tend to be indecisive, and vacillate from one opinion to another.  To write about a real person as synchronized with a cause as Che Guevara must feel in parts like writing a novel.

It's worth remembering that he died a thoroughly unpleasant death, but up until the end of his life Che seemed to exist in a state that I can only interpret as joy.  He wasn't tormented or held back by demons from his past: such things were inconveniences at the most.  From the moment he could move about independently, he hurtled effortlessly into the future.  And unlike most restless youths, Che found an ideology that he could believe in total, and followed it into a life of adventure.  The philosopher Sartre reportedly called Che "the most complete human being of [the] age," and if that means anything, then it certainly means it was a fine thing to be Che.

Che's absolute belief in Marxism and his remarkable degree of self-purpose are twin pillars holding up what might seem to be an impossible personality: I've never met anyone in real life as focused, disciplined, and still as idealistic as Che reportedly was.  Of course he had his rascally, irreverent side, a trait common to many young men in the world.  Discovering someone's youthful excesses, or their enduring taste for all things bawdy, usually tends to make that person more relatable and human, contrasting with a more mature, public persona.  But in Che's case, the overriding impression is that it was all the same to him.  I don't think his private life contained a single major embarrassment for him, at least in the sense of causing any intrinsic shame.  No youthful indiscretion could possibly derail the public Che.

If life were more like a novel, I might say that the Cold War was a setting especially constructed for the likes of characters like Che Guevara.  In reality it was the other way around, another remarkable reminder of a disturbing truth.  Most of the things we regard as exceptional are products of conditions that range from uncomfortable to horrific; there's no adventure without danger, and no Che without a clash of ideologies under the shadow of atomic doom.  If there is such a thing as providence in human history, it shows itself in providing for great characters to act in great moments.

Of course, Che's life is not a novel.  Like all human lives (especially those cut short), there are loose ends and inconsistencies that fail to resolve themselves.  But life is the instructor of art, and in terms of drama and meaning, few lives have been more educational.

Rabbit Bar

A little grey rabbit hopped into a bar, as it often did.  Per usual, the rabbit ordered a pile of carrots which the bartender delivered raw, unsliced and undiced.  It wasn't a huge pile because the rabbit wasn't very big, but even so the furry creature would spend the better part of an hour most evenings gnawing on those orange roots, quietly crunching them between its little buck teeth.  Once it had finished, the rabbit would typically sit on the bar (not at the bar, because it could not reach the carrots from the bar stool), and watch attentively whatever was playing on ESPN.  The bartenders generally tolerated the rabbit's behavior; keeping freshly-dug carrots in stock was little trouble, and the rabbit was well behaved (even its feet were remarkably clean, which is a tall order from most small mammals).  Moreover, it was a reliable paying customer, and consistently settled its tab and tipped generously.  In any event, after an hour or so of sports the rabbit would usually order one last carrot “for the road,” and hop back out of the bar, presumably to its remarkably tidy burrow.

The bar's regular patrons also tended to tolerate the rabbit's presence, though not as readily as the well-tipped staff.  It was not very sociable and had a reputation for being difficult to approach.  Many were unconvinced that having a rabbit on the bar was a hygienic practice, even when the spot was thoroughly wiped down with Windex after each visit: occasionally, idle threats to contact a health inspector were heard.  But for the most part, the people were content to leave well enough alone, even if they all thought that the rabbit was kind of a jackass.
 
On this particular evening, a semi-regular called Marley noticed the rabbit as it began munching on its carrots.  He'd seen the little animal there before, sitting in its regular spot (human customers were rarely inclined to take it) at its more-or-less regular time.  On this night, however, the scene struck him as slightly more bizarre, and he questioned whether it fit with the bar's hip, casually masculine image.  Marley was a slightly smallish young man, and ordinarily he did not concern himself with the social lives of rabbits, his mind being fairly well occupied with college, girls, and potato chips (though not necessarily in that order). 
  
But this night, perhaps due to the influence of an extra-potent gin and tonic, and having nothing better to do, Marley decided to take his seat next to the rabbit.  Looking down over his right shoulder, he could see the animal slowly munching its carrots, its little rabbit nose quivering with every bite.  Moist bits of vegetable clung to its whiskers, but the rabbit fastidiously cleaned them clean with its paws. 
  
“You know,” said Marley, “they have carrot-flavored drinks.  I'll bet they could even mix it with a little booze.  Would you like to give that a try?”
  
The rabbit stopped eating and tilted its head slightly (it didn't need to turn its head completely, because rabbits have eyes on the sides of their faces).  It glanced up at Marley with a single beady eye, crinkled its nose once, and after a moment's silence, said very distinctly, “that sounds absolutely disgusting.”
  
Feeling slightly offended, Marley turned his eyes to the row of tequila bottles on the back shelf.  “Sorry,” he said, “I just thought, you know, this being a bar, you might want to drink something.  Didn't realize you didn't like booze.”
  
“Who said I don't?”  said the rabbit.  “But have you ever tried alcoholic carrot juice?  It makes you feel like an infant.  A drunken infant.”
  
“I was only trying to be nice.  Rabbits don't have bars, so...”
  
“Do me a favor and quit patronizing me, OK?”
  
Of course, by this time the regulars had taken note of Marley's attempt at reaching out to the reticent bunny.  You might suppose that they would have shown great interest in this, as most had scarcely heard the rabbit utter more than two words in a given day.  However, it happened that the Trailblazers were doing particularly well that night, and it was generally assumed that the rabbit would still come back the next day, so why bother?
  
Marley was starting to think along similar lines, having met with only contempt for his efforts.  Thinking it best to cut his losses and take off, he put on a brave face and offered a brief apology.
  
“It's alright,” said the rabbit.  “You didn't know.”
  
“Good.  I mean, Thank you.”
  
“Now buy me a drink.”
  
“I, what?”
  
“I don't buy my own drinks.”
_____

A moment later, the young man and the rabbit were seated across from each other in a small wooden booth.  This was completely unprecedented and did manage to turn some heads: most patrons could not see a reason to buy a round for an animal with such poor manners.  Some speculated about Marley's ulterior motives, but the generally whispered agreement was that the poor boy had gotten himself into a sticky social situation, one that couldn't have been anticipated or easily escaped.
  
Marley wondered if he wasn't too drunk already, as the rabbit sipped from a small saucer of scotch whisky (rabbits, lacking thumbs, do not take well to cups or glasses).  How much does it take to get a rabbit drunk?  What would that even look like?
  
“You're welcome,” sighed Marley.
  
“I didn't thank you,” said the rabbit.
  
“You know, rabbit, you're kind of a jackass.”
  
“That's what I hear.  I've got big ears, you know.”
  
“And it doesn't bother you, being the biggest jackass in the whole bar?”
 
“Every bar needs a jackass.”
  
“No, every bar has one.  They'd all be better off without them.  You're really cool with that?”
  
“Thanks for the scotch.”
  
“Ugh.  You're welcome.”  He took a hearty swig.
  
“Well, for what it's worth,” said the rabbit, pausing a moment to push the saucer away with its nose, “you're probably the nicest guy in the whole bar.”
  
“I don't think I know what that's worth.”  He really didn't (and neither do I).
  
“Well I don't usually say things like that.  Guess I'm a little drunk.”
  
“I'm not surprised: that's a lot of whisky for such a little rabbit.”
  
“Actually, I'm not drunk at all.  I just figured you couldn't tell the difference.”
_______

Another round went by, and then another, and the hour grew later all the while.  The bartenders noted that the rabbit had never stayed that late before.  It had never drunk or socialized this much, and a few rumors floated around to the effect that this was a different rabbit altogether.  This was ridiculous, of course (the bouncer had checked the rabbit's ID, same as usual), but something did seem very different.  Everyone, staff and patron alike, wondered what Marley could tell them about the animal's change of habit.
  
“Why don't you ever talk to anyone here?”
  
“Nobody wants to talk to me.  They just want to know why I'm here.”
  
“Well, that's a start, right?”
  
“Not really.  It's like, can't a rabbit spend an evening watching sports and eating carrots without having to fuckin' justify it to everyone?”  The rabbit actually was a little drunk now, but visibly trying to keep its composure.
  
“People are just a little curious.”
  
“People are just jerks.  Especially men in bars.  No offense, guy.”
  
“Uh, none taken.  But hey, some of them are alright guys.  I bet if you'd make friends with them, they'd think you were an alright guy, too.”
  
“Not likely.  I'm the biggest jackass in the bar, right?”
  
“Well, yeah.  True.”
  
“Plus, I'm a doe.”
  
“A what?”
  
The rabbit rolled her eyes.  “A female.”
  
“Wait, really?”
  
“Yes, really.  I think I would know.”
  
“Why didn't you say so?”
  
“You didn't ask!  It's not like I was fuckin' hiding it!  What does it matter, anyway?”
  
“Well I guess it doesn't...”
  
“You know, I can hear everything people say around here, and every night it's 'that rabbit's such a jackass.'  It sucks, but at least it's slightly better than being called a bitch all night.”
  
“So... you are hiding it?”
  
“Whatever.”  The chill in the air was deadening.
  
“Fu-uuuck,” sighed Marley.  He ordered up another round of drinks; he had a feeling they were going to need them.
________

“I don't usually stay out this late,” said Marley.  “I don't usually get this drunk, either.”  It was nearing midnight, but as far as his level of intoxication, it's difficult to say for sure: both speakers were doing their very best to look sober in spite of themselves.  It's fair to say that both were at about a seven out of ten: far enough gone to set foot in the Land of Lush, but not yet far enough to establish permanent residency.  The rabbit called for some water.
  
“Got things to do in the morning,” she said, “so might as well keep the damage to a minimum.”  Of course, by this point, words like minimum were coming out as a sleepy string of indistinct nasals, but no one made much of that.  After all, it was a victory night for the Trailblazers, and most of the patrons were in much worse shape.
  
“What've you got to do tomorrow, anyway?”
  
“Rabbit stuff.  Stuff that rabbits do.”
  
“Like, hop?  Burrow?  Raise dozens of children?”  Rabbits are proficient breeders.
  
“Fuck you,” was her sole response, as she stained her nose with scotch again. 
  
“No, fuck you!” he said, more than a little upset.
  
“And?”
  
“Uhm, and... I bought that drink!”
  
“You certainly did.”  She paused a moment to rest her eyes a moment, opening them halfway and closing them again.  Her ears were drooping slightly, and she looked like she was tiring out.
  
“Hey, how're you holding up, anyway?  I didn't know rabbits could drink that much.”
  
“Me neither.  This has been a learning experience for every... hold on, my nose is wet.”  She stopped to rub her nose with her paw.
  
“I wonder if it's because you're a talking rabbit.”
  
“Maybe, but that doesn't make any sense.”
  
Marley decided not to dwell on the matter of determining which part of his theory failed to make sense; it didn't seem like a worthwhile use of his time.  “Hey, is this sort of like that one story?  That one story where, like, the princess is turned into a rabbit, and she has to like, kiss a prince before midnight if she wants to turn back.  Or whatever?”
  
She tilted her head a moment and thought about the question.  “No, I don't think so.  I don't really like princes stuff.  Tiaras don't fit on my head; I don't look so good in pink.”
  
“Oh.  Whatever.”
  
“What story is that, anyway?”
  
“Uh, the Rabbit Princess?  Or something.  I think I might have been thinking about something else.”  And he probably was.
  
“You're silly.”
  
“Yeah.  Hey, how do you know a crown wouldn't fit on your head, anyway?”
  
“My head's pretty small, dude.”
__________

The rabbit hopped back slowly from the ladies' restroom, taking care to avoid the careless, stomping feet of the now thoroughly disinterested bar patrons.  Returning to her seat (and then to the tabletop), she found her companion looking considerably droopy about the ears, his composure clearly unsettled.
  
“You alright?”
  
“Uh, yeah.  I am,” he said, vainly trying to focus his eyes.  “I should probably go soon.”
  
“Yeah, you look like you could use some sleep.  Let me give you some money for a taxi, since you bought all those drinks for me.”  She took out about fifteen dollars and pushed them across the table with her nose toward Marley.
  
“Thanks.  Uh, where did you..?”
  
“Where did I what?”
  
“Never mind.”  He really didn't know how to ask such a personal question.
  
“Well, I should get going too.  Busy day tomorrow, you know how it is.  But hey, tonight was fun!  Nice to have someone to talk to who isn't a total jerk.  Maybe I'll see you around sometime.”
  
“Yeah, that's cool,” he said distractedly.  Marley clumsily pocketed the grainy bills without looking at anything in particular.  “Hey, what's your name anyway?”
  
“Bunny,” she said, lapping the last of her scotch from its saucer.
  
“For real?  That's your real name?”
  
“No.  God, can you imagine?  My real name's Bernice.  My friends call me Bunny.”
  
“Oh, OK.  Bye, Bunny.”
  
“Later, dork.”  Bunny hopped down from the table (it was sort of a crash landing, but no harm done) and returned to the bar.  As usual, she ordered one last carrot “for the road,” and requested to settle her tab.
  
“Are you going to be alright out there?” asked the bartender.
  
“I'm fine, I'm not driving.”  The rabbit left a twenty-five percent tip and promptly hopped out the front door just as she always did (not in a perfectly straight line, but nearly close enough).  She did not say goodbye on her way out.
  
Marley stumbled lightly across the floor to close his own tab, and a daunting tab it was: seven gins and tonics and five saucers of scotch whisky.  The bartender, a blonde woman who looked to be in her late twenties, gave him an ironic (but warm) smile.  He gave an expression in return, one he thought was a smile, and deeply hoped looked halfway-sophisticated.
  
As she ran his credit card through the machine, a young guy leaned in to ask Marley a question; his breath smelled of Jägermeister and nachos, and Marley was mostly sure that he didn't know him, but maybe they'd taken a class together at some time, maybe.
  
“Hey,” slurred the possible classmate, “what's the deal with that rabbit?”
  
“Uhm... he's kind of a jackass.”  Marley took back his card, signed his receipt, and after a bit of careful math, left an approximately fifteen percent tip.
  
“Yeah, I know, right?”  The young fellow returned his attentions to his friends and his terrible drink, and paid Marley no further mind.
  
Fortunately for Marley, there was no need to call a taxi: a few cabs were already parked outside, idling in the rain and awaiting a few easy fares.  A Budget Taxi sedan waited a few paces from the doorway, ready to transport weary travelers home from the Land of Lush.  Marley sauntered over to that taxi, deftly commissioned a ride, and took his place in the passenger's seat with a definitive lack of grace.

“Rough night, kid?” the driver chuckled to himself, sliding the clutch into gear.  His vehicle smelled of cinnamon and other gentle spices, but this was the least of anyone's concerns.

“Uh, yeah.  I just spent a couple hours drinking liquor with a rabbit.”

“A rabbit?”

“Yeah, a rabbit.  With ears and stuff.”

“Damn kid, we need to get you home.”  He drove a little faster now.

“Didn't you see it?  It hopped out a few minutes before I did.”

The driver gave Marley a skeptical look (longer than he should have, since he was supposed to be driving a car).  “I think I'd remember seeing something like that.  No, the last thing I saw come out of that door before you was a girl.  A mousy-looking girl, kind of small, kind of bitchy looking.  She had glasses and a denim skirt on.  She was pretty cute , actually.  Are you sure you weren't having drinks with her?”

“Nah, man.  I think... I think that girl was sitting at the bar all night.”

“Oh.  Well, I definitely didn't see a rabbit come hopping out of there.

Marley rolled his eyes in disbelief, becoming momentarily distracted by the bulbous reflections of the streetlights in the window.  In a moment he said, “Maybe you're the one who needs to go home tonight, guy.”

Poetry Jam #6

I'm not sure why, but my poetry backlog is about a year and a half deep.  It's not that I write all that many: they tend to come in spurts, and I can go months without writing any.  But when I do, I write a lot, and then I sit on them, until time and distance have forced me to reinterpret them in a new light.  Actually, that sounds like a good justification.  Let's go with that.

Anyway, a year and a half is far too deep, so I'm going to post a whole bunch of poems today.  Hope you all like them!  If you don't, I hope you don't hate them?

A Dark Soul

I detest, I deplore, I degrade, I desire,
I denounce, more than that, I do loathe and conspire,
I hate, and through hate I seek to empower,
To denigrate, self-destruct and inspire
The same wretched impulse to hate and to hurt,
I feel pain, I inflict, I instruct in the worst

I delight in the lack of delight that I feel,
I neglect, I attack, and I feel I must kill
To justify living and breathing at will,
I murder and I lash out, I instill
My fear in the eyes of the weak of the soul,
I am dead, I break down, I would bury the world.


Fire and Water

Fire and water, opposite powers,
Water consumes the flame,
But break it down into its parts
And fire will stand to gain

For oxygen and hydrogen will
Make it burn the brighter,
Until they will exhaust themselves
And likewise starve the fire

The fire will burn itself to ashes,
The rain will fall again,
The ashes make the stuff of life,
From mud it will begin

Substance

The question of substance is pressing against me,
I brush my hand against your skin;
The theory has been that our bodies are different,
I wonder why that has been

The weight of the world and the life in your whisper,
The carbon and water and blood,
The eyes of the children who've grown into adults,
They see, they are blind, they love

Regardless of whether the question is answered,
The flesh will remain here at hand;
I wonder whether we're different at all,
You answer as best as you can.

Call Them to Breathe

Call them out to breathe the vapors of the morning
And recall the scent into the evening meal
With the vegetables and entrees of the table,
Thus enhanced by the memory of waking
And the gratitude of making
A space within the universe,
To live and not to be disturbed
By ever aging discontent,
We will be happy to have kept our good perspective
And we'll spare ourselves the worst of our invective
And convert it to its harmless, inert state;
When we have the wisdom to accept our standing
We can stand to face our own uncertain fate

Experiment: Blank One

Beneath the tunnels, underground a monk
laments the cosmic crack, which split the Earth
and drained the seas into the yawning wound
of time, a wound that heals but never mends,
and only he can see the scar that marks
the catastrophic site.  He sees it in
his mind, because his mind is ravaged by
disease; what seems like simple truth to him
is madness unadorned.  The doctors all
agree that this would best explain his mental
state, and give him pills to calm him down;
his sons and daughters bring him home, to dream
his nightmares all alone.

The world ends in lonely minds that lack
the vision or perspective of their youths,
and cannot be retrieved or saved.  The world
simply disappears, where reason fails
to give it form; and without form it
sublimates, as gas escapes and leaves behind
the yawning wound of time.  The living one
becomes a monk, though he has never taken
orders or received a solemn cloak;
his brain is cloistered in the nothing and
the key is locked inside a chest.

Prison Piece

Wandering in rows and numbers are the people
Who are caught up in the larger system,
They rely on lights and signals to survive the
Maze, they stumble into walls and prisons,
From the borders of the body
To the limits of the soul;
If the fences were much higher
They would swallow humans whole

All the while I am here, waiting for the signal
To be sounded by whatever sounds it,
Wondering if noise or light bulbs will announce it
Or, if I will know it when it passes;

Water flows into the body
And the plasma to their hearts
With the spark that makes a heartbeat,
And the wheel of freedom starts.

After Noon

So much for the patch of blue sky,
Now obscured by rainy clouds;
The sky is wet with shady vapor,
So much for the afternoon.

You cannot tell the day from night,
Except that daytime has no moon;
The winter overcomes the fall
And brings the evening very soon,
You stumble headlong at a lamppost,
In the dark, hours only after noon.

Red

I am red
In tooth and claw,
Within my mind;
My nails are short and soft from wear,
My teeth off-white and round;
Within my mind
I'm thirsty, brutal,
I am red
In tooth and claw,

And now I see,
My eyes are burnt by morning air,
I hear the din and sound
Beneath the fog,
I am encumbered;
I am red
In tooth and claw,
I can't be stopped,
I give a deadly, deadly stare;

My eyes fall on the ground
And gather dirt,
It irritates me;
I am red
In tooth and claw,
Through dust I crawl
In search of muddy, bloodened fare
From cold and rainy ground;
I am afraid

I wander, mumbling,
Am I red
In tooth and claw?
I wonder still;
My back is straight from standing there,
I spring at sudden sounds;
I shudder at
The thought of that,
Am I red?

I am red
In tooth and claw
Within my darkest dread and drear;
I taste the iron in my soul
And cry with salt-less fear.

Just What Are You Asking Me?

Give me a blank sheet with none of this scribbling,
And see that I don't go mental or crazy,
I can't take this shit right now, I can't,
I can't take it anymore, I can't,
Give me an empty space in the writer's room
To fall asleep with my pencils,
I can't take this right now.

A Poem About a Fire

Fire, burning indiscriminate,
Children inside, outside, where?
Tears of youth at such destruction,
Baying hounds; for us, despair.

Dimming Blue

If your sparkling eyes were water
They would splash across my shoulder
On the bridge above the river;
As my heart was turning over

And my fingers felt your sweater,
While a chill wind made them eager,
I would bless the pleasant weather,
Hold you tight and not let go,

Would you kiss me in the sunlight?
I would follow you forever;
If you led me back to Earth and
To the warmth of your embrace,
If you fell upon the flowers
I would fall beside your body;
If the rain should start to fall then
We should hurry home with haste;
I wouldn't hesitate to follow you
Until the skies were dimming blue,
Then you would follow me.

Jingo

Sing, Jingo, sing your heart out,
Sing to your adoring flock,
Everything will soon be settled
By a song, no time for talk!

Sing Jingo, to the millions
Who admire your every word,
Sung with anger, fire and sulfur,
Cry and shriek, you noble bird!

Jingo, you can see for miles
Underneath the northern lights,
Jingo, you can sing for hours,
A single song for every night

Sing, Jingo, sing your sorrow,
Cry yourself at night to bed;
A cup of tea will surely help your
Peace of mind, your troubled head

Jingo, you must raise the beacon
Of the city on a hill,
And salt the Earth, let it be salted
With the blood of those we'll kill.


Inspirations of Joan Miró

I see you, blood and darkness,
Thorn and thimble, eyes in azure night,
The crescent affirmation
Purple heartstrings, birds in violet flight
I want to close my eyes and fall asleep,
Revolution opens, shatters, tears the streets,
Within me, within reason
Such a pity to be lost in sound,
The horse and fish and monster
Tear my center, pieces all around
I want to close my eyes, I fell to dreaming,
Revolution, Revolution on the streets.

Trilobita

Barcelona by the ocean,
Trilobitely resplendent,
She is resting by the sunny ocean side,
Resplendent by the ocean shore,
And sinking to the ocean floor:

A la Rambla, to the sands of
Beaches under Spanish skies,
She is basking in the shadow of the hills,
Diagonal to ocean waves
And gazing up to sunny days,

Resplendently she gazes up
And sees her fleeting borrowed time
With her gift of second sight,
The Barcelona Trilobite.

The Sea-Elf

I woke in love, and loving one who'd gone
Away beneath the silver setting sun
While singing in a voice of ice and storm
"The moon is up, the skies are lit,
The fire is out, the frost is come,"
To Elvish lands the dreaming girl had gone,
The Elf girl of the ocean's sighing song

Although to her I knew I did belong,
She left me stranded in the sand alone;
To Elvish lands the dreaming girl had gone,
And I could never hope to bring her home.

Drowning in the Fire

Fountain, fountain
Mountains in the water
Rising up through smoke and fumes and fire,
I am choking on my indecision,
Drowning in the dying tombs and pyres
I am burning inside out and through,
I don't know what to say to you
The words aren't even coming through

Fountain, fountain
Bubbling in the laughter
Crashing into stone and brick and marble,
You don't know the things that I am thinking,
Rushing through the channels, streams and brain cells,
A flaming river, blazing blue,
I'm drowning at the thought, it's true
Just tell me what I have to do.

Water Tower

It was midnight on a hilltop
And I couldn't see the stars,
They were hidden by a hazy bank of clouds;
The horizons were a fuzzy orange tint
From the shining of the lanterns on the street,
And it stretched across forever
At the end of time, the end of the world
Without a soul in sight,
You could almost call it night.

Taking

When you touch her pale skin,
Then the world stops turning round
And you scarcely hear a sound
While your heart is beating loud

And you wonder where you've been,
Who has lost what you have found?
And you wonder this aloud
Though your lips are tightly bound.

Thursday Night

I had a dream about you late at night,
And I thought you had been crying
Since you had that crying look in your eyes;
We were in the smokeless section
Of a lighted outdoor bar,
But the smokey air was blocking out the lights

You told me things I knew could not be true,
And I'd say that you were lying
If I weren't lying down in your eyes;
We were feeling slightly tipsy
When I bought another drink,
And I took the words you told to be the truth

Beneath the lamps your hair was shining bright,
And I'd give up half a lifetime
Just to catch the quickest glimpse of your thighs;
But it was the loudest section
Of a crowded outdoor bar,
And I barely got to look you in the eyes.

Kayla

They say Kayla was an acrobat
Who wore an open cloak and laughed at death,
And if you asked her, she'd say yes;
She'd go sailing through the circus tent
And hear the laughter everywhere she went,
And she would send them each a kiss

They say Kayla was an honest girl,
Her cape was speckled blue and green and pearl,
But then her eyes were apple red;
I saw her leap in Brandenburg,
She vaulted up above the crooked world,
And when she landed I was sad

Kayla was an aeronaut who never flew away,
Kayla stayed and gave her smile away;
Kayla was an argonaut who couldn't sail away,
Kayla smiled and gave herself away

They say Kayla was an open book
And anyone at all could take a look,
And if you asked her, she'd say yes;
She would cast aside her precious cloak,
She'd stand before the world, all alone,
And if you asked her, she'd say yes.

______

I'm not really sure what I was trying to do with the first seven of these.  Dark Soul is a character piece, a sort of diagnosis of negativity in the world.  I also liked the euphony of all those negative verbs.  Blank One is not so much a poem as a rambling example of blank verse.  I seem to have been trying something with the rhythms of the other ones, and for the life of me I can't remember what that was.  There were several other poems from this same period: approximately July to December of 2009.  Those others were not very good at all, so I didn't include them here.

But Red, that's where things get interesting!  I don't know why, but starting grad school in January of last year was a very fertile time for me in terms of poetry writing.  I like writing things that include internal contradictions, and Red is just like that.

A Poem About a Fire and Inspirations of Joan Miró are both essentially the product of my showing off in front of my classmates, and were written spontaneously in response to classroom prompts.  The first I must give partial credit for to my friend Jeff Martin, who is a genius and deserves kudos for anything tangentially related to him.  Inspirations, on the other hand, was written as part of an activity where we responded to abstract paintings; mine was a work by Catalan surrealist Joan Miró.  I can't find an image of the specific painting I responded to, but here's a gallery of his crazy, crazy stuff.

Jingo is a political poem.  In a sense, it is easy to understand, but it is also kind of obtuse and weird and really bad.  I guess I decided a Jingo was a kind of songbird?  Oh well.  Back in early 2010 a certain politician of a certain political party was making noises about how we should invade Iran or not sign a nuclear weapons treaty or some nonsense.  Mockery was needed: mockery in verse, no less.  There is an alternate final stanza that references the Mayan Apocalypse meme in connection with the next Presidential election.  I am not sharing it with you.

Trilobita is a ridiculous poem.  I know I promised not to do any more ridiculous poems about trilobites.  I couldn't help myself.  It just sounds so GOOD!

The Sea-Elf is inspired, as you might guess, by Tolkien; specifically by a biographical work on Tolkien I was reading at the time.  Tolkien is one of my favorite authors and I assumed that he'd probably had an influence on my writing in some way, but I wasn't really cognizant of what it was.  I wrote something touching on one of his favorite themes in order to try and solve the riddle.  It didn't work, and I still don't know what aspect of my writing is Tolkien-esque, but I think the poem is pretty.

Some of these poems, including Dimming Blue, Thursday Night, and Kayla, are vaguely erotic in nature.  I'm not in the game of writing *that* kind of poetry, but I do think that it's good to spread out into unfamiliar and uncomfortable terrain.  I think I was also trying some kind of weird metrical trick in Thursday Night, and it came out kind of muddled.

The End of the World

Modern science tells us that the world is a large sphere, and mathematics makes plain that on the surface of a sphere there is no edge.  One cannot walk across the edge of the Earth as if it were flat, or even as if it were a cube, because there is simply no edge to be found.  Perhaps you'll come across a high cliff and think that it must surely be the edge of the world.  But you'll discover your error when you reach the bottom and realize that it's not a true edge; the sphere is just a little bumpy.  It is a peculiar property of the area of a sphere, that it can be so finite and yet never come to an angle or a limit.

Without a doubt there is no edge of the world, but there is most certainly an end to it.  It's not a gaping, menacing hole, or an imposing cliff, or any sort of extra-dimensional void.  The end of the surface of the world is to be found on a California highway, and only if you should be so unfortunate as to find yourself there under the most distressing of circumstances.

Most people pass over the end of the world without incident, saved from destruction by the miracle of the automobile, which whisks them along at a mile a minute or more, leaving only time to briefly gaze at the scenery on either side of the road.  At rush hour when the movement of cars is much slower (or perhaps halts altogether) you can perceive it a little more, when you feel like you've always been there and that you are never going to leave.  But when your car starts moving again and you are once again driving towards your destination you forget all about it.  The truth is that the end of the world just doesn't matter when you're moving fast enough, or when you're far enough away.  It has little to offer to the life of a man or a woman engaged in some business, and its menace is restricted to its immediate location, so that a person is entirely removed from dread once he's gotten far enough away in either direction.

The end of the world has a power though, which neither science nor mathematics can explain; nor can the automobile preserve a person from in its entirety.  No one knows why or when or how, but every so often it will claim a soul who wanders to the end of the world without the benefit of the shield his fellows enjoy.  Perhaps his car breaks down and he has no choice but to sit on the shoulder and await rescue.  Or perhaps, even more inexplicably, he finds himself on the unfortunate spot having arrived there on foot.  Once there he may not remember how he arrived, or what possessed him to come.  Nevertheless, it is late afternoon, and he walks along the side of the road at the end of the world.

Strange things have a way of happening to people under these conditions, unless they should be rescued by a compassionate motorist.  Left to his own devices, the unlucky person on the shoulder of the road will eventually either leave or vanish, through processes that are completely unknown.  Nobody, after all, can experiment in a laboratory with the forces native to a place such as this.  When rescue seems remote, the unlucky traveler must walk in whatever direction will lead him to civilization as quickly as possible.  Whether he succeeds is not under his control.

If cars are on the road at all, they drive by with no heed to the pedestrian.  Nobody, after all, wants to stop on the highway before they reach their destination.  Afternoon falls to evening, and if the person has not made significant progress, he can expect his wide open prison cell to begin to toy with his mind.  The billboards will expand, even as they fade to a featureless gray.  The cars will accelerate, and occasionally honk for no reason.  If the landscape could be said to have any life in it before, it will all drain away.  It is no illusion or trick of the light.  At the end of the world, the laws are very, very different.
   
At some point, the experience will drive the person mad, with rage at his predicament, with fear at his isolation, with profound regret at his not having tried hard enough to escape.  But if he reaches this stage, then his madness is wasted.  He's reached the end of the world, and when he gets there nothing matters any more.  All the truths he's been taught, about love and God and commerce and motion, are as nothing before the end, and who is to say how much weight they held even in the beginning?  At what point the madness consumes him and he disappears forever is unknown.  There are no witnesses to the disassembling of the mind, and the disappearance of the body always occurs just out of sight.  It is only after the end that the rest of the world takes note of something missing.  But nobody wants to stop in the middle of the highway, so the search is short-lived.

This fate is a rare one.  Mankind's genius and invention allow him to travel great distances and move from one end of the road to the other with little difficulty.  For the lucky person, the end of the world is of no consequence.  For some, it represents nothing more than a vague feeling of strange unease as they traverse a road that by all rights should be familiar.  Only the most unlucky will lose their footing,  fall off the road and tumble into the end of the world.

On Art, the Artist, and the Reduction of Both

Introduction:
In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, a university student called Victor attempts a daring act of creation.  His goal is nothing less than the exact duplication of the form and content of a human being; and what's more, to do it from inert matter.  Frankenstein is science fiction, and Victor's goal has traditionally been depicted as scientific in nature, either admirably or not.  But the same goals have been attempted, piecemeal, in a different context by artists of every generation.  It is the root of all depictions of the human body in sculpture and pigment.  It is also the root of poetry and philosophy, as well as all other attempts to define in words or symbols the nature of the human soul.

He expressed it in terms of chemistry, but Victor Frankenstein's ambition was artistic.  In fact, it was the perfect representation of the creative principle in art.  For millennia, artists had to settle for the consolation of evoking humanity's qualities.  The primary drive of the mad student was to do what had never been done before: to fully recreate man, rather than to merely evoke him.

Unfortunately for Victor, although his experiment was a material success, it was a conceptual failure.  In building a human being, Victor created an independent mind as flawed as its creator's.  He looked upon his magnum opus and found him ugly; when he encountered the creature again, he had grown violent and uncontrollable.  In aiming for a perfect creation, Victor Frankenstein deconstructed humanity and reconstructed a monster.

It is probably possible, in physical principle, to give life to a creature such as Frankenstein's.  With proper regard to medical ethics, the worst consequences of that creation could be avoided.  Shelley's novel isn't exactly a prescient warning for us not to try (or if it is, it's not an absolutely convincing one).  It speaks more generally as a commentary on the nature of creation, as a reminder that a creative act is inherently limited; that the dream come true bears little resemblance to the dream itself.

But what is especially fascinating to me about Frankenstein extends beyond the mere words that Shelley wrote.  In the collective imagination, the name “Frankenstein” conjures the hulking creature, not the ambitious young chemistry student to whom the name rightfully belongs (his identity has shifted over the years, so that he is more often remembered as an elderly baron).  Likewise, it is impossible to discuss Mary Shelley without alluding to Frankenstein; it was the author of the book that gained cultural immortality, not the woman herself.  I believe that something of the nature of all art is reflected in Shelley's case: that just as producing a work of art requires a conceptual reduction from an ideal or inspiration, the act of production reduces the artist into an abstraction.

The Purpose of Art
It would be very controversial to try and identify, once and for all, the purpose of art: the one, true reason why people are inspired to create impractical objects of aesthetic or intellectual significance.  For that matter, the results of that sort of project are invariably blasé.  If you think too generally, then the “purpose” is meaningless.  If you think too specifically, you fail to account for the majority of what other people consider art, and your explanations are once again meaningless.  And if you get lucky and hit it right, then your thesis can take its place with all the other plausible theses, and become collectively meaningless.  So before I do identify, once and for all, the purpose of art, I'd like to apologize for trying.  Call it an irresistible impulse.

When I thought recently on the meaning of art, I began with what was personal.  I knew what I liked about art, and that was the way that it unifies something in my brain.  We speak about intellect and emotion as being separate and opposing forces, but in the presence of great art, I know instinctively that it isn't true.  The pure delight that comes with the recognition of craft and intention, and that strange state of mind where answers and questions circle each other without knowing who goes first; you can't describe these in terms of intellect or emotion alone.  It's like a psychic conflict resolution, or a hint at how things are really supposed to be.

Chasing that sensation can be a thrill, and it's genuinely distressing when your mind is less than receptive to it, whatever your desire might be.  But the moment is infinitely sweeter when it takes you by surprise.  I once rode the light rail from the Portland airport, not looking for much more than idle distraction from my music player.  I heard a few songs in a few minutes, but didn't experience much of anything.  But when Frank Sinatra's rendition of “Blues in the Night” came on, my state of mind synchronized with the song almost immediately.  The song took hold of me and ; I couldn't think of anything else for the whole bus ride home.  I'd never heard it before, but for a moment it was the only song in the world, and that moment ignited the kind of passionate obsession that characterizes an experience with great art.

Things like that, works of art that consume the mind and place it in that rare space between intellect and emotion, are both common and scarce, easy to find yet precious when found.  And for all the satisfaction we take from them, we take as much from producing them ourselves: art is a reciprocal drug, just like religion, or sex.  When I decided to make art as seriously as I enjoyed it, it was to satisfy my urge to be a part of that reciprocal process.  When you reach a certain awareness of art, I suspect that that urge becomes nearly irresistible.

I don't know how other people experience art.  I've heard descriptions that echo mine, using words like “sublime” and “transcendent” to a quasi-divine effect.  There are also people who choose more mundane, scientific language to describe the cognitive effects of great art; others have no articulated feelings on the matter, or don't think they even like art.  And of course, there is disagreement among many about which body of works actually is great art, or whether that body is actually discrete and canonical.  But I do know the sort of thing that I am talking about: whether the reader shares my conclusions will probably depend on the reader's sympathy for my perspective, in addition to their understanding of my argument.

Art as a Reduction
The problem with art, of course, is that it is defined by artifacts and performances, which are inherently finite.  No matter how transcendent and boundless the experience may seem for the audience, the artist is always aware of its limited nature.  The artist was there to watch it transform from a state of pure inspiration into an imperfect, material reality.  With resources and skill, art can hew  closely to vision, but a perfect match between a startling idea and a physical manifestation is simply impossible.  A composition requires choices, and choices mean compromises.

Artistic criticism, in at least one of its many forms, is about taking an artist to account for the choices he or she makes in realizing an inspiration.  It's a worthy and necessary task, but one that often breeds megalomania and loss of perspective in its practitioners.  Artists may often be forgiven for dismissing their wildest critics, but I suspect that most of the best have thoroughly internalized the sort of criticisms commonly fielded: “Is this coherent?  Is its potential fulfilled?  Was this worth doing in the first place? Will anyone see this with the same eyes as I see it?”  An artist has to ask these questions, otherwise there is no point in art: it becomes like commerce, except that it is entirely pointless.

When skill and inspiration are mutually limiting, an artist has to accept every work as at least a minor failure.  There just isn't anybody out there, past or present, so perfectly blessed with the ability to generate perfect ideas and artistically execute them with perfect competency.  There's really no such thing as “perfect,” anyway; it's either unattainable by clumsy human hands, or a philosophical impossibility.  Everything's got something wrong with it, whether it's a lapse in judgment or a slip of the brush; something that defies the artist's best efforts.

It strikes me that if there's ever to be a universal purpose for art, it had better reflect a universal characteristic, a rare and controversial item if ever there was one.  But if there is something universal across all forms of art, something that applies as well to Dada and scribbles as it does to neoclassicism, it's got to be this: everything is less than it could have been.  If art is inevitably a process of reduction from an ideal conception, then what is the point of art, except reduction?  It is, at the very least, the only thing an artist can be sure of when he or she tries anything.

The Artist as a Reduction
There is a lot to be said for reduction: complexity reduces to simplicity, and the many reduce to the one.  The concept of minimalism, which is often ascendant in artworks of the modern era, is a testament to the power of less.  But to suppose that artists make things for the purpose of reducing a concept exposes a potential contradiction.  The repeated attempts of ambitious artists to closely approximate an inspirational concept, stretch the limits of their talents and demonstrate virtuosity, does not look like an attempt to reduce anything.  It is a reduction nevertheless, as I insisted earlier, but it is seemingly in spite of their efforts, and often contrary to their stated objectives.  If reduction is the purpose, then what is there to make of strenuous efforts of craft?

The answer lies in the conception of art as communication and self-expression.  Descartes wrote “cogito, ergo sum,” demonstrating through logic that a human being's own existence is the only thing that he or she can be sure of without relying on additional assumptions.  A more extreme view of this has been expressed by some solipsists, who hold that their own minds are the only minds that actually do exist, with all other apparent minds being either zombies and automatons, or elaborate hallucinations.  An audience of solipsists would be very unsatisfying for a proud artist: if the artist should show them his latest masterpiece, each one would assume that the experience of that artwork originated in their own minds, and was thus their own creation.

Regardless of solipsism's philosophical merits (it has few), it is a nightmare scenario for an artist, because artists are compulsive communicators.  More importantly, they are self-expressive: their art ultimately comes from inside of themselves.  When people invest time and effort, which could and theoretically should be used for self-interest, into creating art, their work becomes a proxy for their selves.  Therefore, any effort to communicate that work to others is an effort to communicate the self: the self is the thing that is truly being reduced by the artist, into a form which can more easily be transmitted into other minds through light or language.

I believe that art is a human defense against radical solipsism: a desperate attempt at communicating to skeptical others that the artist exists (which implies, of course, a fundamental belief in “others” on the part of the artist).  It is a stunning leap of faith, as well as a sobering reminder of human limitation.  Self-expression through action is strongly motivated by the assumption that anything less is inadequate; in order for other people to really get it, a person has got to give them some kind of symbol of their existence.  A work of art is one such symbol.

There are no true solipsists: the brain has an irresistibly strong bias toward believing its senses and attributing actions to the wills of other minds, even when it can be demonstrated that this is actually false.  This “theory of mind,” as scientists refer to it, ensures that we see others around us at all times.  And yet somehow, humans live in constant fear of being unseen, unacknowledged, or unremembered.  This is because humans are selective in their perceptions and prefer simpler explanations for their lives.  Human minds, defined in multiple dimensions by history, personality, and potential, are simply too difficult to digest, and so our awareness of them is limited: how many of the more than six billion minds on this planet can we claim to understand half as well as our own?  How can we expect to be understood under such impossible circumstances?

Artists, instinctively, see a solution for this.  If they could reduce themselves from multidimensional entities into simple ones, then they could effectively communicate any aspect of themselves to any receptive member of their communities.  Their beliefs, attitudes, and emotions would become relevant and compelling outside of their own heads, and with a little luck, remain widely-known long after they have passed.  This is why artists feel gratified and even ecstatic when their work is well received, and also why they love art from others: they recognize that same impulse in their own hearts, to hear and to be heard.

Self-Portrait at the End of the World
Assembling this framework in my own head was helpful in making sense of my own work.  Themes like loneliness, dissatisfaction, and the dreadful gap between minds have a way of popping up in my imagination, and I am certainly not alone in this.  I've often said that all great artworks are at least a little bit sorrowful; even a happy song can imply the sadness that would be heard in its absence.  But aimless sadness is no more artistic than mindless giddiness, and understanding why is critical for any would-be artist's own success.  The sorrow, I feel, is twofold: sorrow at our isolation, which prompts an act of artistic reduction, and sorrow at the sacrifices we must make to achieve that reduction.

Deciding how to express this idea was challenging, but what I realized was that I had to somehow become smaller than myself in some way.  If the goal was to reduce myself to an abstraction, then I wanted to produce something that challenged my role as “author.”  I aimed at abstraction in a new work that was made from pieces of myself: in practical terms, something recycled from my previous work.  I wanted to build something meaningful out of something apparently meaningless.  Most of all, I wanted to try something I'd never tried before.

While flipping through the files on my computer I remembered a very short piece I wrote when I was twenty, about a year and a half before I began writing creatively in earnest.  It was called The End of the World, and had a sort of bleak, almost magical-realist element, concerning stranded motorists disappearing into some unfathomable oblivion off the 52, near Santee, California.  I opened the file and settled on a working method of deconstructing the story: I removed words at fixed intervals in three sets.  I then took those words, placed them into three chunks, and put them on a master sheet for the sake of reference and contemplation.

One early thought was to produce a poem or story that was grammatically and structurally correct, yet semantically empty.  I counted up all the words in each set, and then proceeded to categorize them according to their parts of speech, grouping nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on.  I started working with crude diagrams and building new sentences out of the words, making sure to avoid investing them with too much meaning.  But problems soon presented themselves.  I had too many words to work with, particularly small, auxiliary words, and it was too difficult to fit them all into sentences that didn't seem hopelessly contrived (it might even have been impossible).  Furthermore, I found it hard to keep myself from arranging words into conventional meaning: it was essentially turning into a game of Mad Libs with all the parts of the sentences revealed, which basically defeats the whole purpose of Mad Libs.

So I scrapped the idea, because I was out of my depth.  Soon, a new idea suggested itself.  If arranging them by part of speech was too tough, then I could forgo sentences altogether and turn my efforts strictly toward meter.  I marked each word according to the patterns of stressed syllables and divided them into sections according to their metrical quality.  By working with meters rather than words, I could write a more thoroughly abstract poem.

Purely for the sake of being weird, I decided to use an offbeat metrical pattern, alternating lines between iambic and trochaic pentameters.  Combined with the anti-sensible nature of the words themselves, the intent was to produce a poem that would be physically difficult to read out loud, particularly when one strong beat led directly into another.  Initially, my plan was to chop the lines up, resulting in more and shorter lines: the result I found was absolute metrical chaos.  Thinking better of it, I decided instead to keep the lines at five beats long; otherwise, the poem was artificially long and painful to look at.

I titled the finished poem Self-Portrait At the End of the World, in reference to the nature of its composition and to the source of its lexicon.  I ended up being more proud of it than I had expected: I realized that I had actually written six poems in one, by separating the three chunks and interweaving the trochaic lines with the iambic ones.  Reading lines out of order, more conventional poems sprung out, essentially an accident of their creation.  Furthermore, the arrangement of words actually made a certain kind of sense, in spite of their quasi-random distribution, and in some cases echoed the themes of the original story: reading only alternating lines produced new combinations and new possibilities.

The Self-Portrait, by its nature, had basically written itself.  At the same time, its composition was mine, and I considered the project a qualified success.  I had my very own ungainly Frankenstein's monster to show to the world.

The critics' questions, of course, followed hot on the heels of the Self-Portrait's completion.  “Is this coherent?  Is its potential fulfilled?  Was this worth doing in the first place?  Will anyone see this with the same eyes as I see it?”  Of course, it isn't coherent.  I don't know if it could have been more so, or if it was supposed to be.  I do think it was worth doing, because doing it was gratifying in many ways.  But I don't believe anyone will ever see it in quite the same way that I do.  It's the nagging doubt that drives me as an artist and a writer, that makes me want to be heard and acknowledged.  It is that constant impulse to transform myself and become part of my own work, and disappear inside of something worthwhile.  It's that motivation to keep trying what is fundamentally impossible, and hope to receive in turn the benefits of the inevitable.