RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,175
(fragments of cement?)
At the beginning of everything,
one would hope, is a good, honest
start. That seems to make sense,
and is so very simple. For myself,
of late, the sense of depression has
been detracting from everything
I sometimes don't know where
to turn, as the only references I
have are either already tried, and
tired and old as well; or they reek
instead as possibilities of mere
newer ways, in the modern context,
of the same, old, joyless crap-ride.
One of the perils of aging is finding
out that the hole just gets bigger, and
that the 'whole' as well ends up with
very little comfort as payback. One
long life, squandered. Do I still then
have to pay some piper for the tune?
I'll admit to not knowing where to
turn; the darkside of everything always
stepping in to blot out the light. Heaven
helps the helpless? Even that's been
proven to be a crock.
-
To stay alive, to continue on without
disgorging myself, though it is now
pretty difficult (determined, I am, to
win it, at all costs), When memory
begins fading, or the jack-knifed
tractor-trailer of the past goes awry,
those are indication of a bad present.
So, for me, it's now becoming more
'forgetting' the present - (which I no
longer understand or care for. In
fact, I no longer even know what
the Hell people are talking about
as they rant on with their unreasons
and ignorances and reference-less
and speeded up, stupid, Ritalin-kid
junk-talk) - and returning instead to
a farther past of educated learning
and enlightened referentials: like
turn-signals in the deep-dark night.
It keeps me, at the least, in comfort,
and alive.
-
Dealing with others is about the
only real 'conflict' I have. I can
hardly any longer even step out
into the broader world - car-parks,
shopping plazas, banks, grocers -
everything has become distant and
foreign, as if I'm visiting some country
called Outer Brodophobia and have
somehow left my Baedeker behind.
-
I've been told that the 'Modern' day
has changed everything radically and
in many ways. '200 years now', they
add. As if it mattered to me. All I,
or anyone, gets to see is what we
surreptitiously call the 'now' not
ever really even knowing what that
is or means. Something to think
about while the eggs are cooking,
I guess. Trying to survive and stay
alive in this maelstrom's midst, has
always been the same : difficult,
raw, evasive, and sly. Most people
get by it all by compromising, and
then becoming what they are not,
or what they were not created to
be. Even in the most dreadful
times, people somehow have
managed to survive (unknowingly)
through this ridiculous modernism.
Buying their Webers and sizzling
their meats.
-
What's gotten so difficult within this,
for the arts, for the artist, and for me, is
finding the means either to successfully
ignore OR incorporate aspects of the
modern mess into what's called Art,
as it is done: are pieces and parts of
the modern world to be brought in,
used, fused, and incorporated into a
new work? Or not? To be ignored? Is
one way a compromise and the other,
somehow, purity? That's a large
decision, and various people, in
various ways, have tried their hands
at it all. Claes Oldenburg, for instance,
used the 'present' to make gigantic
lipstick-tube sculptures, or other objects
of the everyday in outrageous sizes and
proportions. Perhaps that's just irony,
but isn't irony, in turn, just modern?
-
There was a time, in the enlightened
and old 17 and 1800's, when the height
of style was for the wealthy to have
a hermit living on their estate lands;
a shack and a hermit, as if a personal
and private zoo of some sort. Rossetti
and those Pre-Raphaelites too, with
their peacocks and game birds and
exotics. I've read that the yard-noise
was sometimes deafening. (And
defining too, I'd say!)....If modernism
ever managed to throw off its scraps
and the tatters that join it uneasily to
the past, it would lose all its weight
and depth? Modern life would then
carry it helplessly away? Or is it
only by keeping alive the bonds
that tie it to the past, and even to
the 'modernities' of the past, as they
once were seen, that the artists and
writers of the present can be their
own 'modernists' and remain free?
The old Romanticists, the Byrons
and the Keats, (plural) as it were, of
their own days, reveled in suicides
too, remember. At a point Art and
Suicide went hand in hand.
-
For the moment, I'm not sure where
that leaves me : a scoundrel drowned
off Sewaren Bay? A lone madman in
the Pennsylvania deep-woods, found
only later, with a bullet through his
little brain? All these things have a
way of rattling me to my core. I can
well recall the urban terror too that
I went through - amidst a great
confusion, in NYC as I'd pass the
very weird things displayed as Art
on the street and in arty plazas.
They were seen, by me, as nothing
as much as false intrusion, vain
self-absorption by those artists
themselves, and usurpations of
otherwise public places, walks and
plazas where, if anything, none of
this had any proper place. But they
were damn-well 'Modern,' hip as
all get-out, and as up-to-date as
the modern world of Art and its
present allowed. And often paid for
too by Government and Council
fundings. How crazy. I saw them
as nothing more than intrusion, and
stupidity, and the groundswell of
a really bad, modern day.
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