RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,064
(generalizations, mostly erroneous, we have)
There's no legal maneuver for
keeping a sound body and mind,
and I truly think most people
have already lost it by about
age 15. Maybe before. Once a
person seriously begins to accept
the foul assumptions of society,
and then directs efforts towards
only ITS version of success and
accomplishment, you've either
already lost your mind to it or
are well on your way to the
adoption of their ways of both
assuming and thinking. The
unreal world is somehow
bolstered enough by fantasy
realms to, by silent force,
become everyone's 'real '
world - no one ever knowing
it's all bogus. There's little
more annoying than seeing
some 15-year old snot-nosed
kid put on a shirt and tie and
begin acting 'grown-up' and
writing some Elks propaganda
essay about like 'What America
Means To Me.' Real dumb
craphead stuff. I was always
reminded of that scene in Catcher
In the Rye, when Holden gets
that cranky taxi-driver and asks
him that dumb question about
where the Central Park ducks
go in the Winter. And then it
escalates into an argument over
what the fish do, under the ice,
in the deep cold, while all those
people are ice-skating above
them. The taxi-driver (an
image almost unimaginative
today, but once quite common),
represented gruff reality, when
it was still named Joe and Harry
not Ahmed or Malefumo Obo,
as today. Holden here personified
the rat kid who tears the curtain
from reality, and then starts asking
weird questions about the window
and the view which everyone
else had been ignoring or
unaware of. In this case, at
least Holden Caulfield was the
anti-proper-kid; meaning he
was snide and annoying. I'd
hate even to have seen (read)
him as a snot-nosed, know-it-all
brat going on about nothing but
one who would please the adults
to whom he was nosing up. J. D.
Salinger (dead now) gets a lot
of flack, reputation-wise, for
writing cheaply of pretentious
and chippy young people; a
wise-acre collection of privileged
'Glass family' wealth-brats. Some
of that may be true but there's a
lot more there if one can poke
through the veneer. There's a
rich stream of recognition that
the average, or schooled anyway,
adult can share. Bratty, punchy
kids can surely be annoying,
even at 15, but Holden was a
hold-out. None of that 'Society'
trash for him.
-
Being an artist involves dwelling
on color. Color has a long and
strange history, ignored by most,
except for the usual 'decorating'
pang or the choice of colors for
that new KIA Almagordo one
is about to get. It's funny how
something that is so much around
us gets overlooked, ignored, and
so little entered into our lives.
For the 'ancients' it was different.
Color was an intuitive factor in
everyday existence; ringing bells
of emotion and signification.
The factor, for instance, of 'blue,'
which we know and which is so
common and multi-hued today,
for them did NOT exist. Any of
this takes time, and necessitates
an average person stepping out
of their own, rank and common,
everyday set of assumptions and
'worldview' to learn about. Color
sort of resists generalization, but
is what the everyday world has
become. Color is also a 'cultural'
construct, erected by that very
society which overlooks it. It's
a 'culturally localized' quality -
meaning that there is no real
form of 'transcultural' truth to
color perception. The Arab's
'red' means one thing; the
Westerner's red means another,
and to the Asian, it yet signifies
something other. 'The first set
of problems concerns documentation
and preservation. We see the colors
transmitted to us by the past as
time has altered them (LSD and
altered reality, anyone?). Moreover,
we see them under light conditions
that often are entirely different from
those known by past societies. And,
finally, over the decades we have
developed the habit of looking
at objects from the past in
black-and-white photographs
and, despite the current diffusion
of color photography, our ways
of thinking about and reacting
to these objects seem to have
remained more or less black
and white.' Studying color
itself is difficult, in light of the
past, because there is, or was,
no methodology, and paleontologists
had to make their own way as it
all was developed. Images and
logic had to be extrapolated,
from unknown things, like the
apparent 'red madder' hue in
ancient cave paintings, for a
signification. Representing
blood? Joy? Trembling nervousness
about Reality? In what weird and
torch-lit half-light anyway were
such cave-places and wall paints
located, and why? It was all a
sort of make-it-up-as-you-go
theorizing, which, of course, had
to fit the modern assumptions.
Our ideas, however, about the
dawn of consciousness and the
beginnings of any societal and
group reality are pathetic. Why
reflect that? Anyone trying to
explain cave-paintings away as
extra-terrestrial classrooms run
by Middle-Earth, landed creatures
extending their knowledge to
early Mankind and to earth's
creatures so as the help them
learn of and define their advancing
world as they were patterned and
regimented into working Earth
creatures, would be scoffed at,
in the same way you just scoffed
at what I just wrote.
-
Which is, by the way, all true.
