sasharas said: For me it’s neither, more like mild parasitism, only there to distort and corrupt things. Cynics can’t even do much harm on their own; they still need an idealist to start the fire so they could play with it.
ah, but an ideology can never come to it’s full fruition as long as there is dissent and doubt. ideology can tolerate no other. whatever ideology it is, in that ideal world, X would not exist. until X does not exist, that ideal will always be just that, an ideal, and not a reality. the cynic will maintain that X exists and always will exist.
in an ideal world, no one would lock their doors.
let’s say i live in Mayberry. in Mayberry, no one ever locks their doors. at some point, Mr X is going to waltz right in to my house and rob me blind and/or threaten the safety of me and my family.
from that point on, if i do not lock my door, i am the definition of a fool. if i do lock my door, Mayberry is no more.
without at least some cynicism, you are a sheep in the midst of wolves. at some point, a wolf is going to eat a sheep. if the sheep does not count on this occurrence and grow some teeth, he is defenseless. but the minute he does, he is no longer the ideal sheep.
the cynic weakens the ideal. the cynic will maintain that there is no perfect world but by that very belief helps ensure that that world will never come. yet the cynic is not wrong.
is cynicism the beginning of all evil?
or the only truth?
this is a photo of my great grandfather. the photo was taken in July of 1936, when he was 31 years old. 5 months before my great grandmother divorced his ass.
the photo might not be very interesting to you, and i don’t blame you, but it’s very interesting to me. see, he has been out of the family since 1936. no one ever knew anything about him. hell, i just discovered this picture a couple days ago, and it’s the first picture i’ve ever seen of him as an adult (cuz really, what is a 100+ year old baby picture going to tell you about a person).
this picture, however, does. look at the eyes. that’s a lot of bags under the eyes for a 31 year old man. looks like a drunk.
guess what. he was.
that’s why my great grandmother kicked his ass to the curb. which couldn’t have been no small thing in 1936. but to hear the family lore tell it, he had no problem whatsoever sitting around at home while she worked to pay for their living. and their daughter. and his younger siblings. while he drank. one of the stories about him was when he and my great grandmother would walk somewhere, say go downtown, he’d make her walk 10 feet behind him. so that other girls wouldn’t think he was married.
real charmer.
the irony of this, to me, is he had the neatest ancestry. i went through a family tree kick a few months ago, and found out he’s a 3rd cousin however many times removed from President John Adams. and of course, his son, President John Quincy Adams. he was also a 3rd cousin x number of times removed from Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, whose father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was buddies with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. that’s some cool ancestry right there, at least i thought so.
didn’t appear to have rubbed off. blood is evidently meaningless.
i heard he got his shit under control later in life. my grandmother went to visit him once, when she was grown up. either time or a new wife had gentled him down some. but in an attempt to reach out to his daughter, he said to her “i’m still your daddy”. that rubbed her the wrong way, and i don’t blame her. i doubt she said anything to his face, just bristled inwardly while smiling politely. “you’re not MY daddy,” is what she thought. “my daddy raised me, loved and still loves me, and is married to my mother in Seattle.”
so there was no reconnection. he was never apart of my family. my mother never met him, i doubt my grandmother saw him since that day.
to be fair, i have never heard his side of the story. only heard hearsay of my great grandmother’s side of the story. but to hear my grandmother tell it, even his own siblings sided with my great grandmother against him in that regard. my grandmother recalled meeting one of her uncles, who told her straight out “Floyd didn’t treat your mother right.” and another of his brothers, who was a teenager at the time of the divorce, ran away when she left. she was the only thing holding that household together.
my mother found this picture (and others from that era) in a suitcase in the sewing room of my deceased grandparents. she knew photos existed, as she had heard my grandmother mention a box of her “other life” but no one had been able to find it until last week.
it was interesting looking through it, and i haven’t looked through it all.
there were a few photo albums in there from the early to mid 30s, and mind you photo albums in that day were merely small black and white pictures glued onto pages of black construction paper (this photo, for example, was only an inch high- behold the power of a computer scanner). put together in happier days.
but clearly looked at in unhappier days. there were a few photos in there that obviously induced strong emotions in my great grandmother, for she attacked them mercilessly. tore at them, scratched out their faces. you could tell she tried to tear off some of the pictures altogether, but didn’t succeed, either cuz she was too upset and drunk (for she was known to enjoy a drinky poo as well) or because they don’t make glue like they used to.
whatever else may be said about him, evidently he was capable of producing strong emotions.
i did not have the opportunity to know him. i did, however, have the opportunity to know my step great-grandfather (who of course was always referred to as great grandpa and by my grandmother as daddy). he was a cartoonist and sign painter. perhaps i’ll make a post about him one day.
but as unfair as it may sound, i find myself more curious about this guy, who by all accounts was a douchebag and a deadbeat, than about my step great grandfather, who, despite being a member of the family for 70 years, has no blood flowing through my veins.
it’s funny- even after providing evidence that blood doesn’t mean shit (presidential and transcendentalist ancestry produced a deadbeat drunk), it does not stop the curiosity. you can’t help but wonder: how much of this person is in you? what of the good, what of the bad- that flowed through their veins and of which their soul consisted- was passed on to you?
tumblr is simultaneously the best and worst thing that could ever have happened to art.
i never knew about hardly any of the great art that’s out there. the most cutting edge artist i was aware of was Alex Grey. no joke. and while i respect his talent, sometimes you want to look at more than “i’m on acid so i’m one with the universe” art. at some point you come down. you can’t take the insights with you. (although i suppose his art is his way of doing that, and i commend him for it). but the point i wanted to make is there are other states of being. other emotions. other ways of seeing. i figure i’ll look at an Alex Grey the next time Tool makes an album.
and i knew of artists who’d been dead for years. i knew of Dali, Picasso, Pollock, De Kooning. Van Gogh, Monet, a lot of the impressionists. stuff you’d find in any art book in the 90s. that was my exposure to art. there was no internet. i didn’t even know of where else to look. the only lesser known artists i knew of were Odd Nordrum and Egon Schiele.
i got on tumblr and it about blew my mind.
i started out mostly just looking at satanic shit, as that’s the kind of mood i was in at that time. i go through phases. i’m not one of those goth kids cutting themselves, i just like the imagery. segue into trippy shit, and combinations of the two, and went on from there.
i find more and more art every day. i can’t tell you how many times i’ve thought i’d found them all. there can’t possibly be any more, i’d tell myself.
and then i’d find more. and more.
i’ve been on here going on a year and my curiosity is not yet sated.
but at the same time there’s so many tumblrs now (and getting more every day) and so many of them don’t give a fuck about who the artist is that it’s getting harder to find out who created a certain picture. they’ll post it without an artist credit, or if one is there, the next person will delete it and add “Follow this blog for unicorns and fist fucking”.
lol, i just thought of something, i should put “Follow this blog, i actually cite the artist” under everything i post.
and a lot of people type their url as the source. if they leave it alone, once it gets two reblogs away the url for the original post appears magically by itself. i don’t think a lot of people know that. it took me a few months to figure it out. and no one can change it either. so don’t worry about people not knowing who originally posted something. it’ll be there.
but when you type in your url as the source and i come across it later, 133 notes away from the original posting or whatever, i can’t immediately find out if you cited the artist when you posted it. i can’t give you the benefit of the doubt that some douchebag deleted it when they reblogged it. your url just takes me to your homepage. i’m damned if i’m going to scroll through your whole fucking blog to find something for all i know you posted last year, just to see if you cited the artist.
and some people do cite the artist, but they’ll do it by putting the artist’s web page as the source. that’s fine and dandy unless you got it wrong. it happens. i’ve gotten the artist wrong a few times. i’ve gotten messages from the artist i credited saying “hey, that’s not mine, that’s so and so’s”. so i thank them and i fix it. and anyone who comes across it later can click on the source (which i left alone, and has become the url for my original post via sorcery) and see the corrected artist. if i had typed in the false artist’s web page as the source, anyone clicking on the source is going to go to the wrong artist’s web page. forever. you can’t change the source. even if it’s yours.
the point i’m trying to make here (i’ll hammer it into your skull one more time and then i’ll change the subject, i promise) is DON’T FUCK WITH THE SOURCE. just leave it alone. don’t type anything in. it will take care of itself. trust me. i know, you’re going to post something, and freak out because there’s no source url saying it’s yours. you’ll think i’m full of shit, and you’ll have some sourceless post out there, and no body will ever know you posted it. they will. there’s no need for it to be there now, because it has your url on the top of the pic on their dash. they can see it. and if one person reblogs it, it’ll say they reblogged it from you, so there’s really no need for their to be a source url. then when someone reblogs it from the person who reblogged it from YOU, that’s when it shows up. swear to god. it shows up when it’s two reblogs away.
there are, thankfully, internet tools to help me find the artist of that pic you posted but didn’t give a flying fuck about the guy who for all you know cried his fucking eyes out after he was finished painting it. good old reverse image search. i can right click on that pic and get the url for it (you know, the tumblr.sp4e85yowndgf-yq4y.jpg) and put into a certain place in google and it’ll tell me where else online that picture has appeared. greatest invention.
only to have to sift through pages and pages of more tumblrs who didn’t cite the artist’s name. or pinterests who got it from a tumblr who didn’t cite the artist’s name.
there was one where i had to go through ten google pages to find this one pic and i finally found it on deviant art. the picture on tumblr had thousands of notes. thousands. i think it had maybe a dozen comments on the artist’s deviant art page. no one knew it was his. no one cared to find out.
that happens a lot. seems to happen more and more as tumblr grows. one of the greatest means for spreading a work of art is paradoxically making it harder to find out who painted the fucking thing. there’s been pictures where i just flat can’t find the artist. i always try. but sometimes the information just isn’t there. and the information isn’t there because you didn’t put it there.
not all of you, of course. some of you are awesome. but enough of you, and you know who you are.
and you can suck my fucking dick.
i think we’ve all had busdrivers like this one.
this post is very timely, coming just a day after that little rant of mine concerning my opinion of art. as i said, to me art should be allowed to speak for itself, without any commentary to color the thoughts of the viewer. maybe my thoughts will make you suddenly not like the picture so much. maybe you prefer to just let the picture affect you silently and give you an emotional reaction all your own. by providing my thoughts or commentary, i’m essentially performing a preemptive strike on your emotions or thoughts. or at the very least nudging it in a direction they might not have otherwise gone. how do i know you don’t like the direction your thoughts go on their own better than the way i would have them go? as a matter of fact, i would presume you do. hence the subjective nature of art.
however, as i also mentioned in the aforementioned rant, other people feel very differently about this. and Dr Brillenschnitzel is one of them. the requirements he gives for posting his art are: permission (that’s fair); a link to his website (no problem, i do that the majority of the time anyway); and commentary. my personal thoughts on the piece.
you understand my dilemma.
in order to do respect to the artist (which, look at it, this is an artist who deserves respect) i have to, in my mind, do disservice and disrespect to the art by tainting it with my reaction to the piece which should in my mind remain unspoken. the last time i posted his art i had to go back and add my commentary, as i got a message from him (and mind you he isn’t picking on me, i know he did the same to 2headedsnake and metalonmetal blog). i was so frustrated by that that i very nearly deleted the posts rather than render them meaningless in my eyes by tainting them with some bullshit “personal, unique thoughts” but i thought the art was so good i didn’t have the heart to delete them. so i put aside my principles and wrote some stuff and felt dirty. it left a bad taste in my mouth. instead of art i was excited to have found and proud to have had the opportunity to post on my blog and share it with others and introduce my modest number of followers to yet another awesome artist, they became posts of which i was ashamed. as if i had commited some sin.
a sin for which i will one day climb aboard that bus and have the grim reaper drive me straight to hell.
i’ve never understood the urge of some people to explain what a piece of art means to them, whether it be a painting, a poem, or a song. even if it’s their own piece.
don’t get me wrong, art is subjective. it’s supposed to mean something to you. even if it’s just an emotional reaction, a feeling. but what it means to you is likely not what it means to me and vice versa, and if i tell you what a piece of art means to me it can actually ruin that art for you. taint it. you find you suddenly don’t like it so much anymore.
i’ve experienced this sensation more than once, from both sides of the equation. when i was in high school i fancied myself a poet, and submitted a couple of poems to a literary journal some people in my school district put together. the poems were accepted, and they called me up to come pick up my copy, and even read it aloud if i felt so inclined.
being of a shy and reclusive nature, i declined the opportunity to read it aloud, but stopped by for my own copy, as i thought that was pretty cool. the girls who were in charge of the whole thing were happy to meet me, and told me they liked my poems, yadda yadda yadda. one of them asked me what the poems meant, one in particular. not wishing to go into it, as i found it hard to put into words anyway, i just said whatever it means to you. a generic answer. so she told me what it meant to her.
and i really wished she hadn’t told me. i was almost offended. it was virtually the opposite of what i was feeling when i wrote it. made me feel like my poem was pure adolescent drivel (which i guess it was, seeing as i was probably 17 at the time, but not that kind of adolescent drivel anyway). i tried to be polite about it. didn’t want to be too much of a dick. but i was taken aback, just sort of laughed, a little astonished, and said “no, that’s not what it means.” they laughed too, so i hopefully didn’t embarrass the girl too much, but even if i did i suppose she’s over it by now. ought to be anyway.
and, on the other side, i was posting art on here from some dude, don’t remember his name now. erotic art, arguably blasphemous in nature. i just thought it looked cool. that’s pretty much my entire criteria for what i post on here.
but the guy had commentary on each piece. i mean that’s his right- it’s his art, his website, he can do whatever he wants. but his commentary made me not like the pictures as much. they suddenly didn’t look so cool anymore. i mean i posted them anyway. just without the artist’s drivel to ruin it for everybody else.
i think that’s kind of interesting, how it works both ways. take that girl who was interpreting my poem back in high school, for instance. if i had taken the time to go into what the poem was “supposed” to mean, would she have liked it as much? would it have made her wish it wasn’t accepted into her precious journal? quite possibly. i could have potentially ruined the experience of the poem for her, just as she nearly ruined the pride i had in my poem in the first place.
not everyone has my opinion on art, i realize. i’ve actually gotten into arguments with friends over it. for me, art is an aesthetic, emotional experience. not intended to have any meaning other than that. when you tell me some perceived “meaning”, you just took away my experience. you tainted it. other people thrive on these “meanings”, love to interpret and discuss.
where the difference becomes particularly glaring is in music. i enjoy music. i just frankly don’t pay much attention to the words. to me the vocals are just another instrument, adding further melody and rhythm to the song. i was dating a girl who was really into Tool and she told me about how Stinkfist was about being fisted. it was frankly obvious once she told me, but i had literally never even thought about it, just enjoyed the song. it took me along time to enjoy the song again after she told me that. i was pissed. she took a song i really liked and gave it the mental imagery of Maynard James Keenan getting fistfucked up his asshole. i was all “goddamnit why did you have to tell me that”.
and before i get asks telling me how i missed the point of the song, of how he was using it as a metaphor, or how he said it was “about choosing compassion over fear,” i don’t care. i don’t deny him his meaning. perhaps the writing of it was deeply cathartic for him, and perhaps for others as well. and that’s great.
me, i want to get lost in how he sings the syllables to the words that could just as easily be pure gibberish, for how much it would affect my enjoyment of the song.
my girlfriend couldn’t understand that. just as i couldn’t understand her urge to dissect a song for its deeper meaning and metaphor.
it’s not that i’m incapable of understanding it, or respecting the genius of it.
it’s just that i don’t care. it’s not what i look for in a song. i want something i can bang my head to, or tap my feet, or just get lost in the sublime beauty that i experience when i listen to it.
i don’t deny you your meaning. your experience.
i just don’t want to hear about it, because it has an adverse effect on mine.
keep it something mysterious and magical, that you can’t quite put into words.
an emotion you can’t name, that fades further from your grasp the more you try to describe it or define.
that’s what art is about for me.
Zdzislaw Beksinski refused to discuss the meaning of his paintings. insisted they were just images he saw in his head, in his dreams. refused to entertain possible meanings offered to him by others. the conversation began, and ended, with the painting itself.
i like that.
this is a picture of my grandfather walking the streets of Seattle, circa 1950. he can’t be older than 21. i just found the photo the other day in a shoe box in his empty house; if i hadn’t found it there and it didn’t have his name written on the back of it i don’t know if i’d have known it was him. i might have mistaken him for a poet or a philosopher or an actor.
because needless to say he doesn’t look like that anymore.
now he’s propped up in a bed in a nursing home, his skin like a thin sheath stretched over his skull, eyes half open but seeing nothing. his hair white as snow, oddly beautiful due to the contrast of the rest of him.
his right arm is lifeless due to what they think is a recent stroke, his toes flexed up and twitching in a way that doesn’t look either comfortable or possible, caused they think by the cancer that is eating his insides bumping against the nerves.
the oxygen tubes that are draped over his ears wrapped in cloth or kleenex to soften the rubbing and friction that was causing his ears to bleed.
the tubes that were in his nose to supply him with oxygen now allowed to rest in his mouth, as that’s where he’s breathing from anyway, and still he gasps for breath.
a year ago he could’ve kicked your ass.
or at least, you know, thrown a punch. fought back.
even a month or so ago when i had to take him to the ER for shortness of breath because i was the only one in the family that wasn’t at work that morning, when he was being examined by the nurse he looked over and with his deadpan expression made his ears wiggle up and down the way he always would to get a laugh out of me when i was a kid, and i couldn’t help but smile.
but the fight, and the jokes, are gone.
you know how you hear of old couples dying within 6 months of each other?
it’s as if a part of him made that decision to do just that as my grandmother lay in the same bed in the same room in the same nursing home dying of heart failure a few months ago.
it’s as if his body knew his love of 60 years was dying, better get a jump on things if you want to follow her in a timely fashion.
considering she passed in october, if following her is indeed his soul’s goal, it seems he’s right on schedule.
i couldn’t help but think of this photo as i watched him lying helplessly in his bed this morning gasping for breath, unresponsive due to the possible stroke or the cancer or the morphine or all of the above.
this same body that once roamed the streets, a young man about town with his good looks and his wits and his whole future still ahead of him now is a mockery.
his body has betrayed him. a body that a few months ago walked 3 miles a day with pride and without fail now is unsteady to go down the hall to the bathroom.
his mind which had one of the best memories of anyone i’d ever met- you know how when you preface any story of something that happened to you, you say “one time…”? he knew the month and the year, no exception- his mind now can’t remember what he had for lunch.
his gregarious nature denied in an unresponsive body in a lonely room in a nursing home.
his very manhood mocked by his current helplessness.
and i stared at him with no point in speaking to him since he cannot respond nor show sign of having heard if in fact he did hear and i don’t know if i could have thought of something to say even if it were worth it.
because the thought i couldn’t get away from was “this is our future”.
mine. yours. everybody you’ve ever known or will ever meet, everybody you’ve ever loved or admired or hated, it doesn’t matter.
death plays no favorites.
it is the one indisputable truth of all existence- all else is conjecture.
distraction.
a way to kill time before death comes to make a mockery of all you once were, and all you could have been.
i don’t care how young you are now, the time will catch up with you and i learn increasingly every year that it is as the blink of an eye and i doubt there are many people who react to the increasing uselessness of their body with the thought “right on time”.
your strength and your beauty will fade and recede and let you down and you will become helpless and old like the ones you made fun of in your youth. as if you truly believed it wouldn’t happen to you.
as if your body wouldn’t one day betray you and your wits abandon you and the world you knew in your youth wouldn’t disappear and become almost like legend and be replaced with something you can’t understand and would rather not speak of. your loved ones dead and your grandchildren a disappointment to you.
i know it’s customary in such situations to say he’ll soon be going to a better place. that he’ll be reunited with his wife. i don’t know that i believe that. i can’t say for certainty that it’s not true, either, and it’s certainly a pleasant thought- more so than that his consciousness has simply been erased as if it never was in which case what was the point of consciousness in the first place. nor do i think that religion should be mocked, for even if it is nothing more than an “opiate for the feeble minded” it’s an opiate to which i feel people have a right and it’s nobody else’s business, goddamn it.
to theresidentpatient : (one last footnote, i hope i hope)
i guess what it all boils down to me is i’m against the exaltation of our little human vanities, as i said before. but even that, when looked at closely, could be looked at as a selfish vanity in and of itself- i look at the exaltation of human vanities as one of the reasons our human civilization is heading into decline and its inevitable end. but even that, from a truly objective standpoint and seen from the indifference of the universe, has no real ultimate importance. what am i, on a ‘lofty noble quest’ to rid the world of its vanities? a vanity itself. thanks again for your question.
to theresidentpatient :
regarding the ‘exaltation of vanities’: even then, your question still remains, from an objective standpoint, “why not?”
you got me, man. touché.
theresidentpatient asked: I was reading a post you wrote a while ago about how vegan/vegetarianism is arrogant. Your point was an interesting one, but I must ask why you think humans should model their behavior after the natural, indifferent tendencies of the universe. From an objective standpoint, there's no reason /not/ to, but from that same objective standpoint, why /should/ we?
i only said it was arrogant if the vegetarian/vegan in question is doing it because he/she thinks eating animals is immoral per se. but perhaps i didn’t make that point quite clear, i honestly don’t remember word for word what i wrote as it was a while ago. in my opinion all morality is arrogant from a purely objective standpoint, as morality is a purely human creation. there are no echoes of said morality in the universe outside our own minds. so in a sense all morality is passing judgment on a universe of which we are a part, passing judgment on creation itself. to me, that’s pretty arrogant. but from a practical standpoint, we all practice morality to some extent, otherwise our whole civilization would break down (which to me is inevitable).
the world was here before us, and it’ll be here after us. humanity is but a chapter, and as our morality will not outlast us, it has no meaning.
hmmm. i’m worried i’m just repeating what i said in the post you mentioned, so perhaps i’m not answering your question very well. i think the point i was trying to make was not so much that veganism or vegetarianism was bad (i don’t really care what somebody wants to eat, as long as it’s not my arm or something) so much as to not lose sight of the fact that it’s ultimately a vanity (but we all fall into that category, don’t think i’m picking on veggies there).
thinking long and hard about your question, you’re absolutely right. from an objective standpoint there is no real reason to follow the universe’s example. but to me, it’s more difficult to exalt our little “vanities” if we, from an objective standpoint, are able to acknowledge them as such. perhaps i’m not so much ranting about vanities so much as their exaltation to lofty heights?
thanks for the question! boy, i sure hope i answered it to some level of satisfaction.
