The parable goes like this:
The astronomer's wife is watching TV and hears the breaking news: scientists have just discovered that a nearby star, soon to be quasar, will (within a decade) irradiate the earth and the space around it hundreds of light years in every direction, wiping out all known life. Overtaken with the horror of it and stricken with panic, the wife dashes from their cottage and into the observatory where her husband has isolated himself for the evening. “A star is going to explode and kill us all!” she screams.
“I know,” he replies calmly, but not dismissively.
“What?” she asks dumbfounded, seeing as this is breaking news and he has had no means of communication with the outside world save his giant telescope.
“Sweetheart,” he says lovingly, “I’ve known for years, I just didn’t want to worry anyone.”
I've been accused, lovingly, of a certain degree of didacticism. That is not my intention. But what have intentions ever counted for in art? Also, remember, ask and ye shall receive (permissions to reprint this elsewhere).
Saturday, September 18, 2010
The Appalling Snow
When you die you will leave behind nothing that will not also perish. What few memories and mementos remain proclaiming you will only accelerate their decomposition in your absence. You are not the point of the universe. You are not its pinnacle or its spectacle; you are a single breath. You are one inevitable interplay of all that makes up the cosmos and you are not important. You will not be counted anymore than you will count up your own breaths.
You are, though—through no choice of your own—participating in something vital, if anything can be called vital at all: you are the host of billions of molecules playing together like children, defining new possibilities.
Before there were stars, hydrogens intermingled in darkness; before there were planets, giants of ice and solid rock tumbled into one another in space; before there was life, stars sick with energy spewed themselves into loneliness; and before the next grand unimaginable cosmic expression—before the next breath—there was you and I.
If all we have is each other, it seems only proper that we ask one another permission when sharing or using the other's property.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
an IM to a friend
me: with a Godspeed You Black Emperor Pandora station on Pandora every 15 minutes is like the moment the death of your mother finally hits you and you have to pull over into some gas station to breath it out through tears, and all you needed was someone to care, and so when the attendant notices you crying and comes out to check on you you know right then and there that your lucky to be alive and you know you have to leave this town you've been in since you were born because, damnit, this just isn't living, is it?
No really, it is. Try it. Also, you can like or roll your eyes and the sentiment expressed but do try your best in the future to make art in all the places you shouldn't. On facebook posts or in IM conversations. On the backs of envelopes or on a building wall. Of course every moment of life and love is art and blah blah blah... but if that's true it should be an excuse to make it more evidently so!, not an excuse to lean on the natural beauty of things and add nothing. Plus it breaks my creative habits. A history lesson:
In the 1980's, after Vietnam ended, a lot of veterans were left with longterm heroin habits. And they almost immediately started dieing of overdoses as soon as they got home. Thing was: these weren't stupid, risk-taking tried-to-get-too-high-and-died accidents. These vets had been shooting up to deal with war and the memories of war, and they were doing so in the same veins, in the same quantity, and with heroin of the same potency. But they were still overdosing. The reason?
That dark bunker, or that musty corner of the jungle, where they'd shot up had left an imprint in their mind. After time and time again of shooting up in the same kind of place the body would start to prepare for an oncoming dose based on location, before the user ever decided to do it. Back home, in bathrooms, or laying on a mattress in an empty but safe room, their body didn't prepare itself. It had never been trained for a situation like that.
So If art is only in a word document on a laptop then the mind might just only bother to try when you open one up. That's why I do art at uncommon times. It's a chance, hopefully, to make art possible more often.
Feel free to reprint the IM without premission. I'd like to be cited, but I won't hold it against you.
No really, it is. Try it. Also, you can like or roll your eyes and the sentiment expressed but do try your best in the future to make art in all the places you shouldn't. On facebook posts or in IM conversations. On the backs of envelopes or on a building wall. Of course every moment of life and love is art and blah blah blah... but if that's true it should be an excuse to make it more evidently so!, not an excuse to lean on the natural beauty of things and add nothing. Plus it breaks my creative habits. A history lesson:
In the 1980's, after Vietnam ended, a lot of veterans were left with longterm heroin habits. And they almost immediately started dieing of overdoses as soon as they got home. Thing was: these weren't stupid, risk-taking tried-to-get-too-high-and-died accidents. These vets had been shooting up to deal with war and the memories of war, and they were doing so in the same veins, in the same quantity, and with heroin of the same potency. But they were still overdosing. The reason?
That dark bunker, or that musty corner of the jungle, where they'd shot up had left an imprint in their mind. After time and time again of shooting up in the same kind of place the body would start to prepare for an oncoming dose based on location, before the user ever decided to do it. Back home, in bathrooms, or laying on a mattress in an empty but safe room, their body didn't prepare itself. It had never been trained for a situation like that.
So If art is only in a word document on a laptop then the mind might just only bother to try when you open one up. That's why I do art at uncommon times. It's a chance, hopefully, to make art possible more often.
Feel free to reprint the IM without premission. I'd like to be cited, but I won't hold it against you.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
High Windows
It was there on the delivery bed after her little boy had been born, after the placenta had followed him out so quickly looking like his deflated helium balloon, and after he had been cleaned, wrapped and placed against her breast, that she stopped believing. She lost all her faith right then, hard and fast like inverse revelation, like a booming voice that knocked her clean out of the pew.
If faith is there waiting in the front of the hospital when she is discharged to pick her up she will surely be all apologies and smiles, ready to re-hitch happily after a 48 hour divorce. But that is down elevators, across stretches of over-buffed linoleum, and through far too many automatic double doors. She doesn’t bother to imagine it. Instead she holds her justborn while he screams deciding she likes the way he sounds.
To what little degree she can manage to rationalize it, it goes like this: if this wild little life with all its organs in their relatively proper places is hers—if this piece of creation is her creation—then the world is without justice. Her worship had never been good or pure. This loss of faith, though, was not like a discussion had for years and finally understood; it was more like a fire sparked unnoticed in some high recess of her mind, a web of neurons like entangled kindling ignited, that descended and was heard.
Not a single bone in her body—even filled with the infinite redemption of God—believes she deserves this reward. But here he is in her hands, not miscarried, or spontaneously aborted, or stillborn… just alive.
Please don't use or reprint without permission, or mistake fiction for essay.
If faith is there waiting in the front of the hospital when she is discharged to pick her up she will surely be all apologies and smiles, ready to re-hitch happily after a 48 hour divorce. But that is down elevators, across stretches of over-buffed linoleum, and through far too many automatic double doors. She doesn’t bother to imagine it. Instead she holds her justborn while he screams deciding she likes the way he sounds.
To what little degree she can manage to rationalize it, it goes like this: if this wild little life with all its organs in their relatively proper places is hers—if this piece of creation is her creation—then the world is without justice. Her worship had never been good or pure. This loss of faith, though, was not like a discussion had for years and finally understood; it was more like a fire sparked unnoticed in some high recess of her mind, a web of neurons like entangled kindling ignited, that descended and was heard.
Not a single bone in her body—even filled with the infinite redemption of God—believes she deserves this reward. But here he is in her hands, not miscarried, or spontaneously aborted, or stillborn… just alive.
Please don't use or reprint without permission, or mistake fiction for essay.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Things are not so heavy as we think.
Dylan lies on the roof of her car and waits to fall into the night sky.
It is impossible. Dylan is not a child, nor magical, nor tied to one hundred thousand helium balloons, but it’s a game she has played on quiet nights since she was young. It happens usually as it is happening tonight, on the top floors of parking garages, with the messy Floridian skyline completely out of sight. Tonight the clouds are out in force, taking great care to obscure as many stars as possible, leaving the remaining few to be drowned the light-pollution from the endless row beachfront hotels. But a clear sky is not necessary, not for this. Though Dylan has no desire to understand the exact mechanisms years of these near take-offs have made clear to her the basic rules:
1) Look up into the sky so nothing else is in view (cup your hands around your eyes if necessary)
2) Wait until the sky seems larger than the earth, infinitely wide and infinitely deep.
3) Wait until you feel small and powerless.
4) Fear the sky like it hides a beast, but do not act on your fear. Be afraid, but not scared.
Once the sky is nothing short of immense it will come, triggered by some ancient fear. Suddenly there is no car. To fall now is to fall forever. But this isn’t falling, this is being pulled—taken up by something ravenous and unknowable.
And like this for a moment Dylan floats. Gravity devolves from truth to belief and flying is as easy as changing your mind. No one awake is as weightless as this. She drifts, fighting the welling fear back as it slowly overwhelms her. It’s rule number four that is always broken eventually, as is happening now, when uncertainty turns to fright and a hypnagogic jerk brings her back to the flimsy aluminum below.
The drives home are alien, as though her hometown is a place she has never been. The streets are not deserted, but she gets the distinct sensation that everyone she sees is lost. Every building looks misplaced, the grass seems sharp and ominous, palm trees twist upwards at weird angles, and the light from streetlamps glow with hazy rings as though through fog.
Dylan tells no one what she does. Any explanation might break the magic and make it impossible to recapture. In understanding she fears she might unravel the carefully crafted deceits that make it all possible. Or worse that she might master it completely and rob it of its power over her.
-Excerpt from opening of short-story-in-progress Infidel
No one will see this, I imagine. Less likely even that someone would leave a comment. But I just wanted to post it up, see it on its own. (and, duh, do not steal or reprint without permission)
It is impossible. Dylan is not a child, nor magical, nor tied to one hundred thousand helium balloons, but it’s a game she has played on quiet nights since she was young. It happens usually as it is happening tonight, on the top floors of parking garages, with the messy Floridian skyline completely out of sight. Tonight the clouds are out in force, taking great care to obscure as many stars as possible, leaving the remaining few to be drowned the light-pollution from the endless row beachfront hotels. But a clear sky is not necessary, not for this. Though Dylan has no desire to understand the exact mechanisms years of these near take-offs have made clear to her the basic rules:
1) Look up into the sky so nothing else is in view (cup your hands around your eyes if necessary)
2) Wait until the sky seems larger than the earth, infinitely wide and infinitely deep.
3) Wait until you feel small and powerless.
4) Fear the sky like it hides a beast, but do not act on your fear. Be afraid, but not scared.
Once the sky is nothing short of immense it will come, triggered by some ancient fear. Suddenly there is no car. To fall now is to fall forever. But this isn’t falling, this is being pulled—taken up by something ravenous and unknowable.
And like this for a moment Dylan floats. Gravity devolves from truth to belief and flying is as easy as changing your mind. No one awake is as weightless as this. She drifts, fighting the welling fear back as it slowly overwhelms her. It’s rule number four that is always broken eventually, as is happening now, when uncertainty turns to fright and a hypnagogic jerk brings her back to the flimsy aluminum below.
The drives home are alien, as though her hometown is a place she has never been. The streets are not deserted, but she gets the distinct sensation that everyone she sees is lost. Every building looks misplaced, the grass seems sharp and ominous, palm trees twist upwards at weird angles, and the light from streetlamps glow with hazy rings as though through fog.
Dylan tells no one what she does. Any explanation might break the magic and make it impossible to recapture. In understanding she fears she might unravel the carefully crafted deceits that make it all possible. Or worse that she might master it completely and rob it of its power over her.
-Excerpt from opening of short-story-in-progress Infidel
No one will see this, I imagine. Less likely even that someone would leave a comment. But I just wanted to post it up, see it on its own. (and, duh, do not steal or reprint without permission)
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