This post is not about knitting, wrock or writing.
Well...it's kind of about writing.
A few days ago, a very wise lady called me at about midnight and told me that all art is masturbation.
She said (and I hope I'm getting this right) that literature, television, film, and all the rest, are just ways to indulge ourselves, with the end result being that we ignore all of the terrible things going on in the world, for the sake of self-titillation.
I thought a lot about that concept. About the basic statement.
All Art is masturbation. (This, of course, does not work in the reciprocal.)
And I came to a conclusion about my own view of art, and life, and society:
I think art is a hospice.
I think the world is an incurable knot of cancerous tissue. Humanity is this rancid canker sore that gets bigger and bigger, churning out true-life horror and pain.
But if the world is a tumour, then art is the palliative care unit.
We make you comfortable until it's your time to go. We provide clear-cut heroes and villains, and structure that doesn't exist in life. We let you achieve themes of beauty, truth and love that are, at best, only subjectively acheived in reality.
And we provide humour, because if you ever thought about all the awful crap going down in the world, it probably wouldn't end well. We need humour to temper the absolute abomination of humanity.
So we should take comfort in art because it's everything we aspire to and may never acheive.
--
After writing all this out for said wise lady, I immediately scared the crap out of myself. I have no idea how I got to be this cynical. I remember being in high school and thinking that true love was out there, and that everything would be kittens and rainbows forever. But I just don't seem to think that anymore.
Maybe it was all state of mind. Because I know when I'm walking home from the 14 stop, and the breeze is slight but just right, and the cherry petals are drifting down like confetti from a ticker tape parade, I think the world is beautiful.
I guess I'm not really sure what I think.
1 comment:
I think the world can be pretty, but that we might have to make it so, and not just wait for it to become beautiful, because it is beautiful in a stark, terrifying way. It isn't even the whole "every rose has its thorns" sort of thing, it's more of a... You know in LOTR when Frodo is all like "Here Galadrial, you take the ring!" And she is all "Yeah, sure. I would be awesome. I'd be bloody scary, but I'd be awesome." It's kind of like that. It is so big and there is so much and so much of it is inexorably beautiful, but there is also a lot that is terrifying and painful and sometimes even in that pain and terror there is beauty, sometimes the pain and terror themselves are beauty because they are perfect for what they are. I'm not saying it is pleasant, and I definately don't see kittys and rainbows, (come on, this is me) but maybe some of life is beautiful, even if we can't understand it as such.
Stop making me think. Jeez.
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