ART: A MANIFESTO

By WILLIAM M. GILBERT

i. The creation of art must begin with its destruction. So says the man with the paintbrush dried for centuries. Replication of an ideal upon canvases, this is our goal. So says the man with the camera lens collecting dust since the cosmos formed. And, here, among lacking imagination, we must provide a ruthless criticism of absolutely everything. So says the man with his fingers frozen over keys, lingering in the same position throughout all time. Let us ask, instead, whether the creation of art begins with anything at all from there, unraveling threads of subject Greeks and Gothics cringe at the mention of, we shall forbid the art of art: And the classroom instructs us to provide some sort of answer to our own origin stories. The author of novels praised and damned forbids our own self-proclaimed self-discovery. This is our fate to be indecisive, for tis the ultimate Fate (with a capital letter, to divinization of vocabulary as a practiced sourced by Shakespeare and beyond with names we always forget because you always remember the destroyers and creators cannot help but be forgotten) the inevitable Destiny of those borne to utter art into the universe. Too bad the universe replies with an all pervasive silence.
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But, the Creation of anything begins with notIdeas not-Concepts not-Thoughts in a not-Place so all of the above may be unmade as the sun rises with the moon closely behind. ii. We, you and I, the collective bundled together on cold nights, arrived on the scene to provide fresh new insight on the State of Art in America whatever that means and nobody listened at all. Our words as prophecies fell to the wayside unheeded by men with their snout noses upturned. I bet they swallowed flies as they marched away from domineering matrices of proofs far beyond their confidence level not to mention their comprehension. If we may, let us hinder the inhibition of collegiate types who smell like snakes and dapper oil. Let us dance amongst barbarians and learn humanity at its highest. Gods art. Then, theres this rule about straight lines and representation of a whole. Which means nothing. And I think nothing of it. But, theres the falsified report on the post-modern levels of radiation within my own bedroom and the cause seems to be unknown like the creation of my our this universe unending spiraling spinning spun out of control as the pencil flies away with the wind bleached black with thoughts never meant to be thought.
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Then theres the confused standards were all meant to live by, a set of regulation meant to obtain anarchy at its finest state, within the realm of the mind of the creation of the damn universe and Perceptions the realm; the landscape where angles meet and collide mid-way through. Tangents and secants written drawn then inevitably filmed simultaneously, though divided through different eras of time and history. Theres no unwinding set of standards dictating life itself. Rather, we read, we discover, then we destroy. A controlled whimsy not so restrained as the gears and switches flick back and forth like indecisive avian types peacocks without colors are just birdsAnd we call upon our muses at the beginning of the legendary phase to give us Art. We pray, through blood self sacrifice, that our wishes to become creators may be granted. Then, forever and ever we shall consume fiery wraths and wraiths of superstition alongside fabricated imagination for centuries until the wells of inspiration become dry for following generations. Even though they were empty since the big bang that started us all. Well taste the iron and smell the ammonia in our studios from sources unattainable. From there, well go everywhere fast to nowhere and we will know what its like to swell up like a sponge a nd puffed up with hot air blown from empty lungs
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without any nourishment wilting away into the wind blowing and winter degrading masterpieces we only talked talked and talked about late into nights we never slept and were proud of it. iii. So, teach us, oh master, your proficient selfproclaimed wisdom because our achievements mean nothing as they collect dust. Tell us, oh lord of art, how to create meaning from nothing. Our hands are frail from trying to paint what we see but producing only two-dimensional replications. Our hearts are frozen with theories of perspective and analytic procedures read from the instruction manual with the mindset of religious zealots. We shaved our hair in hopes we would attain discipline. Preach to us, teach to us, live for us, the beauty of art which knows no bounds except that which you give us. Point out our proper path, and tell us where it lays, so we may be like you in the end: legends of myth and teachers of art: iv., A formation of words means nothing to the cavemen of the Paleolithic Neanderthals wearing bones on top of bones. Little importance can be
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taken from the cold-knife stained fingers bleeding onto walls barbaric silhouettes colored with the insides of fruits found while searching for meat. But, theres a persistence of life: the bloated flies eating from carcasses of wild boars slaughtered at night: the grunting vocabulary of men fighting over a women who cooks still and always will: a beautiful scenery of untouched land where life is but a passing moment. There here we have the origins of our primordial soup overcooked and taste it just taste it in the moments of the early dawn on the first day before machines creaked open among Town Halls once forests. Theres an understanding necessary to know about the creation of time space everything we call matter in existence. But, we find that understanding not in the examination of nature and neither in the analysis of spectrums along with the degradation of dimensional vortexes spinning on the tips of fingers with nails untrimmed. Look into the details of details of minor details and you shall know the swirling atoms of absolutely everything. Atoms touched by Moses and Attila the Hun that will one day belong to the body of Napoleon as he slowly dies of syphilis. Colorful words as vibrant colors painted on Monet and played on the violins of Vivaldi in the Sistine Chapel.
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The trick is, the key is, to unlocking the secrets of the universe, to learning how to live, the solution to the problem is: mix up time and space into a singular jumbled void that jumps between points on a timeline held together by a single word uttered at some point in the 31st Century that may never come but regardless of paradox and contradiction still proceeds to allow the existence of absolutely everything at absolutely the same time throughout all time. You must learn how to bend the fabric of space and time according to your own will. Spit upon Mother Natures will and wishes because shes old by now, having been borne at the turn of creation. The nonsense, the un-real, the cannot-be-real, is our source of dimensional transcendence. With fantastical minds without permission to belong within context of standardized frameworks according to theorists who mumble under their breath at dinner parties, we artists can go beyond dreams and nightmares into something much grander In the scheme of things, this life, that life, your next life, none of our laws of physics or law matter. We are not related to one another neither ourselves. A brotherhood dissolves at the utmost urgent rate as revelation reveals itself so we can actually watch swirling clouds of star dust becoming centers of solar systems. A Milky Way
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not yet spiraling. Andromeda is not yet fearfully close. Thus, the art of the universe begins within us within us all. Whatever that means. And we are meant to alert the others amongst us of our inspiration then brag about our own exceptions to all these imaginary rules: lets keep order in my classroom, if the universe has it then can we please have it? vi. The edge of the universe tips, just ever so slightly, but yet everything holds on. vii. Theres an end to these pieces I have written, somewhere deep withinout myself, like made up worlds spun through a widowers thread. Though I search for where the white turns to black upon the page, theres an emptiness within my pen and a void hiding beneath the carefully planned plotlines. No amount of clever tricks could ever produce marvelous results as a result of conspiracy subtextual implication of sexual exploitation but dont you worry thats only ever implied for the reader or whoever wishes to enjoy the trash at the end of my driveway that is, besides the recycle workers who are tired of caring about the state of the Earth. There, it is, an attempt to describe unity through some higher form of aesthetic
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manipulation and yet nothing is accomplished only mere empty words never meaning anything. The over produced harmonies of the Nutcracker and Swan Lake stuck in our heads for hours upon hours. Then, I am asked what it all means. The nonsense gibberish I call poetry. The jumbled up words with added in punctuation they call fiction. And, honestly, theres nothing to it just like nothing exists in a realm where everything goes even the obliteration of the self self-denial like philosophies inspiring countless works with identical diction. The words are simply in different places. A comma placed where an apostrophe can be. And the teacher,s at the other side of the planet erupts into fury. The butterfly that flapped its wing dies, and tidal waves never occur though, yes indeed, mankind never actually thinks or progresses ever again. Is art, then, a denial of the stylistic nature of nature? Is art, therefore, thus, a structural commodity which can be measured, divided, and then just as easily passed around like a cheerleader at a pre-homecoming dance party? viii. Theres a mythological element to the destruction of creation of moderation of the of
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words meant for the this togetherness nothingness that strings things together. Think of atoms. Strings things together along a membrane fabricated sentence without joint clauses. Theres the universe, my students. Within the spiraling words of nonsense that progress as literature is produced more and more frequently by men and women, then boys and girls, with dying brain cells because the sun is dying. So, breathe. Just breathe. And well find something new for you to try. But, I tried to paint pictures with words and came out with just a sketchbook full of paragraphs. I tried to imagine myself reading books with mediums unaccounted for but only pictured thought bubbles with cartoonish phrases. I failed to know what it was like to mean something. I remembered what it felt like to accomplish my name written on the upper right-hand corner of my paper but then left the rest of the page blank. Have you ever seen what blank pages look like over time? They turn yellow and then brown, right before billowing smoke clouds consume the fire beneath the plants of whirlwinds that lift the pages of unkempt unwritten manuscripts from coffee tables and carry them off into the night/day where stories go to go to Die.
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Stories like emotions and mothers and mothers. Die. Death comes to the mind of he who swirls the pencil, often before he places it down upon the easel to step back look at the woman hes made through sheer though. Death, yes, even that great grim reaper with his silver scythe and silver tongue, comes to the universal truths we have all come to adore those which we accept without hesitation, without thought, as applicable to our daily routines though inaccessible when we need them the most. truths dead on the roadside of highways melted under the blistering sun never found by those we once loved and cared for. They. Die. Die. x. Die unto morrow where the words never come and the stories always fade this we call writers block. The stoppage of blood clots in the brain causes thoughts to blackout as if wed been drinking all night despite the fact we went only to our bedrooms to count the number of ceiling tiles on the floor only to shake our heads then hang them in shame when we realized carpal tunnel struck yet again in the middle of the night, right when we needed it the most:
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when the words meant more to us than the images and panel by panel our cameras gave unto static shock the fragmented sound bites of every other word, so that our sentences began to resembled coded messages with alternating rhythms focusing on every syllable forgotten. How could meaning ever be found in our mistakes such as these? Do we ever have any true hope for some form of redemption in the eyes of other artists who write poetry much better, filled with much more meaning and honesty than our own? I guess not, I assume not, because we have begun the process of stabbing art to death. Do not, I repeat, do not let the elaborate landscapes and portraits distract you, though. Theyre here for decoration, to give the place a dcor, an air, of accomplishment so that when you walk in the door you know I am a prestigious, well-known person, you know my name is the one often in lights downtown in cities with foreign names that are always one or two words. So, please ignore the mess, which is actually quite organized, and come in, sit down, breathe in the air of one of the creative types who are now, in this day and age of philistine sentimentalism, raised upon a pedestal often degraded by those who envy our faade of accomplishment with our big brains and big breaths even though all we do is confess ourselves for sins we want to commit but only
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think about day after day in the moonlight lingering above in our bedrooms with eyes shut, jaws clenched, taking another pill, swallowing yet another medicine that tastes like plastic coated sugar as I let it linger on the tip of my tongue before swallowing. I speak with pauses because the pill is stuck in my throat. Then theres the imaginative factors of what its like to not know where youre going within context of a beginning nor an end. This is really a difficult matter which must be dealt with immediately though our solutions are limited to Cuban cigars waiting in their boxes to be lit long past our funerals or cups of tea steaming cold before our lips ever touch the cups rim. We share these things, life together, but speak nothing of its significance because, as far as you and I are concerned, we are not alone or related but togetherness provides us with that sense of communal mutual assured destruction that if you were to die then I would to and somehow that makes everything okay When nothing turns out okay in the end. Finished products only fragementation of umbrella ideas trapped within the confines of confines of a cage constructed around us without a roof. The paint did indeed dry, at some point during the winds ferocious uproar perhaps we didnt hear the erase removing our work because
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we were too busy listening to the sounds of our own voices town about the distance of the canvas and the paper from the eraser. We bragged about how we never bought white out. Geniuses never make mistakes. So says the man who looks into a broken mirror then tries to wipe the drying tears from his reflection but only cuts open his finger. And the palm, its red. The whole room smells of blood. And thats the paint we dip our pens into, though we would use quills if we could: Because, because, because, vintage never grows old. We must repeat the things that have succeeded in the time long ago. If we tried something new, then variation would bleed through the paper and our cover would be blown: disguised as traces only pretending to pretend at pretending to pretend to do art late at night early in the morning. xi. Imitation is suicide. Like cats, we have nine lives. Repetition takes key in determining our motifs and motives for why we create: the world in our own image obscured, a lens dirty dusty dusted with fingerprints inversely connected from parallel ideas. But, enough enough Enough of this nonsense we call music. Enough of this gibberish we call poetry. I have had enough enough
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enough of it all when spread out into one singularity. Yet I continue to push, harder and harder, the thoughts, the ideas, the sceneries I never could have imagined on days, then nights, such as these when the television wont stop playing because our eyes are glued to the advertisements with scorpions dancing on girls legs and the snapping of fingers at magicians who cannot say their own name without looking to the cue cards held up by the clowns the jesters the sources of all jokes as playthings serious. Enough of the garbage, the same production of shit day in and day out I have had enough I tell you. Enough of the over-produced autotunes where violins and violas used to move in sweet, sweet harmony to the melodies formed in the minds of composers with powdered wigs and not haired died absurd colors then spread everywhere and all where at the same time for eternity. Enough I have had enough of the actors with cardboard shapes faces influenced the future rather than the masterpieces of the past. Then, I have had enough, I say, I cannot take it anymore because I have asked you to provide me with a definition of art. I asked you to tell me what in the hell the creation of beauty within the mind meant and you merely spouted at me quote after quote from
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sources unheard of as if by saying a name lost in the annals of meaningless trivial pursuit on prize cards you happened to memorize the contents of when everyone spent their high schools days memorizing two plus four equals fish because laughter was better than impressive nods. I asked you for information which would help me improve my skills as a writer and yet you told me You told me to write about the mundane to look at what I see day in and day out because thats where the beauty lies, within the way bees buzz around roses that are wilting. Nature, mundane, these are the sources of poetic beauty, not the fantastical magnificent glories which could possibly be achieved by the simple human imagination. But, while you were looking at womens lib majors and studying subjects which makes little sense then trying to incorporate them into your poems, I created realms, I say, I created entire UNIVERSE AND COSMOS with the twirl of my pen. I formed societies and gave them languages with the simple whim of my own keyboard. Because, are you listening, are you paying attention to these words?
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Because I am not a damn artist but a damn writer: AND theres a difference between the useless pretension of folk like you who wish to become something so much grander than your actual ambitions and the poor men like me seeking to devise a plan to destroy then decimate everything upon our planet. I am the end to you all. I am death to the artists. The execution you all feared would come for so long. I am the I am the reason you hide within the shadow realms like terrified puppets trying so hard with your little overly developed sensibilities to protect the environment, your environment which helps you suffer under your own end because, like I said, like I preached to you while you taught to no one: imitation is suicide and you have already used up your nine lives but the thing you dont understand. The thing you do not understand is the fact that writers have the ability to form infinite lives within an infinite number of chances. Writers are infinite writers are infinity writers infinite infinity withinout infinitesimal macroinfinite symbols infinitely indescribable. And do you get my point? Do you see my message because its not hiding behind subtext and its not hiding behind deadbeat husbands you thing so accurately resemble the average middle class male?
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Of course you dont see any of this. To you, art within yourself. To me, art never existed at all. xii. Fictional science. The power lies in the fabrication of the systematic description of the physical universe. The empirical data spent in experiments over and over again until we beat the horse dead unto death with our measuring cups which I turn into the phasers with the singular wish of my pen. The power to control the entire universe lies within the metamorphosis of the cocoon in our chrysalis as artists. The development of beauty in the eyes of the beholder but you know what they say: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth until all of us, every last soul wishing to do something with whatever we want to describe life as, become both blind and mute. And we try to talk ourselves out of situations we dug ourselves into with cool suavely delivered pickup lines which we really stole from Tennyson and Byron during our Freshman lit days. A consciousness of words we string together from dreams unwritten and undreamt like nightmares with stinging horns like wasps towards their nests. And they pile up mud after dirt filling the soil with our bones of cold copper wires that went to nothing went to no devices because our cell
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phones were turned off and our minds were blank for the very first time since we exited the womb all those years ago on our birthdays. But we were borne dead. We arrived to the earth of our ancestors not as angels or demons or even men but as living ghosts of forefathers who prophesied their own nightmares we never dared write down into our god forsaken poems or paint into our gothic pictures which were hung up not in museums but in the back rooms of collectors or destroyed in cathedrals During the bonfire of the Vanities when kings and princes who proclaimed the letter had been written from God took the beauty and destroyed and we are still trying to recover from that horrible day of reckoning our wrath filled venom spits on the pews so that the cushions burn and means nothing none of it means anything at all. These are just theories written in notebooks hastily scrawled on Saturdays during masses of masses of messes of men and of of of nothing at all taste it can you taste in or see it but not hear it oh god Beethoven would never let you hear it because not even MOZART could hear it. Music, its not music to my ears. Because I want you to cut off my ears and feed it to the dog and the hogs and birds give me Give me the crows who stand upon my doorstep wanting the scraps I ate for breakfast. Its a buffet to them, it a delectable feast of images
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consumed at a rapid rate causing whirlwinds to be brought up as tornadoes and spinning spun around entire city blocks until the family dog comes barking, trying to tell you to stop what youre doing because in the end it will have no meaning. Only an emptiness we will try to spend our entire lives trying to fill but never can. I am empty. I am empty. I am empty of meaning and accomplishment. We try to define ourselves by the rules you teach us. We tried to adhered to a set standard of principles though it proved difficult when the ideas wouldnt come, when the words wouldnt come, but only angry scrambled jumbled lines were scribbled on napkins supposed to be part of notebooks but they too were burned in the bonfire of the vanities Cultured temperance. There the comprehension of scholars without any sense of direction find their hope for salvation. But, theyre already condemned. Because the heresy of paraphrase goes beyond the limitations of summing up storylines. Infact, its a blasphemy of picking out details and telling the creator where he went wrong. An act of betrayal, an artistic Judas. But the ropes not around your neck and the sword still waits beyond those dusted hardcover copies of Charles Dickens novels which
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will never be opened because you have to read the stories forbidden by your friends. You have to know by heart the inside outs of innards of plotlines which should have never been written for the purpose of entertainment attempting to find the root cause of the problems artists face when doing their job. The root cause. The problem source. A poisoned apple bitten, injected with doubts of ones own confidence in relation to all that is past and all that is in front of us. We bite, swallow, but never chew our meals since someone, at some point along the bending shifting timeline of matter-space-universal existence will soon enough come along and produce the same thing as ourselves and they will sign the canvas in black ink paint with the same name as our own and the same swirling illegible signature as our own. But, we are helpless to know the potential caged within minds and hearts of helpless privateers cushioned on their ships without whispers in ears from gentlemen holding within their palms the skull of poor Yorick, mourning the death of all we love but we never knew it was called love. xiii. So. History repeats itself. So says the historian stroking his beard in his dusty study room where he will one day and sooner
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than one who believes he can reform mankind would think die from natural causes. The air heavy with soot from factories moving, with working in motion non-stop a perpetual production machine: but they never create. Its production, reproduction, population of the worlds resources without ever preparing for any form of apocalypse or resurrection. The insurrection, though, the awakening of a class consciousness is inevitable during year after year of drab breathing without any form of education. Then, theres educated scholars breathing clean air yet inhaling tobacco to appear self-sufficient. Nothing comes by their hands but words. Oblivion produced by the Void within minds who wish themselves claim themselves to be glorious priest sent from the future to elevate the status of all of mankind despite the fact that tuberculosis will consume their lungs then eyes before rotting spines. The carpal tunnel will kick in at any point now. At any time, they, you who live off aesthetic reciprocation, will fall to the wayside and room for the writers of fiction and science fiction will step towards to steer the world towards a new glorious destination: The debate over the rights to intellectual property rose recently out of a need to justify thievery in hiked prices despite the known data
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that the consumer cannot afford to buy tickets to movies or purchase films and music at such outrageous costs. An absurdity of absurdities is this roaring outrage over who owns the deed to the likeness of a man who appeared once in the background of a Charlie Chaplin movie, sipping coffee silently might the lone voice of reason amidst babbling baby mad men might possibly add, if theres permission from the judges that is, and but somehow engraved his image, his relaxed semi-almost silhouette in the minds of all movie goers living thousands of years into the future. A fierce argument over who is allowed to use the names to companies fictional then made real then, due to dubiously secret circumstances which the CEOS try to keep on a hush hush level though we really know what happened in that bathroom with the lawyer who said he was a police officer, companies forced to become fictional again. Ghosts wandering the economic halls of a national consciousness, right beneath the memories we resort to when pointing fingers at ourselves but calling each other terrible names. Nicknames which should be on the verge of libelous but are for some reason allowed during this day and time when restrictions loosen
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around our waists in the same manner that leather belts do over time, worn out more and more after each fierce swing at the backs of our own children who have been painted as excusable, acceptable slaves despite the progression of societys morality and tolerant level. The children have been said to be our future, but we stuff our fists into their mouths with TV dinners, then send them to bed early without desert, but scold them when we find a lamp broken or our hearts weeping. What do we call the executives who claim ownership to the ideas created by men without closets full of two-thousand dollar suits? Are they the artists themselves or are they closer to proprietors of intellectual prostitution? a class of new-Age entertainment peddlers spitting out words in strings and calling it something fresh, from a new perspective in addition to the alphabet soup of labels spelling out wordfor-word the clichs so long sought after by kindergarten teachers and high school seniors who try to explain to their long love of four years this new feeling of apathy now felt, unwarranted by the dogmatic expositions found in pubescent sweat after those long nights spent together in movies theaters watching films no one really cared but, but, what can you do when the labor of love is just the (working) title of television shows and some forgotten celebritys memoirs?
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xiv. Does the war mean nothing to you? I would guess not, when the battle takes place on another dimensional plane apart from one two and three: first: the plane where a line is drawn but really a series of dots placed next to each other, infinitesimally close so that they indeed blend together to become a unified correlation of points spelling out the same word and moment and time over and over and over again; second: a width added to the movement of life beyond ones introspection brought forth and elevated by the scripts written in therapist waiting rooms in order to learn more about each other in a new direction turning left then left then right until were lost; third: we go upwards, towards a sky lingering above us to infinity until nothing can be read on our foreheads but now stares linger above us and if you look closely, if you stop squinting your eyes and instead look towards a new region within your own life and destiny unmentioned, you will discover the sun exploded long ago, before King Arthur even pulled Excalibur from the stone, before the Brahman brought to Earth by men with
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We call these men: traitors.

lightning in their eyes who spoke with thunder from planes of the fourth: And onwards towards a spiraling galaxy within a cosmos, a cosmological paradox where space-time (a singularity complex spinning, spun, upon a single point and how many angels dance, I asked you, how many cherubs dance upon the head of a pin while I write my stories and narratives about them?) folds in upon itself then collapses. Then, collapsing waves along shores of Neptune, the clouds reach over rings revolving around the heads of rams without horns. Blow your horn, oh ghost seething revenge for the death of his father. And are you Caesar, accusing Brutus of ultimate betrayal? Or are you Picasso, with face rearranged to reflect the persona you defied to adhere to but painted abstractly anyway? Skin colors in primary paints not shades of the ultraviolet spectrum. Onwards, climb upwards, follow me up the metaphysical latter as I reveal to you the nature of the nature of art not within, but without men entirely. Theres an unheard of reasoning passing back and forth between the vantage points along that very same field of roses we imagine ourselves being buried in.
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Sometimes, we are lowered to the ground in our heavy casket, lowered breathing and seeing eyelids sown shut after we were presumed dead and the doctor called the time. In the infinity of death comes the corridors unlit by the illumination of life: hallways leading to doors only the deceased can open but our hands, though somewhat warm from blood pulsing, are weak enough to substitute for rigor mortis and we sure are lucky because, as the door opens, the wild secret secrets kept so well hidden by whoever pulls the strings of the universe between and within whoever calls us Mankind. The questions without answers, the answers as plain fact statements written on the papyrus of Egyptians, thrust upon our chests like unwanted burdens after a loved one dies. But, we are the dead. We are the burdened, lifted light by the secrets unhidden revealed to us, and only us; death to pulsating matricidal human race sickening us unto cancer when the swords swing to and fro on islands isolated from mainland brought to a new realm we could never dream of; and, since dreams are fabrications of absolutely nothing everything into one massive ambiguity unable to be written in encyclopedias or found in dictionaries, since the mission statement is indeed shorter than once meant to be composed as a complex, multi part symphony, well, since it is all
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over for us in the premature burial, let us visit the realm we wish to know so clearly before the butler returns with his cherry pie, before we are resurrected by the scribbling of pens by Ginsberg and Pynchon as they look back on the past while running forward, inevitably pulling us along with them: xv Here is our painting dimension, the oldest of forms belonging to the human race but also owned by the very nature of existence undefined. You divide by zero, then multiply by the limitations of infinity and through calculations impossible, you have the paint by numbers without integers within your hands. Red imaginary numbers blended together with blue repeating decimals in order to cover up a mistaken coat of black mixed fractions. The whole process is a mathematical equation: a systematic structure with components left together unlike the separate clauses of sentences separated by unwarranted and much unwanted semicolons like the dashes between made-up conjunctions. See, the brush stroke of a thousand charcoal and oil paints as frescos during medieval Italy resembled your inner conscious desire to not use electricity and to watch the bread rise as you bake it in stone ovens without gas depleting into the tanks of your lungs now stained blackened by cigarettes, a dark shadow every time you inhale
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then exhale letting out silhouettes of smoke from places rotting away. These are the remnants of your humanity. You better do something about it fast Fast acceleration of perception across dementia sculptors trying to remember what a human looks like but only horse then pigs then another horse with wings and horns and scales appears from beneath their skin taught tight over kindling fires from internal rage bottled like genie lamps found in caverns just now discovered as we pick our way through genres unimaginable, storylines unreadable with plots un-writeable since our attention spans have been steadily dwindling over time as our eyes become fixated upon screens flashing image after image. And because we ignore the words passing at the bottom of pictures, because words are not worth our time since time has become malleable according to ones own needs, therefore We have no need for practice. Each draft is perfection in the eyes of someone, even just one ignorant critic lacking all knowledge of what makes anything good what makes words pictures images all of the above worth paying attention to, these are facts in forms unknown by our critic. As they say, these days, everyones a critic. xvii.
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I do not know the amount of truth held by this statement because I am unsure of its significance in the first place but what I do know, and what I can indeed tell you at this moment in time, is that we are entering a museum filled with the works of men and women with more than one last name and what I can promise you is you will recognize not a single face, not a single expressionless smile offered up in amusement to the audience standing before exhibits coated, hiding for centuries under layer after layer of dust: The dead skin bacteria cells of their creators floating through timeless air, pushing aside molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and helium and all the rest of fictional factual elemental concepts from tombstones degrading due to the erosion of matter from thought alone, gathering around a nucleus of sentiment that passes slyly through the cracks between two opposing ideas at constant war with each other during days of downtrodden poverty, impoverished gold watches now merely the dust of ages, the dirt of eons long past but definitely definitively written about in our textbooks the same ones we tossed under our beds all semester until exam time came, and when we opened the accounts of all the events writers considering important enough to immortalize through the process of arranging descriptors together so that the circumstances of each
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instance, the names, the motives, the deaths and causalities of all involved in stock market crashes as well as wars, battles, and the famines of body soul and mind, create a collage of individuals as a whole to be remembered entirely for eternity all these, the individuals and the emotions of time immortalized, as we already told you long ago just yesterday, through the careful precision placement of words in the alignment two-dimensional on canvas/paper hung on walls placed in history books, all these, yes, all these, disappearing between pages forever from the walls of museums rotting from the inside out since no one pays their dues and the exhibits begin to crumble before even the ruins of Athens and Rome are but dust So what name will you give those who wish to become reborn amongst an era of nobodies who consistently fail all their classes and die young by their own hand? Is it suicide if a man eats or drinks himself to death? See if you ask me, and I know I am taking unsaid, unmentionable liberties by interjecting my opinion because I am the writer and should be objective in the whole ordeal but these are rules and rules were born broken shattered memories of something achieving nothing the artists were failed the human race with their increasingly pretentious seriousness and eventual demise from their own hands.
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The writers ceased imagination through narratives and instead attempted to transcend the physical and the literal, as if to create something real from the false rather than give birth to the false through the real and allow the fiction to stand alone. The painters began to portray symbolic meanings through shapes geometric impossible to identify one from the other when glancing from afar, before the closed curtain of which the actors and singers along with the mourning painters, once again these men and women knowing nothing but themselves, refuse to draw back the crimson red fourth wall which has been left hanging we have been able to peek through tears in the fabric (of space and time? Or just reality and this story?) until now, that is, until the era of self absorbed scientific proofs, skepticism of congenial ideas meant to entertain certain what if policies rather than direct a certain specific mode of thought towards an inevitable declining downfall eternally forever destined to self-destruct. Only words will be left behind. When the guardian angels crash and burn, repeating themselves with their snarling mouths, a new age shall come upon us a new era shall arrive in the realm of what was formerly known as art. Before their arrival, the Muses wandered through wastelands unspoken, through
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dreamscapes and nightmares alike within minds, seemingly caged by thoughts limited and words restricted. These iron bars, those jailers without their teeth, kept the beasts spawning beauty by the moment under the careful glance, the deep consideration by eyes without faces, of the critics self-titled geniuses without any production, anything true to add to canon of literature, the worldwide, astrological collection of paintings and sculptors though, by the moment, with each passing second we watch go by uncollected since the hour hand on our watches broke and froze when we shattered the glass our of rage, the entirety of what we have tried to accomplished is slipping through our fingertips. And the paint chips away over time. xviii. Whats so important about the symbols and meanings behind actions and little details placed in at the edge of our peripheral vision, so easily noticed rather than stated out front? Theres emphasis upon hiding your purpose, keeping your reasoning and the meaning behind every decision, every choice made on a whim, at the edge of knowing, behind the scenes writing never coming across as legitimate in any sort of way but heres the cause of my death, the death of art:
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you have ruined everything for me, the thoughts and the ideas I once had now placed under theoretical scrutiny. Your magnifying glass catches a glimpse of the sun and just like that, all my manuscripts go up in flames. And all the while while my beloved scenes and characters, just placid flat scenarios for metaphysical purposes to you but cherished people with actual lives within my brain, their entire world burns because of your carelessness and your desire to speak something about a world rotting. Now, with only the stories of ideas surviving, the stories of fiction declining, you are also the culprit for a murder much more severe: Imagination. Dying with each passing moment as memoirs become more and more popular and writers cease telling stories from the realm eternal and begin to write for money, a spirit long keeping sanity afloat begins to diminish. Its not the concept of art, in that Epicurean aesthetic way Kierkegaard loved to write about so much, which lies at the center of this erupting chaos: no, its the damned destruction of tradition, the decimation of characters because now, thanks to the critics and analysts and professors, all of whose hands are forever stained red with the blood of archetypes and protagonists we all talked to light at night when the monsters were just too much, we are now left without the knowledge of love and truth.
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Now, in our lasting days without books but only words appearing on screens in the hallways of everywhere for all time, these thematic elements are just that: elements with the sole purpose of describing something we cannot touch or see or feel. We are numb in our deaf lives no longer living but dead without stories. And you stole them from me. I loved the tales of Tom Sawyer and Jack Torrance. I spent my nights reading, unable to sleep for fear of the imposing threat of Dagon crossing dimensions into my realm, into my bedroom. I crossed streets believing that flying saucers would come down at any moment and now all I see when I look up into skies on cloudy days in the lingering rain clouds never to be broken by steel structures. Now, when I hear news stories, I only know words spitting out of mouths with red lipsticks, rather than being able to paint the picture for myself in my head. These things, these beloved plotlines are now dead, thanks to the wretched scholars who told me to write with a purpose, which, honestly, was the worst advice I could have possibly been given because the story The story has purpose in and of itself. Theres nothing wrong with the events of fiction as long as
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they unfold themselves across the page as my finger type them or my pens scribble lives into being. For, that is what I am, regardless of the poison fed to me in seminars and through long winded lectures telling me not to use characters with certain attributes despite the possibility that these certain descriptions actually do exist in people. I am the teller of lies, the creator of fictions, and alternate realities, truths valid in other realms, just not so much in our own. I write to fill you in on whats happening to this character or that person, not to tell you whats wrong with this country, or speak about the nature of relationships between mothers and daughters in this day and age because whats the use? Why should I lecture you on how poorly men treat women today because you can simply turn on the television and see what Im talking about right before your very eyes? Instead, the tradition of fiction has been transformed into easy get rich quick schemes in which individuals crank out novel after novel telling the same story over and over again and again, until the cardboard wilts and cracks under pressure of failing dramas. Or, the snout nosed pigs flaring their knowledge speak in riddles, scribing nonsense paragraphs with names thrown in, as if that could somehow lead to the development of a plotline, or
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the realization of a false reality with the capability of being touched on a two-dimensional plane. I am left crying at the end of the day, wondering where the beauty of fiction ever went. I am left weeping yet again over an open book, tears forever staining the page, wondering if I will ever escape again between pages. I am left ruined, hopeless, for you, the professors and the scholars, have ruined fiction with your terminologies describing over-simplified techniques that only complicate the process of telling stories. You have killed what I cherished most, what I longed to be, by making me think about who my characters are, by what my narrators say, rather than just allowing me to let me be. So, I am left stranded amongst piles of books filled with words but never telling me anything I want to hear, left as an unopened novel with treasured characters and a climax no one will ever see coming because the readers went with the paperback that said based on a true story despite the inevitable lies awaiting. and I remain, hoping, praying, for what I felt in the days of old to return. I search titles condemned in hopes that what I praise may be hiding. But, the hidden words shouting in the back of my head leave me unable to go further. I am unable to go further
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xix. The death of art is just pretty words. A slogan for noncommittal pioneers wandering in the wrong direction, or nowhere at all. The death of art is just petty words. A nonsensical exclamation from exasperated men and women who try to find important meaning in their life apart from the breakfasts they no longer make for themselves and the toilets that never seem to fully flush. For, when art finally dies, after millennia, succumbing to the cancer of the human mind, nothing will change the world will continue to spin and man will pursue his own hearts desires without the fabricated help of metaphors and rambling technical jargon severely out of place in a profession intended to be about separating ones inner most core consciousness from reality itself. Because, the heart of Man thrives not off of machine factory produced, academically formatted structuralism, with hidden names and messages in places only like minded fools wishing to be as big as their egos would ever look. Instead, the Heart of Man thrives off of entertainment escapism. The Heart of Man beats, coinciding with the drums of war spoken so eloquently in Ambrose Pierces wars, described as the thumping horror beneath the floorboards in a killers apartment

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(TIS THE BEATING OF HIS HIDEOUS HEART!) meant to pursue our innermost dreams and souls within the realm of imagination. It is in the age-old tale of the weighing of the heart at the river Styx upon dying, that red organ beating still even beyond death and under the ground versus a heavy feather plucked from the mane of a Griffin, the prince tricking Minotaur despite searching the beasts own labyrinth for love, surviving: In stories, the human spirit is allowed to survive. Not beat according to the whims of a machine, or that of a mechanical mind who spouts information out at the end of every sentence, punctuated by semicolons and thoughtless ideas, adherence blind obedience to the masterful minds of underdeveloped children because you have to get to them before the others can: before they can be taught to create and dream rather than robotically think and analysis. Since the source of the human spirit (i.e. the legends told to us by our mothers before bed, when we would fall asleep and continue the tales of dragons and Hobbits, carry the ancient myths into the realm of slumber where they could easily be reborn anew according to our own sleeping wills)
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since the source of the human spirit rests in a colorless casket made from torn down fences, we must now replace its corpse with that of the Body Academia, while our words, those which we made up in our spare time since the stories were taken away from us and imagination had to come out somewhere, if not in tales of magic than through becoming magic itself. We spoke magic words with meanings the men who wore too many pairs of glasses could not see and most assuredly could not cut through with their tools of syntax that would only distort the truth laying before our eyes because the teachers and professors, the wishful writers who were born with the desire to create but not blessed with the talent to unravel beauty, deny themselves and deny their hearts desire. Over time, denial of reality will obliterate the source of causation, and all thats left now standing before our raging souls of fiction are empty shells, hollow personas adapted so completely that they have evidently arrived as a result of truth needing substance but finding only stubborn shells and broken hearts left leaking on sidewalks during the hot summers they no longer can remember climbing trees and building forts under in order to escape the blistering heat, fabricating shade with the justification of role playing scenarios
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mimicking the same books they now condemn and burn by holding their noses too high. But, when the tower of Babel fell and language splintered near infinity, the art of words through arrangement then eventual description, overpowered the human distance between souls created by narcissism rampant. The chiseled tales of Moses and Abraham brought forth to the world both wars and peace. For stories, whether real or nonsense, are humanitys soul source of comfort our best and most efficient means of escape, the pulse of the community of nonbelievers and believers alike. If such tranquility is taken away from us, from the mother reading bedtime stories to her children to the old man reading poetry reminding him of his younger, more fruitful day, then the past destroys itself and a future ceases to exist. If all is degraded to written pornography or synthesized lifestyles, then the frail sanity will slip through our fingers like rain water on a hot summer day. xx. Though the man said to write about the mundane, despite all the techniques and clever tricks taught in classrooms with broken heaters, I still refuse to step inside the cage which I have been getting closer and closer to entering over the years.
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Sometimes, I forget who I am, lose myself in the insanity that is creativity, and abandon such inhibitions in order to conform and be accepted by who I call my family of writers. But, fiction leaves us all alone, unable to know what is real and what is false. Thus, I can no longer differentiate between the truth and the fiction Now I am stuck forever in the In Between, wondering, wandering, if paint brushes are what Im meant to throw away or pens. Then, hear the click clacking of keys as the ink spreads itself evenly across the paper. Paragraphs and letters forming a beauty far beyond the depraved apprehension of man, only a gift from the stranger lurking in the shadows within the memory of our dreams, because in the end, after the art has been created, destroyed, then reborn, the stories still live on forever .The penmanship decreased in both quality and quantity over time as the roundabout means to putting labels on products we kept on shelves in the supermarkets where we spend most our days placing items in the wrong places. Never paying attention to the bar code numbers or the silent cashier who discusses nothing with the customer because his voice is the absolute voice of death itself, yet no one wishes to breathe life into his lungs.
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The conversations taking place in delis and on the snack food aisles leading only back to personal issues whose mother left the boy when he was suckling the blood from her bosom as if his stomach were shrinking the brother with one eye because the Enemy shot it off with a sniper during the war, that bloody terror ordered by men who never fired a gun but wanted to call themselves heroes. These are real world tragedies we are faced with each and every day, so why entertain ourselves with the pulpit sermons without joyful choirs? Why spend our lives listening to fire and brimstone lectures without ever once saying halleluiah? We know not ourselves in the brink of nihilism amongst obliteration. They told us that ignorance is bliss, so we explored the statement and found just aphorism after aphorism. But, these sayings, what our professors call clichs, are they simply phrases bludgeoned to death, left in back alleys to rot so the fruit flies wont get in through our windows, formed from a lack of creativity and originality, or are these clichs borne from sentiments universal? Expressions of the mind and heart which is part of the human experience, the witnessing of a thousand emotions which could not possible be articulated through infinitely different forms never ceasing in variation.
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Is there a meaning behind the meaningless phrases? What Ive come to believe, in my amateur despairing experience, is that these clichs are not dead but deflated balloons, once filled with air, helium form the Big Bang, but emptied because there was a leak in the latex and the particles of dinosaurs steadily escaped over time. With words left alone for millennia, phrases repeated but with flatline tones, everything became meaningless. Phrases were not the clichs. Life became clich, a monotonous existence without definitions and means with imagination only a marginal meandering thought. Thats where I ended up driving, on the edge of the margins, scrawled out like a nomadic vagabond, unwanted but more importantly unthought of, as if I could never exist and by existing, through living, I became a paradox pure and simple, a blatant disregard of self-sufficiency in order to play a role beyond the robots of my age: those parents who come home day in and day out, working, working, eating, the sleeping, all to say they belong in the modern age with everyone else. Parents and uncles and siblings, an entire family, of worker bees dedicating their lives to the economy, to keep the world turning, to go to college and earn good grades to make more money because thats what lifes supposed to be.
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The standards of life, without the standards of Art in a world where television never stops playing in the background. So, I listened to the newscaster and realized the death of thousands meant more to me than it did him because he was reading of a teleprompter. And thats where I differed from everything I know, everything I thought I loved Thats where I lost myself among nostalgic worlds apart from the one Im supposed to call home. The flat tone of my voice reverberated back to me in uniform code dull by the churning machines making phonecalls instead of writing poems or painting pictures. A soulless coward appeared from the shadows, and I saw it was someone like me, without a voice. Cords knotted together where his larynx used to be and I muttered a snide remark that he would never make it anywhere as a writer, without realizing my own mistakes were his the pride, the pretension, the solution from an equation complex and meaningless I had read on a whiteboard in my classrooms one day without any intention of adapting the formulaic process as my own. Abandoning all anarchic tendencies, hence my true nature, I produced nothing in a year but the ramblings of a sane man. Now I am attempting to morph somehow into a mad man he who scribbles on carpets the
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names of gods never told, the stories of heroes who fell and villains who rose despite the way the universe is intended to explode. The plastered casts molded on my arms broke off during the whirlwind, but I saw no more So I began to wonder through crowds, listening to conversations I was not a part of in order to adapt some sort of common belief, as if, though observing the freaks and the average fools of today, with their snaggletooth religions, their crosseyed faiths, worshipping sugar cereals and their own genitals, then, if I could see the way the sheep of the Earth think and live, maybe then I would stop feeling like a hungry wolf. But, I dont. I pursue a path beaten ceaselessly by millions over time, but never walk down correctly by a single sole because the pretension of it all, the textbooks and the theories, gets beneath your skin and wiggles its way down to your soul: a parasite unseen but near permanent for a century. The only way to kill it without killing the host is fire. So, I douse myself in canister after canister of gasoline because I have always enjoyed the smell of aged Kerosene like a good wine unwanted and broken in the pantry closet, stored in the back until its too late but then again its always too late isnt it? And I even enjoy the way it tastes when swallowed but the lights have to be out, they must
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be turned or burned away since shadows will scare away the Creeps and I want them back. I need the fear, am addicted to being afraid of what goes bump in the night. The thrill of terror, the absolute numbing of the senses when screaming for your life, it allows for a paralysis unattainable by local politics and literature written centuries ago. I feel tentacles wrap around my leg and I dont struggle, which makes the beast trying to devour me less hungry, allows me to even glance at it because if I am not afraid of the monster we all have nightmares about then maybe hell become less lonely and will stop eating people? I write stories about him, about his long jaws stretching into the night and the way he whimpers when the moon is not full in the sky. I write his story, but no one reads it, no one wants to know the Monsters life and the reason it exists beyond devouring to live. Because nothing in my tale is profound. xxii. I expose no revelations. I imply no symbols. I stand for nothing than face value. And because of that, I am meaningless.

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