Inherent Fight
An unserious interlude in which your author calls for escaping clutches of wordless speech and finding life in the power of the righteous word.
I have had it with the boring gawkery of death. I recently looked back and rediscovered a joyous fury from when I was last drawn from my artistically stagnant hibernation. I share this not for argument, but for inspiration to join me in clinging to the Angry Word - a dying breed in our sanitized whitebread mediascape:
I recently saw an opinion piece declaring that there was nothing worthy of awe in the style of still life painting. I want to grab whatever idiot wrote that and put them through a series of terribly sharp things. A blue hued table with a large bowl full of rotting plums. Fuck you. I want to take whatever poor bloviating soul is lost and paid by the word and reach through the painting and place their head gently into the weakening morasse of the hot cold mix of the invisible death staged in that bowl. How else are we supposed to feel death in our daily lives - you want your wax-embalmed apples at your organic supermarkets and your well hung fecund grapes and everything sprayed with a nice hydrating mixture of water droplets and preservatives but where will your eyes go when things start to wrinkle, when once strong sucrose synapses start to sag, shrivel, pop open, leaving bruises in the still, still, still delicious flesh of what still promises to drip off your tongue… death, you fool, you fucking imbecile, there’s nothing short of death that those faded palette plums and peaches that you want to mouth fuck dripping with their sweet bulging bodies promise once they’re left too long. How long do you think this perverse erotic plum can maintain its ripe decorum - a week, two weeks. That’s what your stupid painting saves, this snapshot. It’s fucking pornography. You better eat up, you erect, dripping cunt, because once it’s painted, it’s going to feel the sun in a different, bitter way, congealed with the dust of the house, the dead skin and cat hair, clotting into small pockets of bacterial orgies that are going to take the thing you desire and turn it into rot - a carnival of open holes, gored bronchial spots, archipelagos of saccharine sloughs, slowly caving, turning what was once bursting convex curvature into its mute and infinite shadow - death that is the concave, the hollow, the empty, life turned to gas, love turned to foam, sugar turned to memory, forward turned into holes. You’d like that, you fucking newspaper pervert. It’s idiots who don’t appreciate the absolutely infinite fragility of the snapshot of life who sour leagues of what comes next. Let me mourn, let me love, let me yearn for what was and to hope that it will come again, to hope that if I had just captured it, that ifI could go back to that still living breathing Tuesday afternoon in dusty sunlight with everything made of silence, a bowl full of ripe fruit on the table and my father napping on the sofa, walking with steps made of love and thoughts of your kisses - let me hope it’ll come again, let me wander the halls in my socks with nothing but love in my heart and a plum in my hand as my guilty lips run over the livid gloss of the purple meat that I playfully imagine to be between your legs. Will I ever have this again? Did I ever have it even once, even once, I don’t have the time to ask or know because of idiots like you.
Of course, I know, you’re not at fault. You’re just another voice, another one of the mindless suitors at life’s miserable teat, begging to twist another dime or orgasm out of the twenty four hours we all have. I’m just angry. I’m angry at what I’ve lost, I’m angry at what I will lose, and your sorry mug is the thing that roped its way into my flickering eyes at the moment I thought to lean back and have a plum… Can I forgive you for writing dumb things in newspapers? Just as much as I can forgive myself for neglecting the hamfisted metaphor that is the cartilage of my fleshy heart.
Do you have to care about still life painting? Of course not. Pick anything you can muster your own feelings about. Just for the love of rage, do not go gentle into the newsfeed about that godforsaken titanic submarine.