“What are you trying to say?”
The ‘are you a virgin?’ equivalent of art, and the second most frequently asked question to the writer of this blog.
The first, being, are you a virgin?
Making art just to send out a message is like calling yourself a feminist just to get laid. It works, but that’s a different essay.
This is not a defence to produce shit in the name of art, but a defence for art we call shit.
The common critique of art is, “I don’t get it.”
That’s because you are stupid.
But to call you that is lazy.
True, but lazy.
And it makes me look arrogant.
I can’t wait for you to read the rest of the essay.
So, anyway, that’s not the point.
This is:
Art isn’t about answers, conclusions, takeaways. Or, yuck yet, a message.
Art is about reflecting existence. It’s about mystery. It’s a language of wonder, singularly spoken in whispers.
Existence is mystery; anything that pretends to have the answers every Sunday is not art, but a habit. Art cannot be a habit. How can you repeat mystery?
Laziness is asking the same question (why am I the assole that I am?) and varying the answers. It’s self-help. It doesn’t work because it’s all about answers. The point that it’s coming from a pyramid-scheme-preaching fuck besides the point.
Art has one answer. Acceptance.
Art can only be defined by its quest and it’s rarely wealth or fame. Sex, sure, but that’s a different essay.
When people ask me what I am trying to say, they ask a legitimate question. I can’t dismiss them off by saying they are a bunch of dimwits whose brains have been mushed by social media bird droppings and that an understanding of anything even slightly nuanced first requires that their attention span be higher than a suicidal fruit fly and to look for a message in any of this is the result of a head indoctrinated by beliefs, which, let’s admit, are shortcuts to get closer to God so they can get a selfie with the man Himself and then promptly fuck off believing they just had a religious experience, and then reach the conclusion perhaps—and this is the secret, shhh—that they are God, and they now go about scouring the Internet looking for people to pity which is when they stumbled on a blog written by someone who is definitely not a virgin and who is no threat to their God complex, but who can become a better writer only if he asked himself, “what are the three things I want people to take away?” before he started writing, upon the receipt of which the highly immoral writer asked his friend to hit him on the head with a steel chair, WWE style, causing enough brain damage to begin every essay, instead, with the question, “How many times can I use the word fuck as a noun?”
These essays are my faint attempts at listening to the whispers at the edge of existence. Your reaching a conclusion from it is like breaking the promise to keep a secret.
God is not a conclusion, but a continuation. You forget, you remember, you forget, you remember. When I write, I remember. For a flicker. That’s all there is to get, for me at least. And if you get it, we just shared a religious experience.
I am. You are.
And what is the conclusion of this essay?
Why, of course, that I am God.
Meditations 