warning, this is a long post, not all will agree with what i am saying. and no, it isn't rhetoric. those who see it as such are misinterpretting my reasons for writing this.

if there is one thing i learnt this past term (i'll get to what it was in a sec), it was in my early 20th century british fiction class. we read the novels 'heart of darkness', 'mrs. dalloway', 'portrait of the artist as a young man', 'lady chatterley's lover', 'brave new world', 'howard's end' and 'lord of the flies'. i never realised up until know just what exactly kurtz means at the end of 'heart of darkness', but i can see it and how it relates to some of the other things we read. there are actually two things, but they are both connected:

one, art is different from pretty much everything else in life because it is not objective, it's subjective. you look at science and it has an objective point of view. it's applied, not interpretted. art is the opposite, it is interpretted, not applied. you can't take a poem and cure cancer. you can't take a formula and philosophise about life with it. art is a way to link the inner mind to the outer reality and vice versa. there are two kinds of people in the world, those who follow rational thought and stick with the objective, and those who take comfort in the irrational and go with the subjective. for example, there is someone i know, i shall call him j___ for short (that is not his name, etc...). he was a big art person in high school, always acting and into english and such. now he is in science because he needed a drastic shift. he wanted to 'help people' and arts doesn't do that he told me. then there is someone like me, who has contemplated going into science, like med school and becoming a doctor to do something good with my life that will make a difference. but i can't do that. writing makes me fucking miserable. the process is the hardest thing i ever go through, it sucks all the energy out of me, it's like bleeding my soul onto a piece of paper. but it's also the most thrilling feeling in the world once it is done. people say that art can't change the world. they're wrong. 'das kapital', 'lolita', 'catcher in the rye', 'mein kampf', the massive buddha statues in afghanistan, music, pictures, thoughts, it's all subversive. it can sway one mind it can sway a thousand minds. that's what 'brave new world' was saying. books are banned because they are fucking powerful. just like women, black people, asian people, hispanic people, fat people, old people, young people, gay people, bi people have throughout the centuries have been repressed and rejected, because they are fucking powerful. the minority is always more powerful than the majority because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. just like art, a small minority of people are artists, writers, thinkers, philosophers, etc.. instead of being complacent in society art is supposed to change that, challenge that, and not necessarily exist for arts' sake. it's not merely aesthetic in value but it shouldn't be didactic in nature either. language is like a scalpel, sharp and precise, not a hammer.

two, we are all alone in life no matter what we do to change that. yes you can get married, have kids, pets, all that stuff, but in reality we are alone and always will be. religion ignores this reality and creates a comfort blanket for people, like drugs and alcohol and sex and gambling and all that stuff do. it's a stop-gap measure that allows people to bear the knowledge (or ignore it) that we are alone in our heads, no-one will ever know what we are truly thinking about or how we really feel about certain things. that is why art is so dangerous, because it can be interpretted millions of ways. like leonard cohen says in his poem 'the genius', 'for you/ i will be a ghetto jew/ and dance/ and put white stocking/ on my twisted limbs/ and poison wells/ across the town'. the reader controls the artist, controls the words, controls the meaning derived from the work. as a writer i cannot tell you how to interpret what i write, i have to hope that the failings of language are not greater that the intent of my words. and that is how i know i am truly alone, i cannot tell you what i mean exactly, only an approximation. that is something i have to live with or die by.

i finally realised what 'the horror' is that kurtz spoke of in 'heart of darkness'- we are all alone in the dark recesses of our minds no matter what we do. it's only the artists, only those who embrace this that see life for what it really is, and this unfortunate truth drives many artists to self-destruct, to stick their heads in ovens, to hang themselves, to shoot themselves. just like john savage killed himself at the end of 'brave new world', the artist makes themselves obsolete by standing alone, because those who stand alone are never left alone. it's in our solace that we are savaged by the outside world. 'the man who walks alone is soon followed by the FBI' someone once said. it's when you have nothing left to say at all that you truly implode.

this isn't pretentious, it's just life as i see it. misinterpret me if you will, but you are wrong.

... posted at 9:34 p.m. by gleefully gloomy. ...

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