2024-09-20

Letter: With Regard to Art of Everday

To Whom the Poems R 4,

Firstly, a big thank you to anybody reading. I hope y’all have enjoyed some of the poems; I am always available at my email for thoughts. THE SOLAR-MYTH APPROACH has been taking me to new places recently, places where words mean what they don’t. Please read with an open mind.

Secondly, a new article is in the works. It is a VULTURES retrospective. I have no planned date for when it will release——expect it to be around 20000 words. It will cover every song from both albums, and it will take a heavy look at themes and innovations. Its purpose is to examine a body of work that has largely been deemed unworthy of critical examination by the media affiliated art critics. I hope some of y’all look forward to this, as it will be the first treatment of such a length written on these albums. It will be called “Dead Man Walking.”

Thirdly, a discourse:

What do our everyday lives consist of? In our time, it is a lot of working, commuting, and looking at a phone. The history of humanity is written on the backs of countless hours of difficult and incredibly tedious and boring work. We live in buildings that contain several lifetimes of labor in their stolid being. We drive on roads that death has paved. Every day we (or someone else must) cook and clean, travel from here to there. In the 21st century consumerist society, disposable income must be spent on commodities which feign to alleviate the oppressive tedium of day-to-day existence. This is a fact everyone knows but no one can truly say.

Why is it that when we look at our clothes or our goods or our houses, we are devastatingly removed from the process which brought them into existence. There is a holocaust in every t-shirt——it would be patronizing to explain.

And why is it that when we look at others, our friends or our partners or our enemies, we never consider how much of their lives and agency have been dictated by the needs of bodies or space. We believe in “freedom” in America, which apparently means something, but we Americans, just as all other people, spend the majority of our limited and finite time on Earth doing things we would never choose to do——doing the same things we did yesterday. What is “freedom” if your life is mostly determined? I can accurately guess what any reader will be doing tomorrow or the next day, because all our lives are the same.

We produce illusory feelings of agency within consumption, and we imagine that leisure is separate from everyday——it is the reward for enduring it. We can choose which treats to buy, but we all buy treats. We can all choose what art to consume, but we all consume art.

Despite what certain types of thinkers will claim, art is clearly necessary for human existence. It has been around since before recorded history, and though we are yet unsure as to what kind of need it fulfills (the absence of any physiological index will cause many to hue and cry), we can know the need is always there because the art was always there.

Artistic need is likely related to our need for leisure or time spent “outside” or “away” from everyday demands. We can infer this because art does not nor has ever dealt with the everyday. It would require a monograph to adequately address the subject matter of art, but here we can come up with some prevalent themes. Think about it: narrative arts like novels and movies are made with exceptions in mind. Tragedy, loss, supernatural occurrences, love and its excitements are what create narratives. There is no compelling narrative to be found in commuting to work, in the actual laying of the bricks. Much enticement has been created within imagined circumstances surrounding these tediums but little to do with the acts themselves. There has yet been portrayed a normal day at work within a film; there has yet been portrayed an uneventful love within a novel. ¹

We enter the weeds in attempting to discuss visual art or poetry. Most poems or paintings concern themselves with a type of beauty. A beauty within shapes/colors or an arrangement of words. But we see shapes and colors every day, we hear so many words every day——most of them are not beautiful. These fields then concern themselves with abstracting beauty from where it is absent (perhaps latent). A sunset is beautiful because it disrupts the day. A painting is beautiful because it was arranged——the natural order disrupted. The boring encounters with shapes or words are transcended to find something beautiful hidden within banal sensory information.

It seems, then, that we come to the sad conclusion that art is only capable of abstracting from the immediacy of everyday life.

But maybe there is a dialectical hope. Maybe in its process of abstraction, of mystification, a genuine sense of beauty can be brought into the everyday. We’ve all had an encounter with a work of art that made us feel “changed.” We walk out of the movie theater into the crisp night with a different world before us. For a few days things are exciting again, we cannot wait to cook or walk or make a difference at our jobs. Then the joy and novelty fade, and we find ourselves again in the throes of that from which we escaped.

But there are always more films, more novels, more life, until we are permitted to return.

Perhaps the critical theorists were wrong. Perhaps it is impossible to permanently bring into the everyday that which is so easy to recognize it lacks. But perhaps this is good news. It means we have a fighting chance. In our consumption (and creation) of art, we can struggle against the certain visions of pointlessness, toil, and despair to again refill our endemically leaking hole of love.

Consider it this way:
We play music to take us out of a present situation. Music elevates the mood, whether you be cleaning or partying. Music takes us out of tedium, at least partially, into a creative world with endless possibilities. But if music is always playing, it loses its effect. We wash dishes, we dance with the hunger of later silence, and the silence afterwards is more contented than it would have been were there no music. A wheel of stimulation and relaxation unto death. The push and pull——it will forever be necessary. We may only escape to later return——may well learn to love the return.

My heart flutters every time I look up from my phone.

Love,