7th
Art
The countless attempts to expose you and I to the world, to tragedy, starting with a parade of black faces in Macbeth and then to a Touch of Evil, fallen upon deaf ears, transformed, and ultimately crushed, because we must hear, but instead we see, and when we see we see others, but when we hear we might take to heart and transform ourselves.
So many offerings tried on the screen, so many repetitions of theatrical guise, burnings and mortification. And yet, the Joker lives and so do we, holding up our two boats with moral indignation while a thousand other little ships collide and sink in deepest darkest Africa. We have refused to go there, although we are already there. We have refused to go to the deepest darkest heart, although, like our bold hero, we also strive heavenward in Faustian frenzy, struggling in our laboratories to construct wings both strong and light enough to fly away from the darkness we brought back and now feasts upon our children.
That our hearts also would become like wax and melt in the crucible, that our flesh might be transformed, but we cast light upon screens and struggle with color. There was a dance, it was all dance, it was all beautiful, so many smiles, and once and awhile a phallus. So we arose and sent our daughter into the woods where Wotan was waiting. And then because we did not understand what happened, we constructed a shrine. And this shrine was a ward against evil, but the evil was not what we understood. Was it Wotan or the laughing virgin? We did not understand. And so we burn.
And as we burn we live in a world of black and white. We know no color. This is reassuring until we reach the dead of winter, the cold shadow of waiting nuclear holocausts, and we shiver. We need heat. Our carven images do not suffice. And so we fall into the world of menstrual blood, not understanding this delicate process of death and life, of falling and rising, that preceded and will always be with us. We have only red; we no longer understand the meaning of sacrifice.
It might have been better to start with a verdant green, to start in the shade before attempting such a quest — which must always meet winter, but this does not guarantee that we would end up anywhere, except attempting to escape our insanity with other thespians or hoping that a new nihillism can bring liberation through the burning of past temples or collection of scalps.
It might be, it was, in some cases a loud death, a screaming death, although ignored by the mass of men because they no longer cared for or understood the struggle, or it might simply be a thud in the night or the time when are handcuffed and taken away to prevaricate our way to the truth of our existence by the ward’s psychologist.
The poem continues to hide behind myrid masks of deliberate construction.
Joel Dietz, on his Forum, Dunedain.net