the habit of being

The foundry had a chill, despite the artsy kids’ breaths, white in the air, the doors were not closed. Faces were insane and thieving. I stood carving with some bizarre metal version of an Oriental hair piece a woman out of proportion, nude, lacking detail, and bent to fit the square. Later the pot of hot aluminum glowed orange, bizarre men (well, they were graduate students) suited up in full protective armor lifted it and poured. It went from cherry to silver, silver, silver to black soot only to be brushed away, leaving my lady (Matisse-like, said another) cold as I was.

One (other) day: Comic relief. Over there are six music stands all in a line and a box on the wall talks, shouting orders in a Southern church lady’s voice. And the people come and go, talking of disputed politics, as if any of it mattered with all the factors identical and exact. Still the robots wonder and wander around all dogmatic and all afire. (Killing children?! Saving face!) This is, all combined, a scene, a still. Still life, no life. All life is no life, but Meursault may have a thing or two to say about that. All life with frightening music pounding the air, breaking through, shattering nebula after nebula, hammering us down all days in all ways and we will give every fantasy, our very air, as we are indeed noble breathers.

In a city much like your own small inconsequential town, a quiet boy (or “young man,” as your grandfather might say of his being oh - seventeen? or is it eighteen? these details tend to matter more and more these present times - silliness) is given an assignment by his art instructor (a man, supposedly - once married, fathered a now obese little girl, divorced, and dating a past co-worker, English teacher, for years and years - but to look at his penmanship, prettier than my own, questions emerge) to take two images (from the mangled pile of old magazines, excised of all unlikely introns - the pretty pictures, my dear, I suppose, though how many could there be in the latest edition of Popular Mechanics?) which are not usually found together (what is it about TOGETHER these days?) and to include them in the same composition. Not a hard task, and most students will not think of it at length, instead grabbing (greedy, sticky, “young adult” hands, where have you been?) at once two scenes they find cute, appealing (the boy who plays football will pick out a picture of an NFL team, there’s no shortage, and the girls whose eccentric grandmother courts stray cats for pillows may snag some unsuspecting Persian from her wine glass of top-quality cat food for elitists with a few swift snips (alright, that was a bit, much, I admit). No one contemplates paradox really, there’s no time wasted on concocting a meaningful juxtaposition or creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts (they all know that if they simply do what they’ve been told they will make A’s if they are careful and B’s if they are not - schools are not allowed to grade on creativity, artistry, or any such subjectivities)….. Ah yes, our young man (the one in our collective mind at this moment), he has chosen a picture of some factories and a picture of a man holding a hoe. He will paint with cheap tempera, elongate, and his piece will be chosen for a state art show, where a snooty lady will tell him and a room of listeners what it means and how important it is, only so another can step up and enlighten the group about the finer points of mixing colors and how animals jostle for space in her abstract compositions. You tell me what the moral is.