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2002
Literary Art
Visual Art
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In the Here and Now
Jason Scott
We have fixed up a world for ourselves in which we can live-assuming bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith, nobody would endure life. But the conditions of life could include error.
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science
A flock of philandering vagabonds seeking to excel only in lazing about, in primping and preening to counter the slow dread that soothingly creeps up our collective spine in this permeating night-such are we, here, now. With a flash of bared skin and the revealed throb of a sinking pulse, we dance a whirligig sunflower dance upon the upturned caskets of forgotten shades-a desperate ritual not to bring rain or sun as our solace, but instead to rid us of burdensome, annoyingly clear memories of the vaguely recalled backs upon which we have ridden to our great and terrifying heights. Our masks are blankly morose, utterly featureless and exceedingly tight-fitting. They reflect only the lifeless brown of despair and the bland white of ethical ignorance. All things of depth and clarity, of significance, or indeed in any sense indicative of something other than revoltingly unadulterated leisure, are whisked away by the polluting mindlessness sought after day after day and year after year by every newly burdened generation. Sloth is this day's god, and reigns second only to Death; after all, is not Sloth nothing less and nothing more than a mere doppleganger and servant thereof? It Is easier to believe than it is to know, to have than to get, to laze than to work. The most important activity for a lazing people, then, becomes this one central and life-consuming task - glossing gracefully over the notion that it is the ends of the easy that are precisely the disgusting in man. There is no great thinker in our age, no Sartre or Anselm or Dante to save us from what we have become. The excellently good and the excellently evil are not to be found in this day, nor in this place. We are wretchedly compliant, self-victimizing sniveling deaf for thousands of years have been feared as the nemeses of man and of truth: the enthralled and drooling denizens of a dank cave illuminated only by a silhouette picture show. We are a down-spiraling conglomeration of filth and waste, bereft in every sense and twitching our pathetic limbs in salute to the rotting idol of Margaret Sanger. Mirth, distraction, and drowsing mediocrity are the banners we fly over our mud-slathered dwellings. Our shining key has not been rusted by the years' corrosion, nor been destroyed by too frequent use, but has been twisted in a thoughtless frenzy of raging madness and brazenly thrown down before the doorstep of knowledge. We are not to enter. The biomechanical is the realm we now probe, the workings and intricate organs of things mortal: steel and flesh, scale and stone, the staggering pride born of the great bronze shield titled Objectivity. The death throes of the great philosophers, the cries of stubborn outrage and the indignation of beautiful, creating geniuses echo off the surface of Styxian waters and tickle our ears like the wings of so many fattened fruit flies, but to no avail, for we will not listen. The great movers and formers of the ancient world smirk knowingly, stirring in their lightless tombs with the grey twinge of prehistoric folly reborn. Our generation will not fall, because there is nowhere to fall to when one crawls in the dust. Such are we, here, now. Bow your blissfully unburdened head in homage, oh complacent one. Kneel obediently in the shadows of the centuries and be humbled.
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