The Great Edward Cooney Jr.

“Art?” Edward Cooney Jr. bellowed, his magnificent barrel chest puffing up and shirt bursting at the seams, a button popping out in blind rage and traveling with the velocity of a spitball so several of the trembling students duck and cower in fear, “You call this flaccid end of a weeping cock ART?”

The object is in the middle of the University gallery space, a red metal folding chair with the words “DO NOT SIT” written on graph paper pinned to the back. “And who,” continued the great Edward Cooney Jr., in that voice that has been described as ‘a steam locomotive rumbling out of a tunnel at full tilt’, “And who, can I ask, is the maestro responsible for this pile of rotting horseradish?”

The two dozen dazed and cowed students tried to press themselves against the walls of the gallery, but as they were taken up mostly by a large three piece painting made with dried sea-weed and kelp, and a sculpture in the corner of a fat man’s body without a head or arms, they had to content themselves by crowding together and looking at the floor. Then a skinny young man in a fedora and a black suit stepped forward with a determined grimace and said, “Do you even understand it? It’s supposed to elicit response. You have to interact with it, you have to say, if I can’t sit on it, what can I do? It’s a folding chair, so if you fold it you have to let it fall to the ground or lean it against a wall. And then, why are you listening to what a piece of paper says anyway? It’s a postmodern subversion of authority and function.”

“A postmodern subversion of authority and function eh?” Edward Cooney Jr. drawled, “Let me tell you about authority and function. In my authority I refuse to even look at your postmodern shit-pellet, I refuse to interact, to sit or fold or kick it, I refuse even to acknowledge it exists. And my function? My function is to destroy.”

And with that the mighty critic two generations have hailed as “the sharpest observer of our age” steamed over to the lone chair, picked it up over his head and flung it at its author. The artist ducked just in time but the chair crashed into the sculpture of the headless and armless fat man which shattered in two at the crotch. There was a stampede towards the door. The artist screamed, “You’re just a critic! You don’t even produce anything, all you do is whine from an armchair at home!”

“By God am I critic!” Edward Cooney Jr. boomed, “And. I. Will. Criticize.” And with that he let a monstrous fist fly at the startled face of the man with the fedora. A photographer captured the moment just before the punch landed, and it was this picture that made the photographer famous. A decade later the University did a retrospective on the photographer’s works, and ‘The Punch’ as the photograph was known held the place of pride. The great critic had died a few years before of a brain tumor. It was said that he had suffered a series of debilitating strokes and eventually had a hemorrhage.  The artist who had made the chair dropped out of his program and went to live on a native reserve for several years working with a development program. He took peyote and proclaimed to have seen a prophetic vision. He now makes large sculptures in the Nevada desert that people like to dance under once a year. When asked about his art he would say, “A long time ago, before I was enlightened, I was punched in the face for a piece that I didn’t even make. After that I realized that the only way to live was to keep making things that got you punched in the face.”

He lives close to the desert and has many protégés. Once in awhile one of us will punch him in the face. Then we all have a nice laugh about it. He is a good man and we love him very much.

the unbearable lightness of peeing

So I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being again, after a period of some three years. I didn’t remember much of it, just a few scenes (colored park benches floating down a river, kinky sexual adventures with a bowler hat, intriguing philosophical reflections on Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, scatological musings, etc…) so I was able to sink into it more or less with a fresh mind.

Since I have changed so much in the interim of those years, it is difficult for me to read an author this didactic without some sort of mental protestation, some kind yeah but going through my head when I read his political tracts and this-is-how-things-are descriptions of mental states and behavior. Kundera is probably one of the most authoritative voices I have encountered, and if you don’t agree with what he is saying, you’re probably going to hate his books. There’s no arguing with him. He gives you characters and situations and tells you exactly who they are and what they mean. He doesn’t really describe more as proscribe, and so the worlds his character’s inhabit remain uncolored, sketched out. Except for a beautiful and startling comparison of a toilet to a water-lily rising out of the earth, this is not a book for people who like to be immersed into intricately constructed environments and atmosphere. What Kundera is unmatched at, however, is his structural form. His books are constructed as intricately woven proofs to complex philosophical ideas, so what you get is really an argument furnished by the ‘examples’ of character and behavior. What saves it all from being overbearing, obtuse or arrogant is that Kundera refuses to resolve dialectics – for every proof there is a counter-proof, for every successful explanation there is a foil. Shades of meaning build up on each other like musical motifs, like themes in a classical construction. And it also helps that he’s incredibly intelligent and funny in that wry, ironic smart-person way. Here’s an excerpt from a section explaining his ideas of ‘kitsch’:

1

Not until 1980 were we able to read in the Sunday Times how Stalin’s son, Yakov, died. Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed in a camp together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin’s son habitually left a foul mess. The British officers resented having their latrine smeared with shit, even if it was the shit of the son of the most powerful man in the world. They brought the matter to his attention. He took offense. They brought it to his attention again and again, and tried to make him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he demanded a hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as arbiter. But the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin’s son could not stand the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. He hit the target. His body, which would never again make a mess of the Britishers’ latrine, was pinned to the wire.

2

Stalin’s son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his father killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off. People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was, after all, Stalin’s son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off son’s friends in order to punish him).
Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe – no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.
Then, at the very outset of the war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other prisoners, belonging to an incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been intrinsically repulsive to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and Son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit? Were the very highest drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close?
Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo?
It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin’s son ran up to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.
Stalin’s son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country’s territories to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country’s power to the west – yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of war, the death of Stalin’s son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.

3

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me fright, because even though I had come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and God has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus “ate, drank, but did not defecate.”
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

4

In the fourth century, Saint Jerome completely rejected the notion that Adam and Eve had sexual intercourse in Paradise. On the other hand, Johannes Scotus Erigena, the great ninth century theologian, accepted the idea. He believed, moreover, that Adam’s virile member could be made to rise like an arm or a leg, when and as its owner wished. We must not dismiss this fancy as the recurrent dream of a man obsessed with the threat of impotence. Erigena’s idea has a different meaning. If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world. The penis would rise not because we are excited but because we order it to do so. What the great theologian found incompatible with Paradise was not sexual intercourse and the attendant pleasure; what he found incompatible with Paradise was excitement. Bear in mind: there was pleasure in Paradise, but not excitement.
Erigena’s argument holds the key to a theological justification (in other words, a theodicy) of shit. As long as man was allowed to remain in Paradise, either (like Valentinus’ Jesus) he did not defecate at all, or (as would seem more likely) he did not look upon shit as something repellent. Not until after God expelled man from Paradise did He make him fell disgust. Man began to hide from what shamed him, and by the time he removed the veil, he was blinded by a great light. Thus, immediately after his introduction to disgust, he was introduced to excitement. Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses.
In Part Three of this novel I told the tale of Sabina standing half-naked with a bowler hat on her head and the fully dressed Tomas at her side. There is something I failed to mention at the time. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, excited by her self-denigration, she had a fantasy of Tomas seating her on the toilet in her bowler hat and watching her void her bowels. Suddenly her heart began to pound and, on the verge of fainting, she pulled Tomas down to the rug and immediately let out an orgasmic shout.

5

The dispute between those who believe the world was created by God and those who think it came into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond our reason and experience. Much more real is the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation.
Behind all European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
“Kitsch” is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

out of the frying pan and into that place beneath the element that hasn’t been cleaned in a year and has crusted macaroni stuck to the metal like a stubborn and mildly intelligent fungus

Ah so. Here is a poem by Phillip Lopate which I think is very funny. Maybe you will find it funny too. And then we can laugh together, over the internet, invisibly, at different times.

We Who Are Your Closest Friends

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent
and torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.

to all the people I have been ignoring

I am sorry, I have been too wrapped up in my own enigmas to notice what was happening around me. Will I sound like a bad relationship break-up line if I say, “no, really, it’s not you, it’s me”? No matter, I will tell you a secret the towers of ivory have chained in the basement and whipped beyond recognition: cliches are trees that have grown so old that you must chop them down to see their living bark.

For about a month I descended into one of the worst depressive episodes I have had in years. I have been aware of these extreme mood swings since I was about fifteen, but never viewed them in an objective way until I was in my twenties. The time between awareness and response was the worst of it. In the first clenches of the illness I had very little control of my consciousness and its convolutions, and coupled with the generally dismal life I led in Sri Lanka’s glorious high-school system, I devolved into a maniac. I picked unwinnable fights, climbed over desks and chairs in the middle of classes, carried around a pen-knife and threatened to cut the throats of the few friends who stuck by my various tantrums. I did pretty much everything but froth at the mouth. At the height of my mania some bubble of twisted sense broke in my mind and I devised an alternate personality for myself, on which I could heap the blame for all of those abuses of sanity. I called him, in my melodramatic way, “Johnny Dead”, because to me he was a dead man, a corpse making his unconscionable way through the world, whose allegiance was to nothing and no one and who bore no responsibilities, not even to himself. Of course this was not true schizophrenia – it was feigned, an elaborate fable that I used to deceive myself and alleviate the pain of my actions and their consequences. I was a coward who could not own up to the fact that I had irreparably alienated myself from everyone. I hurt the people who tried to love me, I hurt my family and scorned my friends. This hurt was real, it was both physical and emotional, and the scars are still there, reminders of my brief descent into madness.

(Egon Schiele)

One of the reasons I was allowed to progress that far was because of a dangerous lack of information regarding mental illnesses in Sri Lanka. I had never heard the words “depression” or even its archaic, Freudian variant “melancholia”. If you were mad, you were mad and that was it. I was sent to a psychiatrist but I ran away after one session. I had no idea what was going on in my fevered head, all I knew is that it felt like someone had poured sulfuric acid into my ears and it was now sloshing about my brain, eating up the pink, quivering flesh in bursts of scintillating white pain. But then, after about two years, the madness subsided. Since then I have experienced only shades of that initial frenzy, a regular series of ups and downs that I have begun to chart with increasing accuracy. I have tools now, methods of dealing with onsets, relapses and recovery. My life is manageable, more or less.

William James, who suffered from depression for many years, wrote about it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.” And this is partially what is so painful about it, the inability to articulate it to others. Today depression has become one of the most overdiagnosed and overmedicated mental illnesses. A recent survey estimated that almost 25% of Americans will be diagnosed with some form of depression in the coming year. There are special sub-sections in the Self-Help aisles that deal with the issue, and several syndicated talk-shows that make it their bread and butter. And yet there seems to be a total lack of consensus on how to treat it, and even how to define it. The culture of depression we live in is as self-deceptive as the illness itself. It floods us with information and yet doesn’t say anything definitive at all. Yes, take your Omega-3’s to make sure your serotonin/dopamine levels are high enough; yes, get enough sunlight and sleep; yes, exercise regularly, do yoga and meditate. And if that doesn’t work, well, here are some pills to shut you up. Everything and nothing.

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Good ol’ Camus. A stalwart guide through the nether regions of existence. I could not ask for a better companion. And yet, there is such a gap between acknowledgment and action, resolve and force. And it is in this gap that despair lodges and grows roots, the gap between the top of the hill where Sisyphus stands, and the rock that has come to rest at the bottom. Camus died at forty-six, in an automobile crash. In one of most remarkable and insightful books I have read about depression, William Styron’s short memoir of his madness, Styron speculates that even though Camus’ death was not suicide, “he supposedly knew the driver, who was the son of his publisher, to be a speed demon; so there was an element of recklessness in the accident that bore overtones of the near-suicidal, at least of a death-flirtation, and it was inevitable that conjectures concerning the event should revert back to the theme of suicide in the writer’s work.” We need not look at the near-suicides to chart how depression has affected creative minds over the centuries. One of the more recent losses was, of course, David Foster Wallace, whose death came as such a surprise to me. I cried when I watched some of his earlier interviews; he seemed like such a warm, humble, affable man, someone with clear sight who had battled all his demons. And yet in the end he succumbed. His story “The Depressed Person”, which is near unreadable due to its relentless cadence of the pain/boredom/pain cycle, begins, “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its – as it were – shape and texture…” Sounds about right to me.

(Daniel Barkley)

And then there is the guilt. The guilt of feeling these things when there is a war on. This war is not necessarily a war of guns and IEDs, of machetes and rocket propelled grenades. It is those things and much more. It is a war of starvation, of privilege, of race and cultural appropriation, of violence even in its most subtle forms, as tiny nanomachines invading the bumbling body of the free-market, of land-rights and legislation, of unions and inter-union factionalism, of the language of oppression and the tools of the phallic master, of willful ignorance and bubble-gum pop, it is a war that is fought with words as well as fists, that is fought even in the gaze from me to you, the violence of lack. And how dare I become enmeshed in the politics of being when this body, this mind could be used in the service of the oppressed? I am not being facetious, this is a life or death situation. People are dying who do not want to die, people are suffering who have no cause to suffer. These people need not die and need not suffer but for the men who exploit them and use them up for their own lives, which they have judged to be worthless, but have then decided to fill that abyss of the absurd with the amelioration of material pleasures and comforts. There is a war on and its victims are mounting.

So the question then becomes: We who have acknowledged our absurd conditions, our meaningless lives, do we have an obligation to partake in this war? Must we fight against the bloody general, the machines of the dictator even as we judge that life has no value for us? To put it as clearly as possible, does the fact that other lives have value and those lives endangered and in need of help automatically confer value upon our own lives as agents able to alleviate at least some of the suffering of others?

These are not abstractions, this is the blood that boils in each step, the screams I deafen myself with each day. So tell me, tell me, tell me how and tell me why or tell me to just shut up and take my pills.

buried states

this marginal plain.

an abrupt exposed head.

the dominant zones loop away, entrenched under
seasonal sediment, backwater flooding,
patterns similar to abandoned limbs.

Sarah excavates a blocked gorge that was
formed in occupational drowning, an epoch
of black borings striking ancient
subsurface expression.

watershed junction.

Sarah considers a carved reflection,
radiate mouth and well-defined arcs,
scars lenticular, suspended above steeper
chords, features swampy, a characteristic
parent interwoven proof of an older trend.
Sarah meanders.

growth project linear.
history laminated and superficial, devoid of fossils.
quartzitic outcroppings bluff the definite.

body lithology brackish with siltstones,
cherty terraces and brown coastal marshes
gorge inclosed writers.

Sarah fashions agents of interpreted courses.

Bernard, however, maintains the narrowest of gaps,
only covered completely when Sarah is melting.
Inasmuch this rising epoch is comparable to an
upwarp in an English city, it is also older, Pleistocene,
interglacial. A coarser attitude remains.

Sarah and Bernard interfingering on beds of clay.

time logs its crest along fertile basins.
the younger ones align the gulley.

level up!

regenerative dance

Pilobolus has to be one of the most inspiring and talented dance theater companies around. Check out this piece they did at TED, called Symbiosis:

the films of Jan Svankmajer

Some astounding surreal video art from the Czech master.

1. Dimensions of Dialogue (11:15) – Yes, this is exactly what it feels like to talk to people. In fact, this is what it feels like to talk. We are creatures of discourse, created, propagated, replicated, destroyed. ‘Discourse’ has become a dirty word. Just how dirty, Svankmajer will show you:

2. Darkness Light Darkness (7:30) – By turns funny, absurd, disturbing and profound, I cant think of anyone else who’s articulated the plight of existence better in seven minutes. Wow, I actually used the phrase “plight of existence”. Forgive me. I’ll go and whip myself with dried palm fronds 23 times now.

3. Viral Games (14:00) – The contained, normalized violence of sport and spectatorship as only meticulously mutilated clay models can show you.

4. The Food Trilogy – This is making me hungry.

Breakfast (5:56):

Lunch (7:03)

Dinner (3:36)

5. Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (9:52) – Cold concrete, stale urine and a slow decay into insanity. Ah, the golden days of the gulag…