The ramblings of an idiot fool

4 AM again... and I'm still awake. I'm all adrenalin-y from the haunted houses and the lively conversation, and somehow, as always, I'm finding myself staring off into Infinity, seeing every possible outcome and every possible future and I can't bear it. There was more to this post, a discourse on the human condition and about how we're all greedy, insufferable bastards, but I deleted.... You know, in the interest of keeping things positive.

I found an old story I wrote waaay back when.... Back when I was "good" as my mind seems so inclined to think. It wasn't that it was a terribly bad story, just hideously underdeveloped and juvenile. Well... I was so young then, wasn't I? That's the point of art to a certain extent; it reflects the soul of the artist. I'm a huge believer in the idea that the artist and the art are so inescapibly bound that there is very little room for the spectator, the person who's enjoying the art, in the whole artistic experience. That is to say, when you look at a Jackson Pollock painting, what you're seeing is a reflection of himself. It's such a huge thing, to stand in the room with something so great and profound as a person's soul on canvas, and the experience itself is so profound that there's very little room for yourself in the experience. Suddenly, there's this moment of clarity and you realize that what you are experiencing is something so completely unlike anything you, yourself, are capable of conjuring, that you become what Jackson Pollock was when he painted it, and you catch glimpses of his madness and his genius and his beauty.

It's the same moment that comes over you when you're truly experiencing music in its most perfect, undiluted form, when you're standing among a sea of other people, entranced with the musicians on stage, wrapped up in something so beautiful and so intangible that you can't separate yourself from the person next to you, and you're all one breathing, sweating, weeping thing, overcome and overwhelmed and drenched completely in the auditory.

It's the same moment that comes over you when you read a verse that brings tears to your eyes and you don't even know why. You never went walking in the woods in winter as he did, you never saw the rain or the stars or the human spirit the way the author did, and yet you're there, with the author, weeping over a choice that was not your own and you could not make, and yet you were so heavily invested in that choice that you couldn't help but cry out when our hero made the wrong turn.

There is no such thing as bad art. There are bad artists; artists incapable of evoking the artistic experience. I blame Twilight on Stephanie Meyer, and I blame Piss Christ on Andres Serrano and I blame you for having not experienced the perfection of true genius.