Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

38. THE DIANE ARBUS WEATHER BALLOON FLOTATION COLLAR


1. A GUY WALKS INTO HIS PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE DRESSED IN NOTHING BUT CLEAR PLASTIC – PSYCHIATRIST SAYS “I CAN CLEARLY SEE YOU’RE NUTS!”

After all whatever else it’s taken me so long to get here that I will proclaim the following “all things on Earth are true” and you can figure it out from there Talos because REALLY I want nothing else to do with it – in any case haven’t the time – so sit back instead and follow the dots where they lead (or lead the dots where you may) or read the dots and then follow (fellow) : ‘OMINOUS HALLUCINATIONS’ things that have come down to us from Heaven and stayed for millennia – MOST of them have been misconstrued or tinkered with and twisted out of shape and because of that ALL RELIGION IS A LIE and there’s more than you realize to the sky (manic little boy riding his tricycle through the hotel lobby and the entire hotel is deserted and scheduled for demolition and the only people who are left there are homeless crazy waifs who have nowhere else to go NOTHING at all and they are consigned to die where they fall and the meager little boy CRAZED WITH HIS OWN UNKNOWN DESIRE rides his fierce tricycle straight at them settled together on a flaming couch and just before he gets there the tricycle of his dreams lifts off and he is suddenly airborn and carried BY HIMSELF straight to his own violent future ! and two Chinese gentlemen also sitting there begin to write both notes and fortunes with a calligraphic brush on the now outsize and well-illuminated walls SOMA ! JOLT ! oh extra satisfaction too ! “I was loyal to my father behind his back” the one man says and the other agrees but replies “really so ? I hated my own mother fiercely until that day she changed her feeble ways” and the first man (throwing calcified yellow domino bones says back) “I was a scourge to his face but I wouldn’t hear NOT a word said against him by anyone else” and they both thereby agreed that SOMETHING was up (“I won’t know ‘til I’m finished” was the last thing I heard) and regardless of deception or any other calling it doesn’t always matter where you come from what most often matters is where you’re finally headed : ‘in the snow there was nothing visible WHAT BABIES THESE WRITERS CAN BE there’s nothing worse than ‘sentiment’ it’s a truly killing emotion and whenever I see it rear its lazy head I cringe in silence and return to what I was doing quickly aware of the uselessness of any endeavor because ‘tears can ruin everything’ and ‘nothing so silly sports life as emotion’ ! (heard that at a card-game once uttered by the principal and his wife) and the real true key to life ANYWAY is to ‘see without looking’ – AND once you can achieve that you’ve accomplished – more than anything else – that which really just has to be done and (I think to myself) ‘I’ve seen Diane Arbus’ Roselle NJ twins and I know exactly where they live and what they do and I watch them daily together with their Siberian husky eyes and their infracted colonoscopy dawdling eager hands and the two of them together sitting back to laugh both turn instead to crybabies whisking away and even as I watch them I shudder thinking they shoulder both their burden together ! cameo roles in a horror film ? I think not - rather they’re actually quite sweet and loveable tender and dear together POSTER CHILDREN FOR DNA WITNESSES TO HEREDITY’S POWER to send us into the world fully formed and DOUBLED if that’s our luck and if you look closely at these twins (1967) they’re dressed and coiffed as symmetrically as two halves of a Rorschach blot with even their bobby pins in the same places and the little details of dress hairstyle and makeup become clear and important when they are viewed as details with import for EVERYTHING – even gesture – communicates articulately the very ‘what’ of what we are in life and the differences however slight or significant (and they are actually quite significantly different) in their facial expressions hold keys to the deepest mysteries of their individual personalities and whatever secrets each they harbor and if WE ONLY COULD decipher but once we’d then be able to decipher every one and the whole entire world BUT have these twins instead become ICONIC ? which means have we stopped ‘looking’ at them ? not the most fortunate fate to befall a work of art for when we call something ‘iconic’ partly what we mean is that it has become possible to see it without looking (PARADOX : ‘to see without looking’ is at the same time a great Zen-like goal) and once we can summon an image from memory and reconstruct it in our minds and interpret it in ways that become convenient substitutions for the image itself we may lose our motivation to revisit the actual object as often and to study it as closely as we should (‘we stop returning to it for the periodic soundings that it can provide on the subject of how we and the world around us have changed with age and maturity and in the course of time’) AND WE INSTEAD must strive to brush off the obscuring patina of iconography and see ART in fresh ways while we amend and deepen our own partial memories and surface impressions AND THE CASE OF DIANE ARBUS of course like that of Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf is both confused and deepened by the fact of their suicides (in Arbus’ case 1971) and the fate of such female-artist-suicides is that self-murder lends a sort of romantic and even ghoulish luster to their reputations and causes their art to be seen selectively and often inaccurately through the narrow prism of the manner in which they died but (in any case) what is this romantic fog which we spread like buttery-moss over the lives and myths of these dead people WHAT is it and WHY is it attractive to so many ? I often wonder ? and the answer which comes is (in one word) ‘WEAKNESS’ the weakness of weak people being attracted to other weak people and some weird and supposed nobility of their work and station - all in reality garbage and trash - for the well-mined state of exaltation collapses when embodied by the weak and they emote over everything and they too-earnestly send spittle and tears together flying (‘and the world has little use for the weak and they are soon subsumed and covered by events and replaced in their own decrepit weakness by things and by those over them with far stronger constitutions and actions’) and ANYWAY these are the same people – the weak ones who won’t do anything – who in their turn want everything done for everyone - want famines solved and wars ended and problems researched and vast sums of money spent in helping the un-help-able or the otherwise helpless and maybe why don’t they all just gas themselves anyway then they won’t have anyone else anymore to blame YET ‘photo records remain of many great calamities of which large numbers of fatalities and otherwise mortal injuries occurred and for those things recorded we have the early photo-journalists to thank and it behooves one to think of all we’d not see had it not been for those brave souls first walking into scenes of carnage and destruction’ and momentary stoppage and rehabilitation and the re-education of millions and FOR THAT MATTER Mao Tse Tung a’swim in the Yellow River…and so thankful we all very are.