Hood

I saw this young girl, still pink with naivety, cross-legged in the hollows of the skull, the masses calling “Red Riding Hood, Red Riding Hood”—drone of the din, the modern monsters incessant. Crouched in back rooms, peyote fog, they say such a name was for the cap of red—visions of velvet!— the girl’s grandmother gave her in the empty solace of Western holiday.

This same grandmother soon suffered the fall of the ecstasy of life, age withered in the long face of Time. Holy illness that does remind us of our mortality! Red’s mother, in kindness of the very human soul, said to girl “Cake! Wine! The holy food of life, for grandmother’s return to it with full strength. Bear such goods to the lone woman, wrapped swaddling in her cottage like Eternity in Time, the fifth dimension incarnate.” Eyes burning with the wide fire of youth— youth I have burned in shallow pipes!—Red agreed to the task.

Yet Grandmother’s house stretched far through the bending trees and Mother had seen darkness stagger from these same woods, howling and naked on its thin knees, and so she bid, between thick marijuana drawls, “Careful! I’ve seen it all! Stay on the path! Move swift and straight!” 

Mad youth, Red howled, “I am careful! I will be!” Then she pulled red velvet across her pale naked flesh, took gifts in hand, and set out on that old road, that beating beating road into Eternity. Holy, holy, holy road! And Youth upon it!

But only seconds had died, fading jazz in thick night air, before a wolf staggered into Red’s path, bristling with the ecstasy of physical power incarnate. With a voice of heartless horror, that fell empty on those naïve pink ears, he purred, “Where does this holy road take you?”

Wide tooth grin, fed white on the teat of middle class America—Closed eyes in box houses! They know not the road!—Red replied, “To Grandmother’s! The Holy, Holy angel lies in the fallows of age. Age that will take us all!”

To which the wolf, creature of waking terrors, responded, “Those supernatural brilliant gifts—they are for her?” with a madman smile bending into the very mind.

Stupid youth, sightless youth—she should have known! Now off the bridge! Into Eternity!

For Red nodded, “Gifts from the warmness of my mother’s brilliant soul.”

And the madman smile stretched for miles, thin and flat and knowing like that same holy road. In the bending caverns of his mind, he thought, “What a meal this child would make, what feast! Hallucinations of plenty! Visions of content!”

But blessed, blessed satisfaction would come only on the naked back of guile, like saxophone groan at the price of hipster breath in floating nights of peyote pipe.

So as Red took to the road once more, the holy road that waits in thick silence for all to return, the wolf moved with her, fed on a new mental fire—the same that all best minds fall prey too, that of velvet desire, of supernatural lust, of waking fantasies.

As they beat on, the wolf pointed, “Open your eyes! Emerge from your mind! See nature, see sunflowers, see infinite naked trees!” Red’s eyes swelled, suburban curtains pulled back, and she gasped “Flowers! For grandmother! But is there Time to pick them? Oh, Time that winds down never-ending, creating machine continuum beneath the supernatural night sky!”

The wolf swayed, desire of desires consuming, and replied “Time is a fickle mistress, curved into track marks of past visions on tenement roofs and she lends all she has to us now.”

So stupid youth, Red strayed from the holy road and took to the flowers, contemplating this mistress and all the extra brilliant colors that burned her eyes.

Meanwhile the wolf bore on— sweating, shuddering madman of desire— to Grandmother’s house, knocking wildly on the curving, curving door.

“What soul, warm loving human soul that does bend always on, is that?” Grandmother’s weak voice called, fading notes of all-night bop that die as the sun hangs itself.

“Red Riding Hood! Red Riding Hood with gifts for the staggering Angel, from Mother. Oh, the human propensity to Give!” The wolf replied, angry now with pale hunger for the fix.

“Open the door yourself, my ecstasy does fails me, after so many stretching years of pipe and jazz and days that blend.” Grandmother gasped, floating flower eyes wilted in salt water.

And the wolf, the madman, burst forth, silent with single-minded desire and consumed Grandmother whole. Oh hunger that wipes the memory! Hunger that warps identity in Time and Time in identity!

Then with mad ecstasy, he pulled Grandmother’s pajamas across his bristling flesh, the drug of plenty coursing through twisted vein, and took to her bed.

Supernatural starriness, that clouds the eye and the road, had risen to consume when Red finally emerged from her fantasies of flowers to Grandmother’s cottage.

Silence, unwinding thinly like cigarette furls, met her soft knock, so youth shuffled forward, inwards with swollen arms of gifts. “Holy grandmother! Holy, Holy elder, staggering, holy matriarch!” Red called, throat twisted with salt fear. Grandmother, but the shadow of some figure— dark thin outline, coagulating essence like gathering notes—lay tossed across the bed, caught by wind or fatigue with blanket tatters bunched about the chin.

“Grandmother! What big ears you have! And eyes! And hands! And mouth!” Red exclaimed, holy power of the senses, infallibility of human observation!

The wolf, caught in the tightening hand of intrigue—intrigue that buzzes hotly in the ear and twists sharply up the bending throat—smiled thin and wide in the grasped hope of compensation, replying “The better the hear and to see and to hug you with darling, darling precious soul.” Then he added, itching desire finally swelling uncontrollably forth into the gnawing silence after fallen words, “And why this extra enormous twisting mouth is to eat you with!”

With the jittery speed of craving—of early morning withdrawal, felt thickly over the geometric city horizon in the fog of last night’s indulged consumption— the wolf leapt forth and devoured the poor, poor, extra brilliant but no more Red Riding Hood, erasing her as all things are in the face of blind, senseless! sightless! Eternity. Then nonsensical, with brain itself eaten up by the aluminum teeth of unchecked hunger, the wolf fell back in sleep, form curving about the swollen stomach.

But a hunter soon came forth, form gathering shape, outlines twisting into sense in the supernatural darkness.  Throbbing testosterone amongst the trees! Cock in flannel! Course facial hair! Brazen, billowing manhood at its blindly revered pinnacle!

Hearing the groaning of exhausted indulgence, so un-feminine in its timbre, the young hunter paused along the holy road, human fear juxtaposed jaggedly with a naïve desire to intervene and save and make hero out of common man. Courage pooled in skull caverns, dripping thickly down into the muscles and finally prompting jolting movement into the wide unknown, through the leaning cottage door and across to the sleeping terror incarnate. A wolf! Flesh not of a woman but of a beast— expected shock but nothing, never like this!

But as the hunter was preparing to strike the creature of waking terrors, of daydream chills, an idea lurched forth from the oblivion behind the skull—the holy, holy staggering angel of age might still be saved, pulled as only the brilliant human soul and hand can from the heated depths of intestinal darkness! And tearing with the naked ecstasy of imminent heroism, the fallacy of the ego, the hunter brought forth first the velvet of a cape, then the youth bound to it and finally, blessedly, the elderly grandmother—who, so warmly relieved to be whole, to be independent, once more, forgot all illness. Mad victory! Disoriented reorienting! Life again! Holy rebirth from the pit of indulgence! Holy the stranger who pauses on the road! And finally, holy cake! Holy wine! Holy company! Holy a stomach of rocks for the creature of waking terrors! Holy the supernatural all enduring all encompassing human capacity to emerge and go on with ecstasy!

A Cycle of Inefficient Attack

While the pursuit of efficiency is certainly admirable, the scapegoating of a national norm, the penny, is entirely superfluous, let alone efficient, as it is merely a reflection of the human propensity for creating and attacking an external cause for wasted time, for personal failings, which here spawns a process that is, in fact, even more wasteful. But the elimination of the penny would not only be wasteful, but entirely repetitive, as it would make the nickel the lowest denomination of currency, leaving it in a position for future attack over its inefficiency--the cycle beginning once more, the national argument for naught.

Document B: In which the exact time for a cashier transaction using the penny is measured, down to the exact second and the total of additional time due to the penny is shown to approximate at about 4 hours a year. In a year of 8765 hours, this seems hardly taxing, hardly problematic. The true wasted time lies in the creation of such inconsequential statistics. 

Document E: This reveals the true national indecision over an issue constituents would have you believe was impending, was passionately shared by the masses. Many are opposed, or simply undecided which raises the question: are scholars like Gore actually rectifying and returning a nation's "wasted time" when said nation either either doesn't even notice this time gone or doesn't even care to get back. 

Document C: It is simply impossible to eliminate any and all low denominator coins, as the document claims other nations have-- the remaining nickel will simply assume the role. The goal seems to be the invocation of a sense of international competition that could surely play out on a more productive level.  

The Perceived Power of an Empty Command

The “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” street art movement, later shortened to simply OBEY Giant, was borne out of college induced boredom in 1989, when RISD student Shepard Fairey was rushing to make a stencil for class, and happened across an advertisement for the then popular wrestler. By the early 90s, this single stencil had been turned into thousands of stickers and posters, littering cities around the world and leaving passersby wondering, obey what? In a 2008 interview, Fairey admitted that in fact, this command— blared so convincingly beneath the empty, hanging eyes— means nothing, is entirely open to interpretation. And here in lies the true genius of the OBEY poster— it derives real power from “perceived power” (as Fairey described it), spawning fear of the unknown, the misunderstood, and thus spreading. OBEY functions as an experiment in social phenomenology—the study of how one perceives and processes external stimuli, a final conclusion resulting from a war waged between one’s own initial, objective response and any subconscious, socially derived opinions. Essentially, viewers see the image everywhere and see others processing the information and so they themselves assume it has a meaning, that there is something to process. If dialogue is sparked, and the question is obviously left unresolved, people simply assume there is resolution somewhere, that someone has an answer, so they keep talking, keep asking, and real power is borne. The melting black lines of an unknown face, coupled with the confident, senseless command thus create an enormous feedback loop to which viewers, at the center, are blind to but spurred on by. This loop, due to a lack of a message, paradoxically allows OBEY to convey an actual message, to reveal an enormous societal shortcoming: the subjectivity of human perception— our openness to propaganda and eagerness to assume meaning.

inarticulate

moaning and slobbering and bellowing slowly with each  expiration

with the trees buzzing, the glass broke, the drooping flower, the candles gone away

because we are all poisoned, beating the dry pulse of the decaying house where the fungi creeps as our own

because et ego in arcadia but a perverse mockery, found not death but the dead void and I am inarticulate

he can’t tell what you saying, he deef and dumb

but I can hear us all, only to moan meaningless and sustained, hopeless and prolonged

just sound but all time and injustice and sorrow made vocal

he can’t tell what you saying

but I can smell the sickness in this stalemate of dust and desire, this dark cool breeze smelling of ammonia as she is scrubbing, scrubbing what’s soaked clean through to murmuring bones, what’s the smell of trees now matted with vines and briers dark

he can’t tell. hush up. can’t you hush up. close your eyes.

but I can see and it was full of stars, smooth bright shapes, moving oblivious to the sound of their own dry pulse, desiccating peacefully in this too warm emptiness without peace, ticking without any hands at all.

Moving parallel courses like planets, fighting in the mirror, all pupil or all iris and dying aint all

there’s this.

I sees hit! I sees hit! I sees hit! the long diminishing parade I am part of

but the voice that breathed, ain’t you shamed of yourself, making all this racket, this moaning and slobbering and bellowing? muscle-bound and inarticulate, too innocent to protect, but all time and injustice and sorrow made vocal if I could say

get in. hush up. stay on you side.

I opened my mouth, inarticulate voiceless misery

and I began to cry.

The Power of Facial Hair

The Dada art movement emerged following the outbreak of World War One, as a sharp rebuke of what the artists deemed “an insane spectacle of collective homicide” and the conditions that lead to such chaos. The movement developed into “anti-art,” revolting against the banal aesthetics and appealing sensibility of what was societally deemed fine work of the time— aiming to shock, to offend and to disconcert instead. Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. does just this, and is representative of the entire trend away from reason and towards irrationality. With a few strokes, just small additions, Duchamp manages to reduce perhaps the most iconic piece of Renaissance artwork, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, to nothing more than a farce—exposing the delicacy of greatness, the destructive ability of one man and the meaninglessness of artistic esteem. Duchamp first establishes common, comfortable ground with viewers by using such a well-known piece. The Mona Lisa was considered to be untouchable— the holy product of an era of genius— and by suddenly destroying this painting so blindly revered, this common ground so mindlessly enjoyed, Duchamp proves the icon as breakable and the public conception as subjective to the whims of one man (namely, himself). The effectiveness of L.H.O.O.Q is in its shocking juxtaposition of historically feminine mystique with jarringly masculine touches—symbolic of the Dadaist struggle to walk the line between convention and creativity, between rationality and rage. Compounded with this is the piece’s humorous simplicity, using facial hair to raise fundamental questions about the principals of art. Does the artist have a duty to create beauty? But then, what exactly is beauty? Art should certainly reflect reality to some degree—is this piece not just mirroring the irrationality and ugliness of the war culture then, conforming to the generally accepted purpose even as it seems to rebel? By making a mockery of so-called genius, Duchamp gives the average man the power to answer these questions, to dictate what true beauty and art is. By snatching viewers’ attention, then startling them with such unpleasant changes to the norm, L.H.O.O.Q tears down stale, preconceived standards (represented by Da Vinci’s work) to allow for a new era of true creation.

In a Figure

In his “Allegory of the Cave,” Plato categorizes not just the natural world, but our very conception of it— breaking down the levels at which humans perceive and the pain that comes with complete sight. By creating a strict hierarchy, he is able to establish himself as an enlightened teacher, an observer, engaged in a dialogue that grounds abstract philosophy in common sense and a tangible situation. In this position, Plato argues for the link that must be made between the “world of becoming” (296) and that “of being” (296)—for it is only when thinkers “descend among the prisoners” (298) that universal enlightenment will be achieved. However, Plato takes his categories— in both the concept and the structure of the text itself— to an extreme, losing the integrity of his idea at places, and it is only when he finds unity in such numerous divisions that his argument is clearly imparted. 

            Plato begins with prisoners in a cave—able to see only illusory shadows and not the realities behind them— and then moves to higher levels of understanding as one man emerges and slowly accepts the sun. The natural world is broken down into “the shadows… next the reflections… then the objects themselves” (294), and while this strict hierarchy allows readers to understand each level independently, something is lost in such divided progression. Readers are never fully exposed to the true, interconnected variety of life— forced to take “the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven” (294) separately— and so they cannot appreciate the natural world in its entirety, as it realistically exists. By failing to establish any sort of unity between these levels, Plato does not achieve complete cohesion, further hindered by the disjointed flow of events—the man moving in and out of the cave seemingly without cause— and his student, Glaucon’s interjections of “certainly” and “I agree” (295). The text itself is also organized into a hierarchy—readers receiving only what Glaucon understands, Glaucon understanding only what Plato shares, and Plato sharing only what the prisoner experiences. This structure distracts, the actual philosophy somewhat lost as it travels down the chain to readers.                            

            Plato is most effective when he breaks out of these levels, this hierarchy, and appeals to the senses with concrete imagery. By “show[ing] in a figure… our nature” (292), he synthesizes mankind’s vast struggle into that of a single man—clarity coming on a smaller, more personal scale. He then ties “virtues of the soul” (297) to “bodily qualities” (297), grounding what’s intangible, like knowledge, in something tangible, something physical, like eyes that can be seen and understood. Plato places readers alongside the prisoner with his repetition of the words “suppose” and “imagine” and then evokes pain, a primal sentiment that stimulates thought, with his descriptions of “dazzl[ing]… excess of light” (296), followed by sharp darkness. With these simpler images and clearer dichotomies, like that between light and darkness, Plato can move beyond grand pontification and infinitesimal division to address what’s fundamental about the process of human understanding.

He can force readers to stand at the cave’s mouth and see the sun— make us feel the pain of thought but the necessity of  “endur[ing] [this] sight of being” (296) nonetheless. He can show us a way out of the cave.