Art is like a million different ways of sending a secret message to ourselves to tell us that the house is on fire. We know this intellectually, but the mind tries to minimize the impact. It invents pastimes, habits, wars, gossip, drama, toys and social gatherings to block out the reality of the burning house. It's so hard to wake this mind up.
So that's the message: the house is on fire. You are in a very precarious position. You are really here, and you are really going to die someday. But the worst part isn't the dying; it's the not realizing you're actually alive right now. You're letting it all go by you like it's somebody else's movie and somebody else that's gonna die.
Read the graffiti on the wall. It's written in a thousand different languages, and in a thousand different colors. It's scrawled in blood and dirt and paint by millions of little hands. And it says the same thing over and over: the house is on fire.
...and the fire is beautiful.
ReplyDeleteSo happy you got a blog going, can't wait to read what's on your mind.
Interesting... certainly a good take on the Synecdoche, New York imagery. But somehow I imagine that every awakening is within another dream.
ReplyDeleteI wrote this like three years ago,so it's totally unrelated to Synecdoche. I got there before the other Kaufman did. And yes, I certainly am not making a statement about death being bad or that it's the final curtain of everything. I don't have anywhere near enough information to make a statement like that (and neither, I think, does anyone else). Maybe we will awake into another dream, maybe not. Nevertheless, consciousness and identity as we currently experience it will definitely end. So we should make the most of that experience, however illusory. If it's all an illusion, then it is meaningless to say it's an illusion. Saying that nothing is real changes nothing.
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