A fine mess you’ve got us into said Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel. Even then, messes were what we secretly wanted, as long as order would be restored by the time we left the theater.
What is a whodunit other than the illusion that wrong-doing will be
righted and mystery resolved? We pay money to be transported into the unknown
with the expectation of a return ticket.
Order is a tenuous state. Disturb one part and the whole network trembles.
Disorder, over time, is perceived as a new order after our resistance
dissolves. Life doesn’t hold still for a minute.
The itch gets scratched, then disappears. A broken narrative, Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring or Picasso’s prismatic POV were all deemed subversive until our
sensorium rearranged itself. Now, we might regard Monet as a cliché though the
blur of early impressionism met with outrage in the salons of Paris.
The poet, Stanley Kunitz put it this way: Order is greatest which
holds in suspension the most disorder, holds it in such precarious balance that
each instant threatens its overthrow.
If the sort of order created in words or
paint is not easily decipherable that’s because we are not yet fluent in their
terms. Our senses are slow to move; too comfortable in rhyme and reason. Poetry
gave it up long ago. The world of unreason is a Wonderland full of delights as
Alice discovered.
I’m talking to myself trying to find some
measure of alignment with the chaos. I am adrift in the irrationality of
geopolitics and our embrace of a quasi-deranged flim-flam man. Of course, the
news as it breaks is no artform; more like the sea we fish are swimming in.
There are periods when conformity begs for a dose of upheaval to quake us alive. I don’t think this is one of those times. Now I am longing for those good old days of civility, constraint, compassion and common sense. As for art, I am waiting for the bus to elsewhere.
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