Kiss My Bas-Relief!

I am the nephew of a Great Man. Never mind that he could never freakin’ stand me! This guy, a professor and celebrated writer for the ‘middle class,’ was an arch-reactionary deep thinker who never did a lick of work in his life.

Early on he determined to be a writer. He wrote a couple of books while still in his twenties. What did he have to write about? Blah blah blah, his life growing up as a Jew in Chicago. Coming of age books, they’re called today. Who cares? Those books laid there like bombs until much later when he became celebrated, and then they were judged, in retrospect to be ‘brilliant.’ Get the hell out of here, I look at these books, and they’re still bombs!

I have writing and scholarship in my genetic makeup, which I successfully resisted during my youth because I was living in an age of non-linear anti-intellectualism, and I liked it. I never wrote a word for years, accurately estimating that I had not enough authentic knowledge to impart to anybody.

I had a wild life, but that is not the subject of this opinion. I worked and learned things the hard way, but I also kept up my reading because – that’s my nature.

I never wrote a word until it finally all exploded out of me like a pressure cooker. That’s as it should be, rather than try to squeeze stories out of an empty toothpaste tube the way so-called ‘writers’ do today, giving themselves hernias, and the end result being some little lame epiphany which impacts on the world’s determinism as much as a bug squishing on the windshield of a speeding vehicle. Not for me the little moralistic formulations of an overly-indulged superego.

That doesn’t mean that the lessons of culture have been wasted on me, and as I grow more mature I find the meandering intellectual trajectory I follow inching ever closer to that boring straight line established by my close-minded and reviled antecedent.

Is this perfectly clear?

I am currently researching the lives of medieval and Renaissance Italian artists. This I initially embarked upon as a diversion the way lesser intellects fill their minds with chick lit or John Grisham courtroom potboilers, a diversion to kill empty time on the bus, but the hundreds of pages describing the frescos, murals and tapestries covering every square inch of the interiors of palaces and cathedrals of Florence, Pisa and Rome soon overwhelmed my spirit as though a little man with a hammer and chisel were sculpting bas-reliefs on the interior of my skull while baroque trumpets rang in my ears like church bells accompanied by a heavenly chorus of cherubs singing hallelujahs from the ceiling of the Santa Maria del Fiore.

The descriptions of the procedural aspects involved in the planning, conception design and execution of these vast projects, as well as their spiritual, intellectual and cultural underpinnings are demonstrating to me that civilization does not follow a steady trajectory of progress, at least in matters of culture.

I read a description of a project for a door of the San Giovanni church in Florence in 1398, seventeen tons of casted brass recounting biblical fables consisting of nude figures, draped figures and animals sculpted in three levels of relief and cast in a wood-burning furnace constructed right at the site by the artist, Lorenzo Ghiberti, who was only twenty years old at the time.

Compare that with the level of culture extant in the modern world, where ‘artists’ nail their penis to a board or shove paint up their ass and then squirt it onto a canvas, and then sell the piece to an advertising magnate for six figures.

I always loved pop culture like The Rolling Stones or Richard Pryor, and for this I earned the derision of my middle-brow uncle who could not stretch his mind far enough to conceptualize his pot smoking nephew as any more than an imbecilic philistine. I still hate him for that.

But now I find that the contempt he bequeathed to me, I am passing on to the next generation, indeed, to the world at large. 200motels

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Posted on 12/25/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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