~H. Westchop

I have decidedly moved on from Gladwell and his banal drivel; someday I will address his exploitation of the western world’s currently abject terror of the mongrel races, but that will be another day, far from this one.  I can barely allow myself to even beset my bloodshot eyes on his horrid little white book, and, even for the dear reader, I refuse on all grounds to read another poorly-analyzed word.

The truth, dear reader, is that Gladwell’s idiosyncratic tabulations, the precis of his pontifications on the role of the rice paddy, the Asians’ relationship to math, his exaltations of their single-minded nature, their refusal to give in, to fight against the dying of the light, their beehive, their socialistic practices that even now make my heart beat harder in my chest, the blood surging as a current of rage, it all is part of a grander battle, the battle to end all battles, the intellectual crusade of the past 200 years,(from the death of Romanticism to the Victorian progress, to the dead thrush pecking at the hollowed Chestnut tree, an image in stark contrast to the nightingale of Keats) the war between the Humanities and the Sciences!

In this cursed country that I live in, Art is thought of as little more than some kind of local, neighborhood investment.  A museum is no different to a ballpark, to a city square, to a mall or shopping center.   Only market forces drive its creation, the rich elite and its donor-based tax subsidization,  these institutions which cater to these idiotic socialites.  There was once a cultural impetus in the humanities, in Art.  There was a time when Art stood for culture and pride! James Joyce wrote Ulysses to propel the Irish to and above the level of the British. He was competing with Shakespeare, with Homer and his Odyssey, with Oliver Wilde and his northern Irish sensibilities.  Of course, his works meant something to those intellectual elites who read him, but his success meant something to the common Irish people as well, to Dublin and all that inhabited that wondrous city.  It was a fight! That is the power it can claim.  W.E.B. Dubois once claimed “Art is Propaganda,” and he was right.  Dubois was afraid that the southerners that had enslaved the black populations for so long would try and define their culture for them and, in fact, were, from early poems written by whites about blacks, all the way to the 1930s and The Jazz Singer.  Black Face is reprehensible in this country precisely because of what it means for a white to attempt to define a black…through art! Through theatre, or dance, or music, or film, or poetry, or prose, through anything! Dubois knew that Art must be claimed by his culture, must be made its own.  Hence propaganda.

A blog post is never enough space for a protracted argument on what art means for society, so I merely want the dear reader to keep this attack, concerted attack, in mind.  The Analytics would have you believe that any axiological consideration, any statement of value, is near-useless; the logical positivists denigrate and slander ethics and aesthetics at every opportunity, instead espousing the virtues of a philosophy of science, of epistemology and, in their greatest sin, the philosophy of language.  In their attempts to decode language, to try and “clarify,” they seek to dissemble and destroy the beauty that can be derived from the written word.  Beauty is absent clarification, it is non-scientific, it is the antithesis to logic.  Poetry is ambiguity, it is the comparison created by puns, the absurd connections created by metaphor, the irony of a narrative turn.  ”Clarify.” I do not speak such a word, I spit it out as poison.  There is a delicate potential for beauty in every word we speak.  It can be arranged in such a way, its meter can be held, it can trip us up, or slow us down, or allow us to flow with a rhythm, or bring us to tears.  If we try and codify, reduce everything to an either/or, to a logical notation…where is the beauty in logical notation?  The world is grey, it is not black and white.  Our understanding is limited, and even science can never profess to allow us to “know” anything.  Every theory is waiting to be disproven, even the supposed untouchable Newton’s laws were proven wrong by Einstein.  Every law falls apart, and in the end, can we ever really know? Can we start from a beginning and move down the chain of time, from cause to cause to cause, to find us here?  Can we reconstruct ourselves through the laws of science? Is every experience I’ve had, every sadness and happiness I felt, explainable by this neuron firing here, a neuron that evolved from this animal, that was created because of this sun exploding, that exploded because of this law, and that law and here, and there, until we are at the beginning, and the gods are dead, and magic is dead, and everything, me, you him, her, art, life and love have all become nothing more than part of some grandiose equation, a variable, explainable, dismissable, meaningless in the “grand scheme.” The battle lines are drawn for me, as I refuse to believe such understanding is possible.  One side seeks, implicitly or explicitly, to define me completely and, in doing so, denature me, destroy me, render me as a machine, programmed and explainable.  Functional.  Simple.  A series of numbers.  I call this blog Rhapsodic Nonsense, because I refuse to accept anything but nonsense.  I worship nonsense and its impossibility, its stupidity, its unreasonableness.  I love it.  I sing a rhapsody.