Wednesday February 7, 2007
CULTURAL ESSAY
JOHN HOSPODKA
© John Hospodka 2007
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Wednesday 07-Feb-2007 13:49
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RETORT
MAGAZINE ISSN 1445-7164 |
A Brief Statement on the Age of Irreverence
Let’s
do tons of cocaine tonight. We could close down a 3 a.m.
bar like we used to – trading off ever-shortening
stints of paranoiac snorts in the john, and then afterwards
stumble-marching back to the pad to crank half-songs and
to jabber over each other’s too slanted conversation.
We could again feel as if the cumulative noise of our
individualities might morph into a demand for presence.
But, really, who do we know who we can call anymore? We
know this one guy who might be able to make a call for
us, but we haven’t put him in our cell. Besides,
we’re not into dying the way we once were. It’s
not that we now have a wife and a dog that we treat as
if she’s our very own offspring; no it’s not
exactly about all that. It’s just that we seem to
have come to terms with something as we smoldered through
the rejectionary pop cultures of our over-stayed youth:
there is a life for us in the fear of death.
Wedging our own high culture between a voice that paints
a nearly elegant “fuck you” and a vision that
aspires to face our own expressive limitations, the whole
thing about our intellect back in the day was to try and
make sense of how reality’s definition began to
redefine distraction: Let politics go twelve-step for
us. Let religion lose another election for us. Let artsy
sell-outs get the excuses out of the way for us. Back
in the day, we figured we’d grasp a greater command
of the outside world’s dramas by turning a masturbatory
camera onto our price for de-sexing guilt.
Funny what happened once we started sighting our age.
The eyes became like those kinds of eyes they call ‘Poet’s
eyes’: wallowing, and yet somehow seemingly unburdened.
But our guess is that real poets don’t need any
kind of eyes. We can’t really eyeball the imagination,
can we? We’re half the time lucky to even be catching
a glimpse of the goddamn thing’s creations: we’ve
amounted to the crisis of a condition progressively prescribed
by the context that truth has no history.
If we had any hair on our asses we’d follow through
with what we joked about doing when this day of reckoning
finally came around: starting up a heroin addiction and
our own garage band. We wouldn’t give the band a
name (this occurrence wouldn’t represent a “statement,”
it’d come about because we’d never be able
to arrive at a unanimous decision), and the first lyrics
we’d put to music would be along the lines of “The
underground zine that announced us yesterday / Is now
a household name for attitudes gone gray.”
We really did do okay staying away from the MFA, and in
our heads running as far away from our BA as we could.
We grew to learn that the trick of reflection doesn’t
need schooling to be honest, or to get at the nature of
anything in an honest way (it’s because of this
we doodle our secrets in the margin between essay and
fiction). We came to discover that there’s a passion
to humility that tends to repeatedly out-class the classroom
– that humility out-classes the classroom because
its passion has a more hard-bitten suspicion of pride
(it’s because of this we’ve never misplaced
our manners).
And because we’ve always aspired to be the choice
of dropouts across the land, we’ve always known
ours is an audience that’s never had the inkling
to submit to pretense. And because we’ve readily
questioned for those who’ve never acquired the motivation
to elucidate, we’ve never had the inkling to borrow
the single fashionable eccentricity of the indies: phrase
over phase. After all, our art is a fetish, not a festoon
– fostered in thesauruses; unfounded by dictionaries.
But, what do we know? We’re just sitting here at
home on a Tuesday afternoon trying to piece together another
version of our resume, one that might better match the
charitable peak of our half-ass anarchy. Remember back
in the day, when we believed that it’d be only at
the checkout counters of second-hand bookstores where
we’d finally prove suggestive?
So instead, let’s do dinner tonight. The wife would
probably like that better anyways. Quieter; and hell,
who can remember the last time we nosed around in any
real decadence? Let’s roll a fatty, smoke that bad
boy up, and head out to a steak joint for dinner and a
martini or three. Who knows what the wife’s got
in mind for tonight, but once she gets out of her meetings
at the office we’ll ring her up and tell her what
we’ve decided upon. It’s the maturity of our
excuses we’re descending into – we’ll
be the ones saying how we wrap our heads around the unapologetic
from here on out.
