Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! by Joseph Riippi

Author:Joseph Riippi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Do Something
ISBN: 9781938604768
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2009-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

1

I went off the deep end. Went way into it. Not that what happened was Margot’s fault, or that it was David Elliott’s, either. But I had been a critic. A critic looking at beauty always with a dose of cynicism like you have to if you’re going to be any good. Harold Bloom says that all a critic can give, as a critic, is deadly encouragement to artists (poets, he was talking about), and always remind them how important art is, how great the responsibility of the artist. One of the differences between Margot and I was that she didn’t consider what I did to be art. Poetry, lyrics, fiction: that can be art, she said. But writing about art? There’s just no way you can make a piece of writing more successful than the original object you’re writing about, the truer object. But I think it’s like Nietzsche said: there are no facts, just interpretations. Subjectivity rules all, etcetera—and by facts I think he means real things, objects, exactly what Margot was arguing is the “truer” art. My PD, my psych doc, he tells me I was attracted to her because she knew what she wanted—to be an artist, however she defined it—whereas I thought I was already being one, it just depended on another level of interpretation. And that’s exactly it, the PD says; I had to look at what I did a certain way in order to feel okay about it. And I knew this. I knew I had to convince myself. Not just about her but about everything. If I had something I wanted to say about music or art, drugs made it easier to find the right words. The world, my PD told me, is all about perception, how you look at things. No shit, Spivey, I said. And that was that. Since then I’ve been reading some Sartre I found in the library here, and you now how he said Hell is other people? I’m sitting in this fucking hospital and I swear to you it’s worse than No Exit. Some kind of cruel joke, keeping that book in a mental hospital library. Anyway. Art, if you think about it in terms of Nietzsche and Sartre and Hell and God and Nature, art is just something changing interpretation. The object itself isn’t art, it’s the interpretation. I mean, Sontag defined art as stylized, dehumanized representation, and I think she’s right. It’s the neurons firing, the electricity of the mind changing direction. The position, not the disposition, she would say. That’s the art. I thought about this and asked my PD if he thought about prescribing drugs as an art. He said: Hmmmmmmm, I’m not sure. And I said, Because, you know, that makes everything I see a work of art. And then he just looked at me like Margot used to, and said I needed to calm down.

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