GOTHIC FUNK MANIFESTO #4
15 November, 2005
A response to earlier comments made:
If history is a river of convergent channels, and we are the rocks and impediments that block its path and roll along beneath the surface, then Wollunqa is the great snake that slithers back and forth just above us, blotting out the sun, grasping some of us some of the time and rubbing his scales against us to scrub away the algae and make us gleam and shine.
* * * * *
Those of us who spend our lives looking for her passing and hoping to catch her, to ride her back and forth for as long as we can hold on, start to give our victories names and to assign them places. You should do the same.For example, I remember more from when I was four than from when I was three or five or six. Then, I remember the springs prior to my twelfth and thirteenth birthdays with great vividness. I remember the summer during which I turned fourteen. As I came to understand these passages as *passages*, I started to connect them with their source, identify cause: the Michigan Renaissance Festival from 93-95, The Last Roar and The Seventh Dream at FYT, my first relationship, the Denison Young Writers Workshop, seeing the Smashing Pumpkins, drafting Urbantasm, and Anne Frank and Me. The University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt, The Skriker with the Black Box Underground, The Cenci, meeting Jessica, the Caucasian Chalk Circle, writing Adrift on the Mainstream, starting the Occlusion Group, and getting married.
You should do the same.
* * * * *
The artists of today are too resigning, too self-effacing. Inertia is, like death, a certainty, but it a certainty often effected by our efforts to keep it at bay. Artists who do not claim to create art that will save the world will not create art that will save the world. Artists who do not claim to create art that has never been created before will not create art that has never been created before. Artists who see themselves as passive stones, as victims, as incorporeal ghostly entities will remain subject to the politicians, the entrepreneurs, the churches, and the galleries and the publishing houses of the world. Artists who view the institutions as tattoos and ornamentations they apply at their leisure for utility and community will come to manipulate and control such institutions.Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle to bring about social upheaval. He thought that he failed miserably. In setting the bar so high, however, he became a practical and tangible force on the world.
* * * * *
The first Monday of December write a story about a serpent.The first Tuesday of December write a poem about a serpent.
The first Wednesday of December write a homily about a serpent.
The first Thursday of December write a eulogy about a serpent.
The first Friday of December write a joke about a serpent.
The first Saturday of December draw a picture of a serpent.
On Sunday, compile a copy of all these materials, look up the business address of the senator, mayor, councilperson, judge, bishop, rabbi, or professor most-applicable, and put it in the mail.
Try to grasp the serpent's tail. She's slithering around up there somewhere.
