Wrong Notes
Everything is funny if you wait long enough.
We sleep. We wake up. We eat, digest, shit, work furiously, sleep. "Work furiously" is the tricky part. Without that, we could be seen merely as two-legged animals with our own set of endearing and unendearing qualities ("easily housebroken, affectionate when horny, often eager to help but given to frequent outbursts of dangerous violence"). Which is more unlikely? That this small, hard, brown object I can hold in my hand, if given a proper setting and sufficient nourishment, will become an OAK TREE!? Or that this small animal crawling on all fours and dirtying its diapers, if given a proper setting and sufficient nourishment, may 30 years from now produce a visual snapshot (called "art") of such stunning magic that we fall mute in its presence!? Culture: the white noise of surf, endless waves, all the same and all different. Or: a planet whose surface, now rocky, now rich, produces cycle after cycle of life and lives, from jimson weed to orchid, toad to eagle, python to porpoise. From Caravaggio the murderer to Hitler the painter. Give Bach some time and a keyboard and you get the Goldberg Variations. Give Mao some time and a billion people and you get the Cultural Revolution. Give Buddha some time and a bo-tree and you get the Void. Give the Incas some time and a mountain and you get Machu Picchu. Give Pol Pot some time and a chaotic imperialist war next door and you get the Killing Fields. Give humans with their two-part brains some time and you get selfish sons-of-bitches who'll kill you in a minute if you don't share their self-constructed myths. Where, here, are the wrong notes? Where, here, are the bad teachers? Where the bad pupils? To take more, to make more of it, than does the violet you just stepped on is to miss the point. Never mind. The next wave is already coming. END
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The human comedy, the Great Chain of Being, the theater of the absurd,
Lulliput, Brobdingnag? All of the above? None of the above?