Groundbreaking

Groundbreaking. The ground is broken now and I’m falling through the spaces left. “Keep swimming” they say from atop high towers that they have built themselves from paper clips and old sand paper, “You’ll get to nowhere as soon as you open your eyes.” But my eyes are only slightly closed, not willing to let them become the cliché “Eyes wide shut”… they have taught me well.

I stand there among the mud angels given the blue ribbon along with the toilet in the art museum, the vacant flickering room, the blood-covered statue of Mary titled “Bloody Mary”, and the dying dog tied to a wall in a far off place where it’s tears are artfully appreciated as tall men and women gaze at it and say “How refined are we, those that understand that this is not a dog dying before our eyes, but indeed, it is art, a representation of the human condition.” The human condition fell a little more from grace the day that dog died… and a little more when the artist was asked to repeat the masterpiece once more for an art convention of featured works of the year.

“You will be graded on how original your pieces are,” says he the Grand Wizard of Sound. WS likes to be referred to as WS because these two letters are not actual Chords to be played in the traditional world. He tells me that he would cut off his head to be different as long as he could survive… because all hair colors have been taken and shaved heads are overdone… he insists to wear a cardboard hat fashioned in the shape of a half-rest. The words “ART is TRA… figure that out and you have understood all” are written in yellow and blue ink on the front of the cardboard hat. I think he made it. It looks like he made it during his office hours at the University.

Pulsing light and sound fall into a jigsaw puzzle glued together in an alternating pattern of “Jigsaw piece of sky” and then “Jigsaw piece of popcorn kernel”. At first I am confused. Then I slowly am realizing that different puzzles are involved here. There is an Autumn Tree, A New York City skyline, a rusted truck, a procession of killer whales, and a broken window. Somehow the composer managed to decompose these images of sound into a mosaic of pieces that are stuck together with globs of glue and frayed tape. I’m looking around the room and the ones with golden hats are nodding. Nodding they smile and grin to one another “Ah! This is refinement! This is the cutting edge! This is Art-with-a-capital-A!”

And I understand that art is all around us
That the world itself is Atonal
And that my usage of a semi-colon here; makes; me seem. Groundbreaking.

:,,,;.,.;,:,;…,;; but I was sitting in the kitchen once, my hands holding the cool glass of lemonade, smelling the slight scent of peaches on the spring air as a faint tune wafted in through the screen door from the backyard… and it was my grandmother’s soul singing to me… and it was old, and it was faded, and it was crumpled, and it was beautiful. Beautiful. Like a prism scattering light all around the room before the mention of tombs. It went with the silver records and the jukeboxes that people used to gather around. The beautiful is dissected to say that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” … it is, but do not hold my beauty in your eyes, please, do not tell me what MY beauty should be.



But beauty doesn’t matter. It’s the meaning behind the madness that is what you want from me. I will vomit on canvas and outline it with my toenails. Groundbreaking will get me an A, indeed. But; as, long_ as the tones of souls linger, on, the, air, I will rather not be here.;.,;;; I would rather be there with my grandmother at the kitchen table, hearing my Grandfather recite old hymns he knew from when he once was a practicing Catholic, before he became an Atheist; It was the only time I ever heard him sing, and it was not Groundbreaking, but it did break my heart.