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kingtycoonSince this all began I had this one in mind.
I consider it an act of some kind of discipline that I didn't paint it before now. Heroic! Well, or anyway, something.
But yeah - I knew my Fool would be The Student. The fool is all about beginnings, origins - Kal-El blasting off from Krypton, Batman's parents getting shot in crime alley, Abin Sur's ring finding its way to Hal Jordan. I could go on (chemistry accident in the city police lab etc...) The thing about origins is - they're just... They are false.
I was compelled to add this -
Which appeared in every schoolbus I ever rode in. Smoking. I mean, I like smoking- who doesn't? Liars? It's smoking, you shouldn't do it but it's a nice time, everyone knows that.
But look at it like this- so you get up early to ride the bus to school and there's a sign on the bus forbidding you from smoking- you've never thought about it and sure your parents smoke, your grandparents too - it's a thing. A fair thing, just something to notice. But in '63 the Surgeon General figured out you shouldn't. And before that people walked miles for a camel and before that people traded other people for tobacco and before that there was the green leaf of the red man - and before that- well there wasn't a columbian exchange. My point is only that there is a history that precedes everything.
Bruce Wayne can say his parents getting killed after seeing the Mask of Zorro made him into batman - but there's the whole thing of there being his parents with the means to see a movie, and then movies, and then Zorro and then Gotham and then guns, and then the Wayne family, Gotham's founders, the Finger Memorial the whole long chain of events - Columbus and the new world are just as responsible for Batman as Joe Chill - that's what I'm saying.
Our origin stories are contrivances- the broad gulf of history has lapped at all shores, it makes all of us and not just by the discrete elements that have shaped our experience directly, but by all the indirect nuanced elements that have led to thins like compulsory education, books, buses, clothes and shoes. There's so much in the world - all of it piling up. When we start to notice it all - really experience the whole of history and all of the West or the East or whatever civilization we belong to bearing down upon us - well then.
Then
Then we get a little curious, we get lost in the details in the long chain, in the elaborate details, we become students of what's transpired and brought us into being. We can't tell what's important, in our origins, before we know what isn't.
The student isn't foolish, just distracted, just sitting on the bus, all alone, forgetful of the moment in the deluge of the past, trying to make sense of what is, and how it came to be. Trying to see and find and have a place among events.
Because history is events, now is events - the future - it's a thing we conceptualize as being composed of events, being hastened by events. It's not the future till some arbitrary expectation is met - flying cars, hoverboards - whathaveyou. But are events? I mean - is it even a cogent thought - think of it - Are events? What are they? Can they be said to happen? What is our criteria for an event? Arbitrary. Personal.
The Student - #0 - doesn't know it all, but is starting to, is starting to see between the cracks in the official story, is starting to care about the interstices, the world - and how it's made of less than what it appears - all facts of science and math - and all confusing, alienating and driving. The Student is #0 because the student is at the beginning - not of life or of the experiential existence of the phenomenal world- but at the beginning of an abstracted life- based upon ideas, knowledge and the hard-to-swallow exigencies of life itself.
My Student #0 is lost in information, ready to learn, but learning true things, or alienating things, not participating in the world, but diagramming it - knowing it for what it is. Foolish as that sounds, there is value in that learning, foolish as it is, there is worth to knowing just what it is you are getting yourself into.
I consider it an act of some kind of discipline that I didn't paint it before now. Heroic! Well, or anyway, something.
But yeah - I knew my Fool would be The Student. The fool is all about beginnings, origins - Kal-El blasting off from Krypton, Batman's parents getting shot in crime alley, Abin Sur's ring finding its way to Hal Jordan. I could go on (chemistry accident in the city police lab etc...) The thing about origins is - they're just... They are false.
I was compelled to add this -
Which appeared in every schoolbus I ever rode in. Smoking. I mean, I like smoking- who doesn't? Liars? It's smoking, you shouldn't do it but it's a nice time, everyone knows that.
But look at it like this- so you get up early to ride the bus to school and there's a sign on the bus forbidding you from smoking- you've never thought about it and sure your parents smoke, your grandparents too - it's a thing. A fair thing, just something to notice. But in '63 the Surgeon General figured out you shouldn't. And before that people walked miles for a camel and before that people traded other people for tobacco and before that there was the green leaf of the red man - and before that- well there wasn't a columbian exchange. My point is only that there is a history that precedes everything.
Bruce Wayne can say his parents getting killed after seeing the Mask of Zorro made him into batman - but there's the whole thing of there being his parents with the means to see a movie, and then movies, and then Zorro and then Gotham and then guns, and then the Wayne family, Gotham's founders, the Finger Memorial the whole long chain of events - Columbus and the new world are just as responsible for Batman as Joe Chill - that's what I'm saying.
Our origin stories are contrivances- the broad gulf of history has lapped at all shores, it makes all of us and not just by the discrete elements that have shaped our experience directly, but by all the indirect nuanced elements that have led to thins like compulsory education, books, buses, clothes and shoes. There's so much in the world - all of it piling up. When we start to notice it all - really experience the whole of history and all of the West or the East or whatever civilization we belong to bearing down upon us - well then.
Then
Then we get a little curious, we get lost in the details in the long chain, in the elaborate details, we become students of what's transpired and brought us into being. We can't tell what's important, in our origins, before we know what isn't.
The student isn't foolish, just distracted, just sitting on the bus, all alone, forgetful of the moment in the deluge of the past, trying to make sense of what is, and how it came to be. Trying to see and find and have a place among events.
Because history is events, now is events - the future - it's a thing we conceptualize as being composed of events, being hastened by events. It's not the future till some arbitrary expectation is met - flying cars, hoverboards - whathaveyou. But are events? I mean - is it even a cogent thought - think of it - Are events? What are they? Can they be said to happen? What is our criteria for an event? Arbitrary. Personal.
The Student - #0 - doesn't know it all, but is starting to, is starting to see between the cracks in the official story, is starting to care about the interstices, the world - and how it's made of less than what it appears - all facts of science and math - and all confusing, alienating and driving. The Student is #0 because the student is at the beginning - not of life or of the experiential existence of the phenomenal world- but at the beginning of an abstracted life- based upon ideas, knowledge and the hard-to-swallow exigencies of life itself.
My Student #0 is lost in information, ready to learn, but learning true things, or alienating things, not participating in the world, but diagramming it - knowing it for what it is. Foolish as that sounds, there is value in that learning, foolish as it is, there is worth to knowing just what it is you are getting yourself into.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-11 11:40 am (UTC)