"It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at "abstract" or "nonobjective" art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.
But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God..."
Clement Greenberg, Avant Garde and Kitsch.
Graham Gillmore, 2004
he said god, are there things in this life that are real?
& god said, son, there are. I will show you one. and he did and there was a hole in a man lying in a bed wheezing for the world and for all the time he had spent wishing that he wasn't.
he said god, that's awful, but didn't he have it coming?
& god said, son, every single one has it coming, but for mercy. and I will show you another. and he did and there was a family taken from the inside out and a man lying alone with chemicals and only a sharpened knife to call his own.
he said god, that's more than awful and my hands are now heavy stones and my ears are ringing for the blood pulsing on the inside.
& god said son, there are things in this life that are real. the blood in your hands and the air in your laughter, they are both of them real. but they are not the same, are you my own or will you seek another?
"It's enough
I wear my garment so it shows
Now you know
Only love is all maroon
Gluey feathers on a flume
Sky is womb and she's the moon"
flume, bon iver.
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