It's just me

It's just me. I'm sorry.

Kant once alludes that Art can only be valuable when it is no longer useful. Perhaps this cannot be truer for the human endeavor, that I am only valuable when I am no longer useful. The more I ascertain myself into Design, the more I lose meaning in Art that binds my existing reality; I become a parody and pastiche at the same time. I am a parody insofar as my past no longer stands at a critical distance from my present, but it has been drawn into a Road that I can neither hope nor embraced. I am a pastiche insofar as what constitutes my self is no more than a random collection of speech, misdeeds, and thoughts that cannot possibly have gained any significant awareness through your self. Maybe the pastiche in me has provided moments of flippancy and laughter. Yet, in a bitter irony that – to be sincerely honest – constitutes an insult to the self who is blinded by the beauty of Design, the flippancy and laughter have provided a form of affirmation and strength within the ship of fools that drives everyone into madness and civilization. I can understand Marx when he says that all that is solid will inevitably melt into air. How could I not have understood earlier as I tried to play God and reverse the dialectical truism? I stand against the tide in the hope that the air that permeates Design and Art could be concretized into an affirmative realm. Nothing could have possibly been more foolish than that. I stand looking in, understanding the struggles, as an outsider, a third person, a has-been. Therein lies the greatest chasm. How could I have let those words slipped through my fingers? The prescription of silence would have been much harder to bear, but serves as a reminder of the chasm that negates and affirms all at once. Kandinsky says that Art should be about its own form; the independence from the world is the central subject of the world. I stand as an apprentice – looking in, understanding the struggles, a third person – wondering if it is ever possible to gain autonomy in the way that Art should be. Why, indeed, should there be autonomy at all, if the removal of Art does not, and has never, make or made a difference in the actuality of a means-end relationship? The Road that cuts between Design and Art has never been the road that leads into Design and Art; you can bifurcate it by sheer power, but the Kantian aesthetic – Art can only be valuable when Art is useless – affirms the negating distance that you are always near, but yet so far behind. If passion, as what Matthew Arnold describes as the sweetness and lightness that prevails, can overwhelm the Kantian aesthetic, by all means, let Art be inflamed by passion. But Art is not always literal, in fact, it often tells a lie to reveal a truth. I stand by the Road, measuring the burden of lying and being truthful all at once. I am none, for I am a mortal, in the realm of the less aesthetic. Even Adam, as accorded by Mark Twain, was but human; he did not want the apple for apple’s sake, but because it was forbidden; the mistake made by Providence was that He did not forbid the serpent, for Adam would have eaten the serpent itself. Forbiddance is a powerful emotive. Before I can fabricate the words that bind, I’ve second-guessed myself, and rendered those words into my own iron hands of self-censorship. Kierkegaard, in his biblical allusions to the omnipresence of Fear and Trembling, says that we can never be in a both/and situation, only an either/or dichotomy. Maybe the deathless part of me will never cease to pursue the ‘both’ and the ‘and’; may Providence have mercy and grace for the next leg of my journey, on the road that cuts, but never leads.