On festivities and utility

MET exhibition: primal arts of oceania oceans are passage ways to the past in these tropical rain lands, the program note says. in modern eyes, those oceanic canoes are the means of traversal; maps and vessels are art and transgression. all the arts here look cute and are framed cutely, cute bodies and cute faces carved out of wood, especially as compared to the sensual and arching bodies of greece and monet one floor above. sometimes I think about what’d happen if there’s an earthquake and the floor collapse and psyche - in her writhing body - falls in to the arms of the silly hay body mask and those empty eyes made of white marble looks into the empty eyes made of braided grass. In a movie that’s when you have silence except for a cello playing an F and you blast it through the movie theater speakers. such are symbols. beautified and objectified and fetishized in our imagination, molded to fit our beliefs; or do they have some inherent integrity within them to protect an ancient truth? - tools as art and art as tools - doesn’t matter because what is truth if we don’t believe in them! I remember there was a body mask with wide eyes and wide mouths and empty armpits that are spirits of the deceased; men who are close to those who had died will wear the mask into the village “for a celebratory feast and dancing…and by the morning, they are expected to return to the forest and never return to the village.” such are our humble lives on earth no? we wear the spirits of the dirt between our toes and grass between our fingers and the air through our hair and feast from sundown to sunrise, and then we return to the haystacks among fireflies and primordial chirps. Such are symbols of festivities embedded in our genes before the invention of language, and the truth is that festivities are meant to end in cosmic void, eternal slumber. Which is maybe why the greeks drank and threw week long feasts and olympics when soldiers died; which is maybe why Dionysus is a god. =================================== Diary entries on festivities irl: Early June: dear sf, you have been gentle indeed. all the rains i had walked through without getting wet, except for that one night when i stood with no shoes in the backyard and the turf stones squeezed water into my adidas socks and that began my cycle of undone laundry which probably nourished the spider under my bed. Late July: dear , i don’t know who to address - sf? i’ve talked to you enough. july? i think i have lost my interest in july after the first few days of fireworks. … july was the most magical when there were festivities. they said humans needs such festivals to remind ourselves of the existence of magic, the hard won sleeping in days in elementary school when there are parades whose historical significance i had yet to understand playing on tv and red ribbons clean and crisp or ragged and damp wrapped around lamps, or fireworks that this year are dampened in the fogs above the sea but nonetheless magical because of the smell of hotdogs and that on my lone walk back to soma i was less scared because of explosive sounds in the distance of fireworks and the parade of people back along with me who could not get an uber. this little migration of humans is a form of magic in my eyes. and so is the collective decision to sit on dolores park on a sunny day - you see there are some biological and animal instincts in us that are completely harmless and completely useless but which shows us that we are the same species and in the same lineage as dogs and fluffy tummied birds, and on this thought the world feels softer.