Thursday, September 27, 2012

Marie Antoinette Eats Cake, parts 661 - 664

661. Creation was all so natural in our childhood. We built forts in the woods, and stood looking at out handy-work in rapt admiration, created plastic models of war ships,  built snow forts, and cardboard condos out of refrigerator boxes, soap boxes with roller skates and two by fours, and painted faces on our hands and made our hand say stupid things. When we were children all our pleasures came from the things we created, judging everything by Picasso's rule - I made it so it is great, period.



662. But then I went to work in the post office, and for thirty years never did a single thing that meant anything to me, and when I retired, I was beset by this restless longing to make something  but everything I managed to do seemed so cheap and tawdry and pointless compared to the so called "great artists", that the powers that be keep telling us are so important. Anything a person like I might do must therefore be of no consequence.


663. Those were my self deprecatory thoughts as I drifted off in my own mind as Buboni was talking, but I was brought to attention when the Duck interrupted him in his didactic way, and, like he always did, threw the discussion in a different direction, giving it a broader and deeper significance. "People" he said, "long to be creative, in imitation of nature which is the only truly great creator of art.


664. Let us consider a grand landscape stretching back for a hundred miles complete with rivers, lakes, sloping hills and all of the distance dissolving into mist. Nature creates this panorama of infinite complexity and furthermore, alters it with subtle precision every second bringing in more sunlight to caress it with a touch only light can bestow, or with a few clouds casts a foreboding darkness. What you never realize is that nature observes this creation and swoons with delight over it.

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