Anachronistic Anarchist by Herb Eaton

At the middle of the vast midwestern prairie, it is the beginning of the inside time of year.  The pumpkin-spice hazelnut decaf with cinnamon and a dabble of nutmeg coconut-silk creamer time of year, the lavender-scented butter cookie on a doily discretely separated from cream cheese pecan slathered apple-cranberry toasted rice cakes, time of year, followed by a chardonnay  with raspberry vodka over crushed lemon-ice; time of year.  And it is the scented candles time of year.

Here at reunion of the anarchists dining vignettes and folding tables are open, books about bucolic idylls can be discussed, while seating jealousies among images of a misty-auric rural past. Dated readings for urban tastes with an olde-timee perfume fantasy.  No actual noxious animalian smells wafting from the shoes of those who once tended to the butchering or brought in the fish to be cleaned.  The stooping and plucking stories are about garden flowers, not subsistence food.

On the tables, lit antique bombs (oh those old feelings!) will serve for candles and include a different part of the olfactory picturesque;  disconcerting bits of pain burning oily creosote-soaked, metallic dusted, and sulfuric fuses.

Off the subject, just a thought; but have you noticed sometimes autumn rivers don’t carry enough water to hold all that should float away, and they silt-up;  dropping sand in whirling shoals that trap floating leaves and decaying smells in emerald algae pools?  Maybe they are (peace?) or natures gossip gatherings.  Disjointed itinerant memories, stilled, enfolded in moss;  open to quietly awaiting the frost, if not for those present at least they might be for the lonely. The lonely in the manner of things to basic to expose; the rage at passings, eddies of panic, damp muddy abandonment, floating alone.

Well, just a thought…

…as the rivers roll on and we are, for a time, indoors. Hopefully we will get some art shows up in the Temporary Museum of Enfant Terrible Culture, and look forward to decorative seasonal emotions.

He and She, your long-patient docents, were to have been giving you a tour of the  wonderfully sophisticated white-walled upscale galleries here at the Temporary Museum  of Enfant Terrible Culture, but alas more delays.  This delay due to antagonism towards “Pastoral” paintings, which await hanging on those white-walls.  The lack of support by the anarchistics is focused on the question of how rustic/serene paintings could ever have a significant theory with the “critical edge” necessary to be included among their highly emotive, and superior system offerings.

Rustic serenity, it is a bit difficult for the average anarchical reunion attendee.  Simply put, conjuring the rustic is just getting props and costumes, a new accent, maybe some sheep.  The serenity part though,  requires escaping into a complex simplicity, and acceptance of the dirty disheveled itchy part of nature, the smells of rotting wetness (there is always something dying), the scratchy sticks and insect buzz.

This opposes the attendees sophistication which requires compression into complicatedness,  and acceptance of the dirty, disheveled, itchy-palm (financial) part of modernity, the concrete chaos-perfume (there is always something dead), the scratchy-chic strangers and traffic noise.

Enfant terrible behavior, cosmopolitan instincts throwing emotion-bombs; would be dissipated, consumed, and unnoticed in the rustic landscape.

As the stress built at the gallery of the Temporary Museum He and She, as you can see, decided again to wander off to the river, somewhat disguised: (keep a careful distance, lest we interfere). Once again their actions are an enigma…a misguided mention of a memory?…an inappropriate answer?..some mysterious duplicity?   Maybe its’ only a rustic-serene moment as they expunge some bit of adhered sophistication.

Later, maybe eased somewhat, and better able to be with you, He and She will rejoin you and the others.  But now…

…they temporarily escape the imperious and infantile and confront only each other, maybe desiring a picnic, maybe an island of something enjoyable;  maybe a floating mystery..

…or, maybe,  the pleasurable gifts of October.

The air is chilling, and people are gathering, join us next Saturday…

A ringmaster is a character, benefitting from the glorious uniform of authority.  A costumed tyrant for circus performers, all nicely trained and willing. Can it be readily placed upon a new animation?

Center stage, bright lights, a whip perhaps for effect;  we must dress a ringmaster; and  acknowledge the authority of a costumed character.  This old circus tent housing the Temporary Museum of Enfant Terrible Culture probably has use of a discipling  ringmaster, charged by the clothing and position, grasping the antics of the gathering crowd, whipping into the middle the few for a momentary swirl in the spotlight.  Center stage, authority; far from the edge of the ring, the borderlands, the undisciplined, the audience.

Beyond the ring of authority, bombs, dramatic explosive emotions;  lurk in desire for the spotlight.  Near bursting with desire; anarchic borderlands, lair of a nemesis and the scenes of many a hero’s tragic notoriety: anticipate the limits of the ringmaster.

At those limits trifling bombs are exposed to create fury and fear: some reach the point of self-animation, and grow.  Most remain distinctly artificial.

The ringmaster and the nemesis whip belligerent valor folded into their own, to be hidden, hoarded.  Authority keeps a distant witness in the tragedy (definitely not an actor);  but uniformly claims the scars of those who took the hits and fell graceless, at the edge of the ring, the no-man’s-land, the borderlands, and into the audience.

Join us next Saturday, out beyond the tent ( maybe some peace).

It seems we have worried you about the literate anarchistic types, but bypassed the anachronistic, the more common:  ghosts and “stuff”.

They are here, 16th century ghosts.  Amorphous Everyman types have emerged from the donated stuff, the recycled stuff that well-intentioned folks have left for “art projects, found-object sculpture, etc.” at the entrance to the corn-crib.

It seems old men (living or dead, poor when young) still need “stuff”, still want to be possessing “stuff”, “stuff” that would have made their epoch easier. It seems with “stuff” life would have been better, brides prettier, bullies more quickly smote, winters warmer. “Stuff”, the Everyman’s embarrassment if not having  whatever “stuff”…that “stuff” that  vanquished material embarrassment. “Stuff”, the solidified influence, protection, et al,  that property bestows; the “stuff” to fill one’s belly using the appropriate accoutrements.

It seems that a banquet is part of “stuff”.  Now of little value to the ghosts,  but once reason for tools and gadgets, money and items of barter,  weaponry and flags, trade and transport, all outdated here at the reunion of anarchists.  It seems the ghosts aren’t artists or hungry, so why do they clamber though the junk and left-overs?

It seems, (always a great introduction meaning “really, who knows?”),  it seems, that a reminiscence always brings forth the puzzle of the truly or falsely known.  It seems that the life of a young man is now the ghost of an old man.  It seems that ghosts may still feel the spirit’s pains of hunger and lack of material wealth, and so rummage through that junk deposited at the corn-crib;  grabbing perhaps at a future (what would that be?).  A bomb, rare in their day, lays fused and tempting. Can it emote today the glory of their immortal memory, even if delayed?  It seems antique to us, it seems modern to them, it is, or seems to be anachronistic.

Yorick, himself from the ancients, ponders that this day is closer then all that junked and rotting “stuff”;  it seems, that isn’t remembered.

Join us when we consider the arc of words and pundits…next Saturday…

Here at the reunion someone will get attention.  Should sympathy ever be extended to the  foolish egoist?  Maybe some unified discipline, some compassion, for those who would lead?  Certainly leading anarchists is not a job for the meek, the injured, the tired, or the weak; nor the philosophically coherent.

Compassion for artistic dominators?  Once a stone-tipped spear made a point concerning cultural superiority, sinking deep into the belly of a contrary idea.  Now decades of bullet-proof artistic magazines are a glutinous belly-full, worthless sometimes before their publishing. Vainglorious invectives meant to guide, using wordy dominance.  The dominated uninformed receive the same compassion (not much) as those who are out-dated.

We have been “gifted” the contents of the Library of Artistic Manifestos, dropped at our tent door, presumably by the generosity of someone who did not note the “temporary” in the Temporary Museum of Enfant Terrible Culture.

As many anarchistic emotive artistic types have written, or at least outlined, a manifesto it probably is appropriate that someplace archives the piles of boxes, notebooks, and reams  of loose-leaf (and loose-thought).  We had not agreed, but now we have them.

We have no intention of reading all this stuff, but we have a certain compassion (if you will) towards the effort of writing all this stuff.  Possibly, by just holding on to it, eventually someone will hire (or convince) a student intern to unpack the boxes.  Then a doctoral candidate can compile the interconnected dissonance, sorting out the oracles of blunt truth and historic amalgamation.  Then, digitized, esoteric ideas of communal wrongs and grudges can be funneled into personal theoretical bombs, fused and ready for the throwing: all energized through daily social media clips of outraged invective.

Until that day, we have insisted that all of this should be elevated to higher-ground (the attic of the corn-crib), a bit of compassion for the past and the potential future.

Join us Next Saturday when we consider the ghostly accumulation of “stuff”.

Peeling back history;  looking for proof of one’s remembrance, especially for bad boys, has brought some dead artists together with some very young pre-dead artists:  searching digitally for evidence that the oldsters still matter.

Amidst the searching of catalogues the above image was discovered, titled “Yorick the Dane” by an obscure Italian artist c.???? Yorick was shown the work (unfortunately in the presence of a pair of 20th century anarchistic feminists) and recalled his halcyon days with the famous Prince of Denmark doing puppet shows in Italy.

Pointing out that manipulation and ass-grabbling was a popular form of entertainment at the time, was probably inappropriate given the audience present.  Some additional morally-focused questioning types wanted to know if the puppet was meant to imply the Princes’s mother, the Queen of Denmark; given her future dramatic characterization.  It is difficult to note blushing on a skeleton, or interpret eye-contact and other bodily clues, but he did mumble that the Queen was “an honorable”…something.

Being forgotten can be very trying for emotive types.  Most only found obscure mention with little “c’s” by their dates, “c.” meaning “circa” meaning “about (but not quite)”. Others noted their names in vintage auction records with small black and white reproductions; a small number, a very small number, found lush reproductions in learned books.

Searching for our own memorialization untainted by whatever has transpired and whatever someone else might think, is folly.  Artistics, even real artists, can never know what will remain and who may love or ignore it.  ‘Tis fruitless to wish to know your own notoriety.

Alas, the sins and folly of youth; poor Yorick. ‘Tis likely this Lady has a four-century old grievance.

The folly of now and then, join us next Saturday…

Here on the Illinois prairie, spread upon a fallow cornfield, the Temporary Museum of Enfant Terrible Culture has yet to begin serving food to the attendees.  Balancing dietary offerings, attempting to deal reasonably with of emotive artistics in offering food, has yet to begin.  Those with food “reasons” are still on their own looking out in all directions at the rational production of corn, the vasty fields.

All demand balanced attention, fine…so long as the rational is never irrational, and the reasons never unreasonable.

Balance…the tension where one thing becomes another.  The corn is either dead or dying (it is that time of year) it will soon turn dry violet, dry brown, dry golden, dry yellow, and dusky sand white, to crackle (dryly) in wind that is loosing its’ sultry growing moist summer beneficence.  The corn, now starchy grain, limps a bit, droops a bit, bronzes a bit.  The leafy stalks tighten into inflexible, breakable, scratchy pillars holding up a draining sky now returning northern chill and wind.  Bit by bit, balanced at the point of one thing or another.

What has been green and agrarian will soon be gathered, manipulated, heated, milled, and repurposed, industrialized; it’ll feed a lot of people.

For seven billion people, mostly urban and mostly like the emotives gathered here for our reunion:  eating is a daily cultural opinion.  It is only reasonable; “how”, “when”, and “what” matter more than “that” as they eat.

Farming, producing, delivering the -“That” corn, the grain -is totally rational.

But the balance tips: to the tension of “reasonable”, or unreasonable;  considerations of how, when, and what.

The reaping of this vastness has yet to begin, but it will be done by rational means.  Reasonable arguments from various sides will inflame the “Why“opinions of food on our plate.  “Why”… we should have, must have, this or that.

At the reunion of anarchists picnic, little opinion bombs will no doubt be served with the food, emotional nibbles.

Skeletons in our closet don’t have food fights, but they can be food for thought…join us next Saturday.