The Art, The Tragedy, The Art of Tragedy, The Tragedy of Art

Author suffers an attack of pure belletristics in real time

The Great Imperative devours the day! To write or not to write, a question daft and unbefitting, for an author to ask himself strange, even vulgar. If you wish to write—write, if you don't—don't, but if the writing yearns to break free—who are you to keep it caged? An author's a freexpressionist, the urge artistic gushes in him ceaselessly, like an avalanche rumbles, blazes like Prometheus's eternal flame. It's cramped inside the author, and there's but one desire—to unleash a thought, an idea, an emotion, an experience into the world, in other words, to release Self into the world, and let the world into Self, to chew each other up, spit out and die, leaving his creation to be passed from hand to hand, in a successful scenario, of course, when the reader snatches this creative substrate, takes it and rubs it into her brain like an ointment. A dialogue between two minds, in which only one participates at a time. Asynchronous telepathy, traversing time and space. Ink on paper, pixels on a screen, mush in the head.

—Were aliens to come, what would we show them?

—What else! A book!

—Don't they have their own alien books?

—They do perchance, perchance they don't, but if they did, they wouldn't be flying about cosmos, they'd be sitting, absorbed in reading, basking in wisdom.

—Or in foolishness.

—Well, those are inseparable! Everyone talks about the philosopher-king, when the true king is always the jester.

And therefore the question is not even whether to write or not to write, for the author embodies her essence only in the moments of composing text, if only in her head, whatever you might say or think. Authorship is an ephemeral state, akin happiness. A person is happy only when she is happying, and no other way, and an author is an author only in the moments of authoring, and at all other times she is someone else.

—Shall we write?

—We shall!

—But what shall we write about, my dear friend?

—About this and that, et cetera, et merda. So that the reader would fear to lift his eyes! So that the human core within him would tremble as if in a ten-magnitude quake! So that understanding would balance somewhere in between, for both absolutely full and absolutely empty cognitions are equally boring! We must torment the reader! Torment, but care for him! For those are inseparable!

—Well, you've gone too far with that, my dear friend.

Sometimes it happens that an author's hands itch to scribble something on a topical issue, to sit down and spatter the screen with bile. Of the deceased—speak well or not at all, of the present time—the opposite. People seldom write good reviews about life, because when things are good, there's no time to write, and when things are bad—please, we'll give you such a screed now, your eyes will glaze over reading it, your heart will thump so, you'll be so imbued with this problem that everyone will immediately feel better. One shouldn't suffer alone! Let's sit down, gather our wits, discuss what's wrong with our world, and what's wrong with it is pretty much everything, so we won't run out of topics, will we? Whatever you an author says, it'll come out as satire, and when everything around is satire, there's no point in satirising. The author needn't even to choose words, just sit and describe the surrounding reality, document it. There's a bubbling of shit and rotting of brains, war, epidemic, right versus left (rarely they think of the vertical, fools). Dystopian writers are out of work, they have nothing to write about, nothing more inventively decadent can be devised—they themselves are as if in a writer's dystopia.

—Pardon? The grass wasn't greener, it wasn't even growing at that time. What a nonsense.

—But the memes, the memes were funnier, weren't they?

—The memes, indeed.

—Now everything's somehow different.

—Wholly different.

—It wasn't like this before.

—Definitely not like this.

—Was it ever like that?

—Or thusly?

—And it wasn't thusly either.

—Was there aught at all?

—The past ought be banned. So that no one thinks about how good it was then, but thinks about how good it is right now.

—Then let's—bam—ban the future too. We'll live in the present, as they say.

—Oh, spare me, my dear friend, anywhere but in the present.

—You don't understand naught, pah on you.

—And pah on you, too.

They stood, pahed at each other, and parted ways. Oof... as they say, what a chat! The sun fled beyond the horizon, leaving behind only drowsiness, cool air, and empty bottles on the table. At night, a cat will jump on the table, take interest in the transparent objects, swish its tail and sow the kitchen floor with broken glass. You'll want some water with your hangover. Barely blinking you'll go for a glass, and cut up all your feet. There they are—the consequences of alcoholism and arguments about the nature of time.

Sometimes it happens differently, when it's not your hands that itch to type something scurrilous, caustic, cynical, and not your tongue that wants to curse the unsatisfying reality of simple, measured life, to expose its incompetence in meeting our needs, but it's your soul that aches, suffers because the world is bleeding with tragedy, catastrophy, fiasco. You empathise it, in a word. It's been traumatised by another maniac with a God complex, and now he stands looking at the open wound, which will take half a century or more to heal, and the scar from which will gape there until the terminus of our slapdash civilisation. The past, they say, ends where the understanding of the reasons for one's own actions begins, and everything else beyond is a myth. You want to sneak up behind this maniac while he's looking at the product of his sociopathic sins, kick him in the arse with all the might of a little man, so that he would fall into the wound, and there the historical leukocytes would pounce on him and devour him traceless, the blood would clot, the wound would close up. Gradually, the epithelium would cover the gaping defect, and remodeling would lead to the formation of a solid scar—it no longer bleeds, but it still hurts.

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The Apotheosis of War is a mid 19th century painting by Russian war artist Vasily Vereshchagin. Following his completion of the painting, Vereshchagin dedicated his work "to all great conquerors, past, present and to come"

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—While it hurts, don't touch it, don't disturb it, don't expose it to direct sunlight, regularly apply protective creams.

—But when can we, doctor? When can we?

—Be patient, my dear friend. There's no rush. It's better not to talk about the tragedy at all for now.

—But how? Why has it happen?

—Just because. At least for the sake of art.

—All the victims, suffering, struggle... "for the sake of art"?

—Everything in its own time. Now—for the sake of art, and you'll deal with the rest later. You have to forgive the tragedy before you justify it. At least it created art.

—I protest.

—You are free to protest, just don't forget the cream.

Later, the descendants will gather and, as a generation, will build a temple or a museum on this wound, or perhaps a temple-museum, a monument, a memorial, a place of endurance and grief, and those among them who possess a more delicate and sensitive nature will turn it into art. Poets will compose sad verses, artists will paint dark pictures, writers will print sharp social novels, cinematographers will shoot life-affirming films, playwrights will write aware-winning plays in one, two, or even three acts. And so, until the final curtain falls, in the tension of the surrounding atmosphere and tired muscles, Tragedy will stand in front of the audience, in full regalia, and to the sounds of ovations, accepting flowers, smile, bow, and drip tears onto the stage.

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Thank you for reading.

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