Tuesday, March 29, 2022

Apologies


Armelle Gouyet

"I'm sorry."

That should fix it.  You know. . . an apology.  

"Well. . . he apologized."

I took a poll among friends yesterday.  "Which camp do you fall into, the Rock camp or the Smith camp?"

I was able to predict with pretty good certainty.  But unpacking all the theory-bound arguments gets sticky.  You know--feminist/identity/class/intersectionality arguments.  It was easiest for my redneck and would-be redneck friends.  

"That boy got bitch slapped and took it."

Of course, the liberal Hollywood establishment is shitting its pants over what to do. You know. . . a Black man wins an Oscar--let's celebrate.  Oops.  Still, they stood and cheered him when he got the Oscar and gave him all the time he wanted to speak without playing music.  One wonders at the #MeToo implications. 

I'm so over it all, to speak in the parlance of youth.  I don't mean the Will Smith thing.  I mean all of it, all the theoretical arguments about what is right and what is wrong and what things are and what they stand for.  I find some of the arguments interesting and compelling even when I don't agree. . . but we have radically altered the moral landscape into Protestant sculpted gardens of clean lines and right angles that savage the natural lie of the land.  

You should see MY garden.  It is one of those wild Berkeley parcels.  Have you been to Berkeley?  Every yard has one, or so it seems in memory, untamed things spilling over with abundance.  I love them.  The Puritans associated wildness with sin. We can blame them for the problems we have now.  They wanted to tame nature.  Oops.  

"We're sorry."  

"See. . . they apologized."

Fuck 'em.  

Wait!  Perhaps you think I'm making a case for Will Smith.  He was only acting "naturally," wild and untamed.  

But only animals act "naturally."  Humans act by reason, no?  That is our greater capacity?  

I like today's photograph.  Armelle Gouyet has quite a flair.  I think the picture is beautiful.  I almost said "just beautiful" and then "simply," but nothing is ever "just" or "simply" I'm afraid.  I suspect all statements that carry such loaded words.  Theory has so much to say about a photograph like that, most people have been scared away.  Armelle is either brave or an idiot.  Either way, I'm with Armelle on this one.  I don't know if Armelle is a boy or a girl.  It might be a pseudonym.  Good.  It could be the gaze of a male or a female, the Bastard Gaze or the Bitch.  

If words are violence as some have held forth in the case against Rock, what is an image like this?

This is what concerns us here as Ukrainian people fight for their lives and scared Americans worry about Biden's words.  I'm a primitive, I assume.  She looks like Lady Liberty to me.  

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