Ouch

Self evident truths are just not as routine as I remember. I am disinclined to think that this is some cardinal numerical divergence from the grand scheme of all things in extant, but am more inclined to feel it to be the malworkings of an internal mechanism of that muchly muddled area of ....perception. How I hated that word in psychology-- shall we exchange "perspicacity?" Surely it is no worse the word in spirit because of its conspicuous lack of popularity in my own experience--albeit it most assuredly does not say bang on what I mean-- and so I shall use it with reservation.

Any societal entity is built upon certain assumptions. Those assumptions being solid grounding from which we may vary or stray when we decide the creative urge is worth the effort. For exemplification, I will abuse Picasso, whom I hate almost as much as the word I have substituted "perspicacity" for. There is a bedrock history of art and struggling artists, going long between meals, suffering through fits of depression, climbing metaphorical cliffs towards a culmination of shared experience, typified by a great age of painting that has come to be known as Impressionism. While I am universally a curmudgeon about words I dislike and painters I loathe, I am impassioned when it comes to Impressionism. Here surely is the essence of art in that artificial perspicacious boundry lines were mostly gone, yet still quite awake in the artists' bedrock of experience to help give the work a proper grounding.

Impressionists relied on the self evident truth that lines, with coloring inside them, were fairly uncommon in the natural world outside of coloring books and say, man-made objects that relied upon men who grew up with coloring books as their antecedent perspicacity concerning art. It is not like I don't enjoy a comic book now and then... but not Picasso. Give me Monet and I shall not waste my allowance on Picasso.

Picasso stands upon the shoulders of genius to draw funny shapes and color them in or not, a second grade exercise of either boredom or incompletion. When I look at my elbow,  I see no Fred Flintstone heavy black line separating it from the color of the wall behind it. I see color on top of color. It is self evident.

Ye who hold the reins of evident truths, who labor to present them, who spend countless dollars on the byways of bustle, advertising to create new truths, be forewarned--your truths are on the wane. You like Picasso, stand on the shoulders of genius and paint comics on a canvas, but yours is a canvas of murky rising steam.  The fictional eloquence with which you paint your perceptual  --dammit-- notions is becoming less important as you dumb down your subjects, but your chimerical truths are having less and less effect as their numbers rise and their failures accumulate. And yes, I enjoy the word "chimerical" despite it's overuse.

All this being said, I hesitate to bring up the pain in my left big toe. It is a hell of thing. It is not likely to disappear soon. No amount of fiddling will help, and I must resort to a cure all for my entire body just to perchance effect the far flung.

Perception be damned!

by Michael DeVore