Friends,
It’s been a week. We lost a legend (RIP RBG). We risk losing a lot more. Fires rage across the west coast, searing the skies with orange omens. Women are being sterilized against their will— sadly this is nothing new. And science has become so politicized that I long for the time when the biggest debate was whether to teach dinosaurs in school.
We’re living in absurd times. Literally, absurd: wildly unreasonable, illogical, ridiculous.
In times like these, I often turn to art to try to understand, to feel my way to meaning, and to find a way out. So for this edition of Muddled Fairytales, here’s a journey into the art and science of the absurd.
Shana tova,
Carine
Saks Afridi. Space Time Continuum #5, 2019. Hand woven in wool. 3’x5’ and 4’x6’
PS - I’ve been incredibly inspired by the freediving book Deep (thanks Lauren and Alex!). It’s about human resilience and the surviving wisdom we all have in our bodies. Magical read.
7 O’clock News / Silent Night
Original
Today
David Robson. “A touch of absurdity can help you wrap your head around reality.” Psyche.
“According to research on the ‘meaning maintenance model’ of human reasoning, surreal and absurd art can be so unsettling that the brain reacts as if it is feeling physical pain, yet it ultimately leads us to reaffirm who we are, and sharpens the mind as we look for new ways to make sense of the world. The findings also suggest new ways to improve education, and even help to explain our responses to some of the more absurd political events of recent years.”
America, by Allen Ginsberg
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.…Read the rest of the poem here.
Berkeley, January 17, 1956
Hugh Hayden
Hugh Hayden, 2020.
“Feels Good Man,” 2020
“…the movie is a vertiginous, head-slapping examination of the tangible, unpredictable consequences of making art.” - Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
Avis D. Carlson. The Jitters. 1937
“Fear is an old emotion, laid down deep in the nervous system. Without its promptings no species of animal life could have survived and civilization could not have developed…
In our efforts to deal with [fear] we have developed religion, science, and many of our most valuable social institutions. Tempered with reason and faced with an amount of fortitude not beyond the reach of most people, such fears have been tolerable, though of course unpleasant. But the apprehension with which so many Americans are now regarding the world is a different thing, an emotional state where every fresh headline increases their sense of impending disaster.
Barrett Swanson. “This is not a test: Why America fails to prevent disasters.” Harper’s.
“This weekend’s simulation is something that happens every year, an Operational Readiness Exercise, this one involving a hazmat drill. Two hundred first responders are participating, and I am serving as one of more than a hundred Living Victims—people willing to get bedecked in prosthetic gore and bloody makeup, only to subject themselves to a whole catalogue of misfortune. The coup de grâce of today’s exercise is what I’m doing right now, the Rubble Entombment, which has been going on for the past few hours and which, I must confess, has started to make me sweat.”
Jill Lepore. “Is staying in staying safe?” New Yorker.
Lepore waxes on animals, building design, and whether walls are meant to keep us in or out.
“A gang of porcupines is called, magnificently, a prickle. They hardly ever venture out. Inside, in the damp and ratty dark, fallen-out quills carpet the floor. In spring, female porcupines raise their babies in those dens. A baby porcupine is called a porcupette. There isn’t a word for a porcupine den, but I humbly propose calling it a quiver, except when it’s a nursery; then it’s a pokey.
…the advent of germ theory “suddenly shifted the burden of health from the external to the internal, and more implicitly, from the state to the individual.” In the age of the microbe and the antiseptic, “health became the burden of the individual, associated with personal exposure and responsibility.”