Inversions

Abstract

Without structurally instructive irony, when things start to become about the act of making in art or literature, everything gets called “art.” Even the vanishing moments of reputation and power that come with inventing the piano key necktie.¹ Without an understanding, a mindful employment and usability of the frameworks of time—characters’ chronology within story-time, story-time against larger historical, epochal, or Horological Times—the horizon of Being shrinks. Just as in the story—and this is not a chronology or history of that shrinking, merely a representation of the occurrence in literature and meditation on its effect(s)—we lose truth, if not beauty, but probably both, reducing truth and beauty to entertainment or pleasure, or less. While there is nothing wrong with pleasure or entertainment, people often seem to want to see their own lazy enjoyments as being insulted in the distinction. And if we reduce pleasure—satire, say—we end up with burlesque; reduce burlesque and we participate in puerile cruelty or meanness. If we reduce truth—realism, say—we end up with fantasy and beyond that confused pettiness. And there are two primary ways to reduce Truth: enable people to shrink their horizons of perceptual time, which requires and uses the second, take away their language, allow them lazily to give up words and slowly but inexorably return to grunting as they hunt Sabertooths or hang curtains at the mouth of their grottos.