Cultural Sacrifices
Date Friday, March 29, 2024 - 02:26 AM PST
Topic Beauty


Felix Spencer pulled off the artist's smock he had been wearing since 4 am and threw on his dirtiest clean shirt. The morning sun was peeking through the thick cloth that passed as blinds in his small artists' loft that he had occupied for about four months the coming week.
The world was a beautiful place to live for Felix, and his ust for life was reaching it's zenith that day as he had, in the wee morning hours when insopiration had decided to poke it's large and luminous beak into Felix's ear and grant him the personal confidence to draw this new portrait.

The canvas was blotted with the oils of creation; from a shimmering white void had come colour, life, and substance. The aforementioned blank canvas had been coated in numerous shades of green, blue, orange, purple, red, yellow, and even adab of beige here and there for flavour. And just a tiny, tiny, miniscule amount of black had been used to put Felix's signature in the remote corner of the page, signifying this work of art as his creation, and none others.

Felix was cynical, at best, about his recent work. It would brinbg money to placate the greedy landlord, and satiation to his growling stomach. He was an artist in his heart, and he wanted to put the poetry in his mind upon the canvas, expressing his soul in a barrage of colour and design. But, you know, art has it's boundaries, and Felix knew this. He also knew most people don't have an appreciation for work until after you're dead. And what good is art, and good art, when you're not around to spend the money that selling that good art makes? No, Felix had shallowed, sullied his character to the level of -- god forbid the use of the word-- landscape painting. It was a simple enough philsophy to understand, People with higher bank accounts than IQ's want landscape art. Why? They are trapped inside, working at a terminal, locked inside a tiny white box with all the manacles of possession clamped around their souls. So? They wanted landscape art- escapism. The world was not so closed in with a portrait of the massive sprawling woods of some fantasy planet undisturbed by the toils of man in a cramped hall. How damnably simple.

But it defied his nature, his soul, his view of his own creation. He was there for more, for interpretive art, for fantasy, for the unreal. Surrealism.

He pondered these relatively deep thoughts as he stepped out, through the portal of his apartment complex, out, into the morning light, bathing his existence in the early sunlight. Looking anywhere towards the horizon was a sharp, painful experience that would scar your retinas for the next few moments, changing in colour and radiating sharply in the feild of vision, staying even after you close your eyes as if to try to ward it off like some offensive creature on the landscape in front of you. He put on his sunglasses and began his trek to the park, to search for inspiration for his next voyage into the horrid occupation of 'sell-out.'

The park was abandoned, no poor men sleeping on benches, no birds, no cute furry woodland creatures translocated from their home enviroment to this artificial existence in the middle of the urbanite center. He heard no birds singing their telltale sharp, jagged songs that were reputed to awake the hangover victims too early in the morning, no trash littering the paths that run through the park, no police tape and chalk outlines-- an artificial forest. There was no personality to these trees, no special markings of history. They were old, and had a beautiful symmetry between themselves-- but it was alien for him. He was a stranger in this false woodland, and the trees were outside of his world, and he of theirs-- no enjoyment was given, taken, or presented in any manner.

He looked up to the sky through the overlapping branches and leaves, and small trickles of light did not pour through, they lingered above the forest- no rays would bathe his body and wipe away his sins.

Nature had left him unsatisfied. "Guess this is how my girlfriend feels," he joked to himself, more toe verify to the lesser recesses of his mind that they were in unison with the section of brain that felt honestly cheated about the walk through the park. The goading worked, and soon those nerve sections that work his atrophied legs began to push them in the general direction of the exit to the park.

The stiv slid quickly into his lower ribcage and tore along his back inwardly until it reached his spine, then, the worker of the tool quickly took it out and stabbed back inwardly, tearing outwards after putting itself back into his skin just near his spine on his right side. The arm wrapped around his neck prevented Felix from turning, but he knew that this was no debt collector, no old enemy, and he had been "someone else" to someone else, and recieved the mugging that migth have gone to some simp jogger in sweats with a walkman and a pair of dumbells running through the park. He could feel his knees move outward, readying himself for the fall to the ground. He did not moan, did not scream, though the pain was intollerbly sharp. The arm released it's hold on his collar bone and let him drop, slowly, but nonetheless face-frist into the pavement. He must have looked odd, arms slunk behind him and his ass presented into the air like some target for whatever pervert migth happen by. He felt a hand reach into his trousers and grab that precious possession of his that was worth taking his life, despite the fact it might have only had two dollars in it. His few thoughts raced through his mind, and he noticed he could still hear things, and he heard the footsteps run off in the opposite direction of where he kneeled bleeding. He felt himself start to roll, and then, as if just an observer half aslep at some movie, his body rolled onto his back and he was able to look up, throught he canopy of leaves at the dim orange hue that the morning sky had taken on. The leaves were dark green, as viewed from the bottom, and the trees were dark. His visdion had begun to darken, too- the edges were becoming fuzzy. But he say through the cnapoy of leaves into the morning, out, and around him, and around the iny, cold park. He could feel his own blood dribble past his head in small rivulets on the downward slop, making his ahir wet. He had no last visions of his entire life moving past his eyes in a slide show, no beautiful visions, no angels, or blinding light. All he saw was the trees, with a green mesh wrapped around a giant orange sky that would fall on him at any moment, but not crush, but envelope, Not destroy, but merge with, become, and then let back up after coloring the land that rosy-yellow colour. The world had taken on colours and hues he could never put on to a canvas, or do with any paint. Nature had become more real, more vivid, than anything could ever hope to retell, or try to mimic. No words could describe the sight before him, in this alien forest where he was an observer and life had taken on colours that he could never touch with his conventional paints, or paint with his human mind.

A single leaf flittered there, on the thin, twig-like branch, and snapped in a silent snap that seemed almost like the sound of a single second being ticked off on a watch, off, and flew, down to the ground, moving more gracefully than it could have ever moved attached to the branch that had kept it alive, feeding it from its own reserves like a mother and her baby child. But this mother was withering, and the young must go so that the mother must survive and create more at the end of the winter, And this leaf was the first to fall. It glided down, sliding through the air like small ramps had been set up to let it slide down one birefly, then land on another, sliding down that next one in an opposite direction, but still moving downward, onto another platform that was sloped the same way as the first. And it flew down in this way, moving slowly, painfully slow to watch, but still graceful and simple to observe. It was a nature scene that everyone says must be watched at some point in life, like a sunrise- but when you actually watch it, you're cold, and bored, and only doing it out of a task- but if it happens conviniently, while you wait, it takes on new meaning, and becomes a scene worthy of watching again, not a ritual passed down from generation to generation as a menial spirtually-enriching task.

And the leaf came down, and into contact with a wet ground, and began to slide along the liquid as if it was some water slide, and it was one of the nuermous child passengers.

The Leaf was released from the pull of gravity downward when it reached a small puddle that had formed itself on the bottom of the slope, and stayed there, floating in crimson liquid that had almost the same composition as salt water. And this morning, the sky acted as a large mirror and reflected to the ground the orange colour of the sky, and bathed the world in the magnificent colour that is hard to find exact words to describe, other than orange. And that colour bathed the top of the leaf.

Probably a nature scene that could never be painted.

This article comes from Shmeng
http://www.shmeng.com/

The URL for this story is:
http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=39