Wassily Kandinsky: Entwurf 2 zu Komposition VI (1913)
"You matter more than any us or them ever could have mattered."

The days are gone when culture amounted to holding eccentric skills like demonstrating the one true and proper way to cantilever a little finger when holding a fine china cup of Darjeeling. The only canting done these days involves twisting the common language out of shape for the purpose of demonstrating how ignorant another obviously is, each word purposefully loaded, each phrase most likely cast into meaning its opposite and said with a knowing sneer. We seem incapable of assuming the best of each other and so opt for presuming the worst. Another's not just wrong, but evil. I'm not just right, but righteous. Without my presence, this whole operation would have long ago gone to Hell without the benefit of hand baskets. I consider myself Heaven's Handmaiden, as you consider yourself, too, except your Heaven seems more like Hell, as mine must also seem to you. You're more than welcome to yours! I might be the only one left standing who actually qualifies to consider myself upstanding, everyone else, mere wannabes degrading civil society. Not even civility seems to be what it used to be, now seemingly more interested in trying to prove some essentially unprovable something than in letting anything or anyone simply be. Even culture itself seems to have gone to Hell.

Now we engage in wars about it, and not civil wars, either, but the most unimaginably uncivil ones. Your culture seems every bit like a cult to me, as mine must certainly seem to you. We maintain CultYour instead of culture now, where each feels compelled to publicly display their personal fetishes for the expressed purpose of experiencing the liberty of publicly humiliating themselves for fun and, hopefully, for profit. I offer my least generous interpretations in backhanded homage, intentionally interpreting what you might believe in to be your definitive identity, a truly tragic error of logic. It makes perfect sense to me, perhaps too perfect of a sense for anybody to believe, thus the unending defensiveness surrounding the conclusion, a double-dog-dare-you-to-disagree disagreeableness which also seems perfectly defensible. There's no bottom to any of this.

Blind dichotomies inform our CultYourWar. Our enemies do not seem to be in any way similar to us. They're gooks to our minds, what little's left of them, not former friends or neighbors but to-be-avoided enemies of our state of mind, which we all might actually be out of this time. Reason, so twisted, gets gleefully left behind. A deep sense of liberation reigns, an anarchy of the mind, or, as I said above, what's left of our minds. We find good reason to suspect those we firmly believe might be out to 'cancel' us. We double down in defense which, like The Confederates, seals a certain fate. It always seems too late to recant and sue for peace. Just look at how much we've already invested! Don't for a minute consider what we've already insisted upon losing. Humility seems just another form of humiliation, and we've grown accustomed to being Proud Boys now. There's no reassuring way back from any precipice.

I am not a Democrat, I just vote for Democrats. I don't hug trees, they just seem to hug me. Vilify me if you must but please consider the deeper cost. We forfeit the considerable benefits of doubt when we become so certain. We tend to outsmart ourselves whenever we start feeling all-knowing. When I find the one and certain way, I render everyone around me lost or damned or worse, then I seem surrounded by the cursed. What sort of salvation have I purchased and at what onerous cost? Maybe we're all lost and need to pretend that we're not. What could possibly be the harm in that if we really are all lost and most needing practice at ever more emphatic pretending? I do not know for you and you sure as Hell do not know for me. We could, it seems, disagree much more agreeably, as if we were all immersed within sacred uncertainty, as if we were each naturally blessed with a protective cowardice, as if we were merely flesh and blood, bone and hope, and little else.

We seem to create the cults we see. We identify groups which are comprised of individual persons. Worse, we're capable of misidentifying our self, of over-identifying with groups to the denigration of that self. Do we think so little of that self that we can only feel capable if we identify as somebody else? The CultYour I perceive might most probably be my own projection, though it certainly seems convincing. The conundrums we foist upon our selves prove the most troubling. I wonder if I can see anyone as a person, whatever that means. CultYourWars insist upon everyone losing themselves and can only ever be won by not engaging. Not for us or against us, but for you and against that ultimately humiliating sense of us. You matter more than any us or them ever could have mattered.

©2021 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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