My friends, you can take the girl out of Missouri, but you can’t take Missouri out of the girl; in fact, I haven't been there for a while to check, but what with mass media and gentrification, it might today better survive, however miserably, transplanted to a place more forgiving of anomalies. Among other less obtrusive qualities, Missouri dooms the native, transplanted or not, to the misery of being and expecting people to be nice, quite like, but then again unlike* today's genuinely gentlemanly or -womanly rock stars. Below I will address this particular possible deviation below. I also don't mean oppressive, over-protective niceness, or the subtly condescending, manipulative, covertly hostile variety, of course that's not nice; that's why Missourians fail to cultivate the sometimes sinister skill of Southern belles or the always sinister skill of Northern hirers of the handicapped or historically oppressed for the sole purpose, it turns out, of the tax benefits and other professional perks. Ours is not for results, it just happens. It's not necessarily a smile in the street, though it can be, depending on the immediate need ascertained out there. We may seem mercurial, even evasive, unto quite ennervatingly invisible in order to channel the ever-changing input. Politicians, when not booming and bragging, try to imitate it, but it's not political. It could be god-fearing, what with the spirits lingering from all those sacrifices at the pyramids of Cahokia and that quiet old river that just keeps rolling along, it must know something and somehow purvey it. Wherever it comes from, it's in the air there, or used to be, and bred from the birthing bed until it's automatic, the original default disabled and switched to perversely, unnaturally heart felt communion with the needs and desires of a sentient being in ear or eyeshot or even of a rock; how nice is that Japanese garden so perfectly at home in the consummately accommodating Missouri botanical, not that all botanic gardens don't manage, with the constant attention and back breaking labors of love required, more consistently than any other contender to break out of the relative, almost ubiquitous un-niceness of everything else, both culture's and nature's. Such niceness and fittingness translates into, even if she's a rock, answering and politely concluding -- an emoticon tag does the trick -- your text conversations with her. Like Alfred Hitchcock, I’m a very sensitive person who likes to be done to as I do, if it's nice enough, including thoughtful and considerate enough to warrant such consideration as would cause one to think of it, and so a dangling text thread can unsettle me for days. Or, it bears repeating, noticing and welcoming strangers, however dowdy or not dowdy enough, as the case may be, when one is among familiars.
That it's essentially nowhere to speak of, drawn and quartered between North, South, East, and West -- where the different directional winds having traversed the continent face off, grind to a chilling or suffocating halt, and a supernatural stillness reigns -- explains the peculiar cosmopolitanism of this pack of back water provinces so provincial that they're at the forefront of going, as well as both sideways and forwards, backwards, the first, say, to get hand guns back in circulation and the last to join the Confederacy, thus the favored straw for breaking the back of the Union, a thought thankfully by now perished, at least regards the issue then prevailing, which caveat I enjoin not because I'm thinking of it, but so as not to hurt the feelings, by excluding them, of any decent souls with off the beaten track ideas.
Thus Missouri being everywhere as much nowhere came not only to be Japanese gardenesque in its graciousness even to rocks, but also, in its welcoming of strangers, it's ancient Greek, the mother of attentive, self-effacing, cosmopolitan science, supremely nice in and of itself, however ruthless its drivers can be, oh if they would just let science -- not to be confused with computers running on human-made programs and input, not that they can't help as much as hurt locally, but consider their longterm effect -- drive itself, it would, veering neither to the left or the right, forced to linger over special interests that it's not yet equipped to address, fly as the crow flies straight to the promised land for all the needed supplies. This is visible wherever it breaks free and verified in my secret lab, where it doesn't just croon for, but touches down in that very promised land, beyond the yellow brick road, and starts dictating texts like this one, in a foreign language all its own, as I dutifully take dictation having no more idea than you do where it's going, just that it's very upset that people aren't nicer to us, more accommodating to our needs, more nurturing of our capacities, constantly pulling in the reins on, and thwarting the realization of our sensationally sensually (science's secret, as explained below) versus their aloofly abstract -- only ideas, not actualities, sell I guess -- long term ineffectively altruistic proclivities and abilities, and it just can't take it anymore. Miserably empathetic -- Missourian Tennessee Williams: "Happiness is a function of insensitivity" -- meter measurable -- don't tell me, show me! -- niceness suffusing the surface admittedly, when it fails to penetrate, can create a cloying effect, or worse if a monster hides behind it, but at least it’s a potential start, which that stranger will appreciate so long as it’s effectively concealing any such xenophobic contempt as might be, or rather certainly is, built into our selfish genes.
To return to the niceness of today's rock stars, as promised, they’re awfully cute and no dummies, but I can't help liking, even as I only sporadically trust some of those admirably, but potentially ennervatingly energetic performers with their ubiquitously, generically defined, optimally marketable, perfect faces, when these not only admirably creative, but also, let's face it, paler imitations of Madonna, Mick Jagger, and Nina Simone flaunt their truly gushing niceness to their fans, as well as the poor and handicapped, with the camera pointed at them. In defiance of the tradition, they like being liked so much they fawn on their likers, they drink up the flood of applause as if they were dying of thirst more for it than the music, and this river, as they drown in it, feels a part of them and their beauty youth wealth and fame as indeed they would, as they often openly profess, fade away like blood deprived vampires without it. And maybe it’s just envy, but when I watch them I feel it, the blood draining out of me.
Of course in truth the relatively elder never do get the relatively younger, envy indeed plugs up our ears and covers our eyes with scales, but to me it mainly all sounds like well designed original-ish collages of familiar melodic moves, catchy rhymes, pretty faces, and however literally as, if not sometimes more, sexually edgy, not as suffusingly sexy, and not with an absence, but still a relative shortage of the je ne sais quoi that sets a genius far above, often in fear and loathing, if not outright contempt for the madding crowds (however I do like their style and find that when all else fails fâshion finds a way into the neo-neo-neo-etc.- classical future). Did Harry Truman ask to be liked? Right or wrong, deluded or not he authorized dropping the bomb -- please let's not get sidetracked by far more (seemingly, but look beneath the surface) critical issues involved that are nonetheless irrelevant to the function of the example in the context provided -- because it was the kindest thing he could think of doing under the circumstances. And if I thought the same and had earned the power I’d do the same -- if novices are still experiencing difficulty detaching the contextually defined detritus, however otherwise, even ontologically central, so as properly to facilitate the obviously intended function of the example, don't worry, practice makes perfect; when you finally get this one, go to the head of the class -- that with the same plaque he placed on his desk — the buck stops here. I left Missouri in a hurry, but even as far from Missouri as you can get, such as New York City, whenever I sufficiently challenge their investments in the status quo, especially when they most overtly protest it, they too won't let me be, to be and see by my own lights. But what does that matter? Wherever I settle, I'm from Missouri, neither here nor there, just on my way to where the gold is and yet uncorrupted by either having it or resigning myself to lacking it, a pioneer in progress. I can shut them out and let myself be to buzz about where I will and see whatever it shows me. I am not an art practitioner practicing authorized art, I am an artist, meaning it’s my skin that I trust. I am a plant, my skin is made of eyes, my whole body cries show me! and bends to the light. I am rooted in history and the earth, and this is one of my showy flowers, holding the seed of my fruit. I am not a real, I am a surreal being, supernatural, not natural. Who is not called to this vocation? What practice cannot and should not be an art, even the art of science as epitomized in Einstein. Did Sherlock Holmes ever crack a case with a disembodied brain? Indeed he had to smoke his out, so his eyes, nose, gut, and crawling skin could get the job done.
C'mon, you can prove you’re not a computer by picking out the traffic light in nine images. As MLK says everyone must be an artist; every mouse must roar! However given the temptations of numbing robotically, most may fail, far better to fail at the one thing worth doing than succeed at anything else. If humans suffered suffusing sentience and owned its powers, they would no longer fear the dominance of machines. It begins and ends in the skin that likes and offers a nice touch or it's hopelessly mired in the muck of its mediator, some kind of anywhere from subtly (the most intransigent kind) to obviously fascistic be it leftist, rightist, centrist, hybrid, or all over the place ideology, fostering a misalignment of means and ends ultimately thankfully fatal to the project, however seemingly a nice one. Consider native sons of Missouri, Hemingway, TS Eliot (however he begged them, they could not take Missouri out of that boy either), the aforementioned Tennessee Williams (oh he aches of it) and Mark Twain. Alfred Hitchcock (from long lost twin of Saint Louis (home of the hot dog), East London haunted by Jack the Ripper) and my late mate (from Chicago) and closest friends are honorary citizens. We are not just plants, we are minerals. We are, as mentioned, in my case not to mention the ones above, rocks. We are evidently water. We are, by inference as well as evidence, nobody, even if we're as famous as Emily Dickinson. We are ciphers. Wherever we are we’re a nice fit, ready to serve. When you are against us, you are against everything. Your world, however its Pollyanna positivizing protests — oh yes it doth protest too much, but this play’s the sting — knows only world negation and your self, however masked, self-assertion. You do not let us finish our sentences. You do not answer our texts. You just say, go back to Missouri.
essential
footnote:
https://detritusofmongrel.blogspot.com/2022/10/footnote-to-soupe-de-guerre.html
Praised Folly, September 13, 2022
