Children's Magazine // Believe the Lamb This Time
Though realism is in vogue, the overriding aim of arts and literature cannot be simply to document. Once photorealism was pioneered, should we have stopped creating? Once we had gleaned the moral and ethical ambiguity of experimental theater, should the majority have retreated back to the comforts of naturalism forever? In my work, I often align myself with Man Ray’s commentary that through the communication of often grotesque absurdity, truth shines through. Our society is an absurdist and hyper-referential playhouse with marionette strings running from the many hands of fabulists all the way down to the crowds of the super-poor. Because of that, our literary culture, our poetry in all forms, should champion the truth of the situation not by cataloguing small moments, but by chronicling the maximalist panorama our concept of truth exists in today. However: with the internet age ushering in a human nature that is by nature non-regulating, and with a vast number of rational Americans becoming unable to recognize the impulses which subjugate us, the supposed citizens of the free world, in the presence of our own mirror image, what comes after a post post-modern society? What is appropriate? At the very least, it seems clear that there is agonizing humor to be found in many forms of our collective, philosophical culpability.