Bellicose Activities

My, my, my! Pretty Lady is feeling veritably Flushed. The thrill! She has been so daring as to get herself Banned. Banned by Bane! What a distinction! It is quite a milestone. She feels almost as chipper as she did the time she managed to overcome a lifetime of craven Good Girl behavior and get herself arrested.

On that momentous occasion, she was caught, literally red-handed, spray-painting her signature emblem upon an inner-city construction site. She was accompanied by her partner-in-crime, the Masochistic Socialist, who was plastering the selfsame construction site with posters demanding six-week vacations for all American wage slaves. The arresting officer took one look at her partner's informational material, complete with erudite research on civil structures in Germany, and let him go; Pretty Lady he handcuffed and escorted to the station.

This arresting officer was a patriotic subscriber to Establishment Mores. He shook his head and wondered where Pretty Lady had gone wrong. His pedestrian brain was unable to comprehend why anyone would want to Rock The Boat by decorating disposable private property with enigmatic calligraphy. Self-expression, introspection, reflectivity, and general puckishness meant nothing to this man; he regarded Pretty Lady's impulsive offer to paint a mural on his station wall with blank impassivity.

The other cop on duty was more amenable. After exchanging good-natured banter for a few minutes, he inquired, "I know this is not my prisoner, but can we take the cuffs off, now? I don't think she's dangerous."

Little did he know.

Boys, you may fight your little wars. You may go to War in Iraq; you may wage a War on Terror, on Drugs, Poverty, and Inner-City Vandalism. Pretty Lady will watch from the sidelines with respectful and disinterested curiosity. But when you infringe upon her cause, when you cross that line, be prepared to face her wrath. For Pretty Lady is a high-ranking officer in the timeless and international War On Kitsch.

For Kitsch, my darlings, is the most insidious evil of them all. It rots the soul from within. It maintains the superficial pretense, the vile and consuming Lie, that all that is not namby-pamby, cutesy and corny is rejected of God. It flattens the rough, the difficult, the quirky and mysterious; it obviates adventure, struggle, engagement and discipline. It is a totalitarian hand which steamrollers Truth in its gangrenous path of the Banal and the Bland.

But Pretty Lady! you cry, from the depths of the trenches. Pretty Lady! Why? Must we let go of every last scrap of Untrammelled Beauty in our lives? Must you rend this last, most precious fantasy? Must you muddy the small, clear puddle of the Sacred in our lives, which we have carved free of excrement with the most Herculean of labors? Must you tear from us our Thomas Kinkaid houses, our Jesus With The Little Children posters, our Kenny G albums and our Mary Janes with ribbons on top? Must you replace them with Francis Bacon-esque portraits of the very struggle we are trying so desperately to transcend, in the name of your degraded and abusive notions of Truth? How, Pretty Lady? How can you be so cruel?

Be not despairing, little ones. There is light on the other side.

Listen. When Pretty Lady sat down in her scribbling chair to share with you her thoughts on Kitsch, she went to the stereo and selected a piece of Sacred Music with which to fortify and inspire herself. This piece of Sacred Music is Tabula Rasa, by Arvo Pärt. Pretty Lady has been a major fan of Mr. Pärt's music since her thirtieth birthday, when a bassoonist friend of hers very kindly made her a tape of 'Miserere.'

It is, in fact, somewhat difficult to listen to Pärt in a recorded context, as the dynamic variations are so extreme that if you set the volume knob so that the music is audible at the start, it will presently escalate to such a pitch that the furniture begins trembling, and coherent thought becomes a challenge. Thus, Pretty Lady imagines that Pärt is best experienced in the context of either concert or Mass, when one's attention may be unwaveringly devoted to the experience of being wafted, tickled, seduced, plunged within, shaken, tossed, dismembered, reassembled, and finally elevated to an unimaginable transcendence, by the stark harmonies and pure dissonances of the Pärt phraseology.

No, friends, Pärt does not tweedle. He does not croon, tinkle or elide. His music speaks of the furnaces in the heart of the Sun, mirrored and echoed by molten upheavals in the core of the Earth and of the soul; it passes through earthquakes, through tsunamis, into the sparkle of sun on a wave, and all the forces which allowed this miracle to come to pass. It plumbs the depths of wisdom and of experience to achieve its sublime authority, and thus may not be challenged by anything less than the whole, but merely answered in kind.

This, loves, is Art. It does not live flatly and tamely upon a wall. It participates; it looks not merely upon your clean Sunday faces, your battened-down prudish lisping of platitudes, but equally upon your scars and the dirt under your nails. It looks with the unflinching eyes of God; it accepts, forgives, and reveals the holy perfection that underlay all of your bloody endeavors.

For do you truly prefer, my darlings, that God live in a little sanitized corner of your lives and houses, only smiling approvingly upon your most false and strained attempts at conformity? Or would you rather welcome Him everywhere, in every moment, into the most private and personal, into the very core that is You, where you have exiled him out of a false sense of unworthiness and shame?

Perhaps you do prefer. But until you love yourselves, all yourselves, Pretty Lady must do it for you. Even unto being exiled, jailed and Banned.