7 DEADLY SINS : RANKED
PERFECT ARTIST — PERFECT SINNER
— R U A SINNER ?
NOT HAROLD !
— my friend asked me, “why do U always write about Urself” : a question I NEVER considered ; experience’s sludge accretes like lasagna on my skin : compulsion demands I scrape & funnel into little vials for loving scrutiny. . .
Life is water off my duck’s back. — — A dictum presupposing the existence of HELL : “forgive but never forget” . . . it’s an easy forgiveness if Ur enemies burn for eternity anyway.
I prefer what I just heard the gargantuan Dominican fellow who stands under my window all day (asking passersby for hamburgers) yell at his enemy :
“I wish I could hate U but Ur gonna die motherfucker!”
. . . how are U supposed to live?
I went to see Raphael at the Met with Eric & London Jack on Good Friday, concurrently with Jesus’s cruciform brutaltime ; Eric, — Aesop’s ancestor, — had what I thought was a brilliant idea :
U MUST harness the power of the tortoise AND the hare :
he’s working on a book called MACRO-TORTOISE, MICRO-HARE, — basically : every day U burst to the finish line! but over the course of a life, all these sprints accumulate like a tree’s rings : at some point, U might take the slow step of final TRIUMPH. . .
We walked thru the Raphael exhibition. I regurgitated everything I memorized from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550) after cramming all night. . . in the midst of the fulgurant Madonnas, a thought popped into my head :
What does the PERFECT ARTIST look like?
In front of Young Woman with Unicorn (1506), I remembered a story from John Hollander’s book Demonium Biografata (1983) about Vasari’s forgotten rival : Ghirlandaio Pompa (1530-1563) :
“Ghirlandaio Pompa was the Florentine Christopher Marlowe. If you want to find trouble in the city, follow Pompa around for the night. No artist in 16th Century Europe was more interested in gambling, fornication, drinking, or fighting; activities in which he would partake with a supreme indiscretion, unimaginable for anyone concerned about earthly or divine punishment.”
Pompa wrote poems, plays, two novels, and an extensive diary, — all of which are completely lost because Pope Paul IV proscribed Pompa with the zeal of an inimical hurricane. All we have are fragments of HIS Lives of the Artists (1560) which,
“takes a delight in biographical prurience unmatched since Suetonius.”
. . . the problem : Pompa was ill with biographer’s scurvy : inventionitis. . . truth or lie : try reading about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael as rambunctious unconscionable sybarites and remain UNTITILLATED. . .
His best story is about when Martin Luther came to Rome in 1510. Here’s Pompa, audacious as Lucifer :
“the fat boar came to Rome to burp rancid sausage in the face of Pope Leo X. . .
Luther saw the magnificent, unparalleled painting of the woman with unicorn, Raphael’s triumphantizing of Leonardo’s drab, ugly Gioconda. . .
the Wittenbergian witnessed hell : a perversion of Madonna & child, Madonna transmogrified into lust incarnate. . . the Christ child a mythical, demonic lamb. . .
the tempestuous heresiarch became sick with lust & gluttony, spent six weeks communing with Satan in rapturous defilement. . . When he returned to Saxony, he was sick with the world. . .
Raphael was the perfect artist because he was the perfect sinner!”
Pompa had to flee Italy; he was burned as a heretic by Philip II in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, the day before his 33rd birthday : July 22, 1563. . .
. . . the PERFECT ARTIST is the PERFECT SINNER!
HAROLD! TELL ME : HOW SHOULD WE SIN ?
7. GREED
“NO MAN BUT A BLOCKHEAD WROTE, EXCEPT FOR MONEY.”
U would have to be a blockhead to write. . . for money. Greed is a vulture pecking the liver of integrity : MONEY can make the sharpest prose fat & slow & edgeless ; our greatest wits become dull corporations. . . ;
still : the Renaissance was a financial phenomenon ; if our overlords were Cosimo de Medici and not vampiric numbnuts with the artistry of law-firm train ads, maybe it would be worth suckling a hegemonic teat. Alas.
Shakespeare’s greed made him RICH & BOUNTIFUL : take the lesson from him : produce & innovate unremittingly ; remuneration might not follow, but genius may. . .
Don’t buck-chase, let money come to U ! and maybe, once U R long past Ur best work, U can eat caviar and write collab-thrillers with former presidents.
6. WRATH
“I HAVE SPOKEN FOOLISHLY, RASHLY, UNADVISEDLY, ABSURDLY. . .”
ART is NOT shitting : — tho much work is EXCREMENT, — U defecate naturally ; ART requires IMPETUS :
Thomas Sutpen, in Absalom, Absalom (1936) : a destitute white trash kid, pulls up to the door of a proper white man and is barked to the back door by his slave ; Sutpen stores and harnesses the wound like plutonium, to power his empire : —
WRATH is imperial fertilizer. . . scattered properly : U will be like the Most Wrathful Artist of all time, YHWH :
“He has no match on earth, who is made as wrathful as he. He cuts down all that is haughty, over beasts of all kind he is king!”
BUT, if abused, WRATH’s radiation will poison U, and U will end up like Sutpen : a pile of nuclear waste in the annals of HATE. . .
5. SLOTH
“ASSIDUITY IS THE GREATEST SIN AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. . .”
ART is lightning-struck SLOTH : the perfect artist lies on their back like a sumptuous harlot, like Darwin’s primordial puddle, waiting to be pierced by a fecundating BOLT.
Sitting on Ur ass is the greatest sin against INSPIRATION : the most SLOTH-SICK will do the very opposite of creation : NOTHING, — but toiling like a sooty Victorian factory-kid produces a DIN over which the voice of the muse cannot be heard. . . ;
Ghirlandaio Pompa writes,
“Leonardo would spend days sitting in perfect silence in front of a blank canvas. He would let his mind race like Theseus through the labyrinth, hoping somehow, to hear the voice of God. . . or the Devil. . .”
Spend Ur life butt-plunked, firehosing Tiktoks down Ur throat : the muse will find someone else to fructify : harness perfect idleness, & SILENCE will be a SYMPHONY.
4. ENVY
“FOR IRON WIRE PIERCES ALL THEIR EYELIDS. . .”
ENVY : the Artist, a blooming heliotrope, confronting his superior like a sudden storm. . . Raphael on a doe-eyed trip to Florence witnessed Leonardo & Michelangelo DIVINE where he was only good : he didn’t fret, he STOLE. . .
he saw Leonardo begin the Mona Lisa in 1503 : the dreams of the ENVY-CURDLED would decompose like gnatty roadkill ; —
ENVY can be a slow-gestating, proliferous cancer ; every assassin, — scions of envy, — can say like Satan at the edge of the Garden,
“Me miserable! Which way I fly is hell; myself am Hell; and in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour me opens wide, to which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.”
. . . but the Perfect Artist can say, like Dante in Purgatory,
“My eyes will yet be taken from me here, but for a short while only, for small is their offense in looks of envy.”
Because they have already STOLEN what they need and turned it into INNOVATION.
3. PRIDE
“I’D STRIKE THE SUN IF IT INSULTED ME!”
R U Greater than God? . . . how dare U otherwise attempt to CREATE anything!? Did U learn nothing from Babel? Why does Ur mind presume to flight when U are nothing but a measly WORM?!
. . . Pompa, at the beginning of his Lives (an opening Milton knew by heart) declares his stakes,
“There is but one God who created the universe, but here I declare to separate myself from him, and set off on the treacherous way of solitude, trusting only the power and force of my mind, as I attempt things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”
. . . the Devil was the first Artist because he was the first to believe he should have no LIMITS. . . the Perfect Artist must ask themselves, are U willing to risk eternal damnation? Like Ulysses in Inferno 26 :
“Not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty toward my agéd father, nor the love I owed Penelope that would have made her glad, could overcome the fervor that was mine to gain experience of the world and learn about man’s vices, and his worth.”
U must be a TRANSGRESSOR : but foolhardy reckless transgression, blowing past Non Plus Ultra with no plan & no chance, and U will end up like Ulysses, subsumed by the sea. . .
The Perfect Artist goes beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and finds LAND.
2. LUST
“ALL SORTS OF THINGS, FUCK OR SHIT OR ANYTHING!”
LUST : the ancient & surreptitious BEDrock of the Perfect Artist. . . the point of ART is to somehow transform this fetid, cummy, deathbound meatsack into an exaltation worthy of ETERNITY. . .
LUST : a coruscating animation which makes a HOLE seem like HEAVEN : transmogrifies reality like the Resurrection; . . . Pompa tells us : when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel,
“He would pay vagrants to come to his house. He would have them strip naked, and he would sit on his bed, staring at their penises, as his own engorged penis throbbed. But he would never touch himself, he would fight the urge until the arousal enflamed him to paint.”
LUST must be under CONTROL. . .
if Michelangelo would’ve suckcummed to a fuckfest, he might’ve never painted anything : he would’ve been burned in its fire. . . instead, like the trobadors, he turned LUST into sacral music. . .
Dante took the trobador example and ran with it, transforming his life-eating LUST into the perfect muse : Beatrice ; to thank them, he lets the greatest of them all, speak in his own tongue, from a raging fire, in Purgatorio 26,
“I am Arnaut, weeping and singing as I make my way. I see with grief past follies and I see, rejoicing, the joy I hope is coming.”
The Perfect Artist must NEVER let the FIRE consume them. . .
1. GULA
“THE PERFECT ARTIST IS A GAPING BLOODY MAW.”
GLUTTONY : the Greatest Sin of the Middle Ages. . . EVE, — the second Artist after Satan, — ate the apple, not because of Greed, Wrath, Sloth, Envy, Pride, or Lust, but because she was HUNGRY. . . her life was too small, she needed MORE. . .
GLUTTONY : wanting way too fucking much of the WORLD : the soul of all sin, and the foundation of Virtu, Beauty, Love ; —
LIFE is NEVER enough for the Artist ; — Pompa writes, movingly,
“After a particularly satisfying work day, Leonardo would go and sit at the banks of the Arno, and he would weep. Once, his beloved companion Battista asked him, ‘Why are you crying, master?’ Leonardo said, ‘I am too late to see Christ with my eyes. I am too early to see the glories of the future. And I will never, never have enough time.’”
. . . the Perfect Artist must have a mouth like a raging furnace, but if all that consumption is not used to create beauty, life becomes a disgusting, greedy WASTE ; —
if it wasn’t for mother EVE, — our PERFECT SINNER, — humanity would be YHWH’s static, timeless pet ; ME & U would not BE. . . — the BEST parts about life only exist because of the time-hating impulse to create MORE. . .
but EVIL sprouts from the same soil. . . the Artist has a tremendous responsibility : to SIN appropriately ; we have to be like Adam, in Paradiso 26, who gives Dante the final key,
“For I can see in that truthful mirror, which makes itself reflective of all else but which can be reflected nowhere else.”
. . . we have to cultivate our TRUTHFUL MIRROR : in order to see the world and ourselves with perfect clarity, so we can be the PERFECT SINNERS ; until U figure that out, my only advice :
SIN! SIN! SIN!
If I had to rank SINNING on my list of funnest things to do, it would be #3, right behind #2: Walking thru the Met with Harold
"ART is NOT shitting : — tho much work is EXCREMENT, — U defecate naturally ; ART requires IMPETUS" I love that so much. <3 THANKS FOR SINNING!!!