Babe's Artistic Motivation

It must be said as a disclaimer that Babe is alone in her apartment a lot of the time. It is a choice she’s made, but it does at times become a little resonant.

Even if you think that DH Lawrence and his hot-talking coal miners are for shit, and even if you think that Freud had his thumb up his butt and should have been sent to culinary school, even if you find the works of Isaac Asimov clunky and laughably mundane, you should be glad and thankful, glad and thankful that these three and others like them and unlike them have filled up tier after tier after endless toppling tier of books for the library. Can you imagine, can you comprehend the clattering echoes of footfalls in cavernous empty spaces if only those people who really should have written books had actually written them? Can you imagine the dearth, the worldwide dearth if only those who could really paint fantastically had painted? Or if even those people, even those rarified few, had only produced their best best work? There’d be nothing to read in the grocery store. There’d be the same forty-seven prints for sale at every framing store. We’d all be wearing very functional overalls and eating corn pudding for every meal.

More importantly, the blackness that encroaches would flood us in. There’s always a wave of language and art that’s cascading over itself, endlessly refreshed by the people who do it, the hopelessly stupid and the brilliant laboring side by side, and it’s washing up against and pushing away the black death of empty space beyond. Bring on more cable channels. Let everyone who has a pen and a piece of paper write as many poems as will fit. Let’s put another wing on the library, another gallery downtown, let’s put another art supply store in the mall and another screen in every movie theater. Let’s make movies, books, sculptures, paintings, recordings, quilts, botanical gardens, interesting footprints, collages, haute couture, ridiculous stilettos, unusable furniture, mechanical compositions, let’s push it back, back, back so we can rest peacefully behind our shouted up wave. We will not be engulfed. Not this decade. Not with Fox Searchlight Pictures on the job, and every angsty teen poet that started a blog this year, and every kid scratching in the dirt with a pine cone, or making a jacket out of a blanket and wearing it all day. The rows and floors of the public library are battlements, trenches, defenses for us. Don’t let the books go away. Don’t let the acres of canvas under the Chicago Museum of Art ever cease to be replenished. Keep taking photographs. Keep singing arias. It’s everyone’s job. The absence is terrifying. The silence is cold and grim.

It should be noted that Ronnie, who hadn’t had a moment alone in the house since before the baby was born, no not a literal actual moment, would have seen things differently. She might have even said, “Bullshit.”