Short Thoughts
by Merick Humbert
August 22, 2024
Introduction
The area between black and white is grey, but not only grey. It is for the artist to craft that grey into reds and greens and blues, and every combination of the three, including black and white. This is where beauty lies. This is where conflict lies. This is where meaning lies. This is where I go to bed at night. And wake in the morning.
On Entertainment
Every court has its jester. Apollo and his muses. Seventeen thousand people sitting on the stone that was carved and set in the side of the hill of the Athenian Acropolis, waiting for tragedy to grip them. Waiting to be moved. People are all the same. Cheers. A monument to Dionysus. Pathos. Ethos. Logos. Toni Morrison and Anton Chekhov returning to the streets outside the Fillmore where they drank scotch and witnessed Lenny Bruce being led away in handcuffs. They went across the street to a small bar where Miles Davis was playing the trumpet, Woody Allen was on clarinet, Questlove on drums, Cole Porter on piano, Carlos Santana on guitar, and Billie Holiday on vocals. There was only the bartender and one other couple who sat at a small table with black linen and a red candle which had almost exhausted its wax and wick, drinking pinot noir and listening intently.
On Matter
Epicurus sat in his garden for three hundred years with his colleague Lucretius, nearly two hundred years his junior, drinking wine and eating grapes, and explaining his belief in atomism and a means to happiness through minimalism and friendship. No superstitions. The big bang. What we all come from. What we all return to.
On Henry Ford
He was wearing a white suit with a white shirt and a black tie when Hitler made him the first and only American recipient of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on his seventy-fifth birthday in the year of nineteen hundred and thirty eight.
On Comedy
David Foster Wallace said there are forms of humor that offer escapes from pain, and there are forms of humor that transfigure pain. He goes on to tell a story about how Kafka, sitting at his desk late at night, working on some of his most horrific stories, would begin to laugh uncontrollably until his neighbors complained. Feste seemed so sad to me. Intelligent. The rest were fools. A heightened sense of awareness. Observational humor. Irreverent. An unabashed sensibility. A list of clichés. The sad clown. Modern day philosophers. Robin Williams. Chris Farley. An anesthetic. Often not enough.
On Rebirth
Tupac said that his only fear of death was reincarnation. As a young boy, I had this strange feeling that in a previous life I was Abraham Lincoln. Do all things come to an end? Or is everything cyclical? A young scholar named Poggio Bracciolini arrived at the gates of the abbey of Fulda soaking wet from the rain, tired and on horseback, in search of forgotten knowledge. The monks unwittingly copying each line and each mark. A discipline. A punishment for sin. Poggio scoured the aisles, row after row of thoughts and words, stories and meaning. De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things. Greenblatt believed the discovery of this manuscript and its reemergence marks the birth of the rebirth we have come to know as the Renaissance. Petrarch thinks otherwise.
On Cunnilingus
One of the two possible ways that one might injure one’s neck. The other being a car accident. A curly hair wrapped itself around his uvula. He feels as vulnerable as she. Yet, one could never know. A beautiful act of love. They say there is no such thing as a selfless good deed. Enjoyable for the lot. Some circles of infantile masculine tradition find humiliation and dishonor in such an act. When the story has spread, Junior Soprano returns to the source and delivers a Lemon Meringue pie to the face of his lover, Bobbi Sanfillipo, similar to that of the grapefruit James Cagney smashes in the face of one Mae Clarke. Homage perhaps.
On Projection
When I first saw her, I was frightened. Rilke knew that every Angel is terrifying. The possibility of joy in her fingertips. Pain in her lips. The hope brings about a certainty of pain. The longer I admire her from afar the worse it becomes. More perfect, impossible to live up to this monster I have created. Desire is a bear I am trying to befriend. Werner Herzog knows how this ends.
On Nature
The path through the woods by the river is calm. My three dogs are scurrying about as I walk on the dry dirt under the shade of the sycamores. I come to a stream that curtails at the river. Small falls over rocks, the water, ice cold. I sit on a log with my feet in the water admiring the tree that has grown into the bank of the stream, its roots all exposed and entwined. I look up as a cloud moves in front of the sun, but I am thinking of the moon.
On Holden Caulfield
What drives a man to seek solitude? Thomas Pynchon eats his eggs with no salt. J.D. Salinger, young and in love, drafted and shipped off to kill Nazis, only to get word, an ocean away, of his Oona, the offspring of A Long Day’s Journey into Night, in the arms of the great Charlie Chaplin. A young boy, lost, preoccupied with loyalty and a world he can only describe as phony. A documentary. A timetable filled with lies.
On Eccentricity
His grandfather turned the study into a cage the size of a prison cell and he filled it with tree branches and flying squirrels. Why anyone would want flying squirrels, he did not know. Boomers, he called them. While he appreciated the peculiarity of it, it was his first time to Vermont, and he really just wanted to go skiing.
On Hamburgers and Hot Dogs
A chicken, a horse, a cow, a pig, a turkey, and a dog cross the road.
On Theatre
Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People with sharks is Jaws. Two men Waiting for Godot. The beauty of minimalism. 12 Angry Men deciding another man’s fate. I can almost reach out and touch her. Jim O’Connor and his glory days make me sad. The lights go down and I can hear the woman sitting next to me breathe. The man behind me whispers to his daughter. Figures wearing all black are faintly seen on stage moving mirrors and recliners, mountains and buildings. I take a sip of cabernet from my plastic stem-less wineglass. The lights come up.
On Housing
Streeteasy. Zumper. Gypsy Housing. RentHop. PadMapper. Zillow. Craigslist. Everyone in New York is clean, quiet, and respectful. Five roommates sharing one bathroom but we are all fast and conscientious so there is never a long wait. Bob clips his toenails with his feet up on the coffee table, but he finds most of them when he’s done. Fred likes to play his guitar early in the morning, but he is good so it’s not annoying. We are looking for someone who is clean, quiet, and respectful, like us; who doesn’t mind washing the dishes if he notices them sitting in the sink; who orders pizza for everyone sometimes, without us having to ask; and who is just an overall chill person. Dog Friendly. 420 Friendly. Oh, and if you wake up and I am hovering over you, don’t worry about it; I do that sometimes. DM us if interested.
On Walls
Number Two. I am lying in bed listening to Comfortably Numb, looking at a poster that I recently hung. Paper Moon, Tatum and Ryan O’Neil sitting on a cardboard cut-out of the crescent moon, a cigarette burning in the young girl’s hand. My parents didn’t want to know the sex so they made the wallpaper yellow. I pick up a book on the night-stand and read Robert Frost’s words, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense.” I fall asleep and dream of Amontillado. I wake up and my t-shirt is damp with sweat. I am afraid of being buried alive.
On Productivity
I hit snooze and throw the sheets over my head in a desperate attempt for a few more minutes of sleep. Always a few more. I don’t want to confront the day. There is so much I have to do but I can’t face it. I don’t want to. I’m safe here under the covers as if time has stopped. As long as I lie in bed, the day will wait to begin as well. In the back of my mind, I know the longer I wait to get up the worse I will feel. Time wasted. I don’t want to move. My dog whines. I sit up and remember how good I felt yesterday.
On The Royal Tenenbaums
The hilariously terrible patriarch. The matriarch who found her charm the second time. The fallen prodigy. The unforgiving and overbearing widower. The adopted playwright. Hey Jude. Only the first forty minutes before dreams of mescaline and true blue laughter become fond memories that turn sour. Where Good Will Hunting with MGD became a home away from home in a basement with concrete floors.
On Primates
Apes are not monkeys. Monkeys are not gorillas. Gorillas are apes. Orangutans are not monkeys. Chimpanzees are apes. Baboons are monkeys. Gorillas are not chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are not baboons. Orangutans are apes. Chimpanzees or gorillas are not orangutans. They all are primates. Humans are primates. Chimpanzees are the closest living relative to humans. Human birth control pills work on gorillas and chimpanzees. But, of course, we must remind our chimp friends that the pill is not to be considered a form of protection against STDs.
On Van Gogh
He was too big for his bed which was in the corner of the room. Behind it on the wall was a wooden rack which held the only two shirts that he owned and a straw hat with brown sweat stains. There were two wooden chairs and the seats were weaved with straw and fastened tight with string. Portraits of his grandparents hung on the wall to the side of his bed. On his nightstand was a glass pitcher of water that sat in a ceramic bowl with a damp washcloth draped over the side. Next to it was a brush, a bar of soap, a tin cup, and two glass vials. Above the head of the bed on the wall hung the last painting he ever completed. It was a landscape of his favorite tree.
On Desire
Blanche Dubois says that the opposite of death is desire. The blank page stares me in the eye. It tells me I have a future, that it is my future. A blank page. Incomplete. Potential. What will happen tomorrow? Dread. Maybe something great. More likely nothing at all. There is something coming. Patience. Something special. Always working toward that something special. A goal. One foot in front of the next. Delayed gratification. A greasy bacon cheeseburger. A peanut butter cup. An orgasm. And then what? A martini, dry with a twist. It’s not enough. I want more. Something else. No matter what. Something else. It’s never enough. I just want to end this feeling of needing something. Something else. Peace. First, one more slice of pie. The hole, it never fills. I just keep shoveling.
On National Lampoon
I think about the atmosphere of a Mad Men creative department. Only this time it’s the 70s and they are trying to sell you back your soul. Doug Kenney is Donald Draper but he is not an ad man. He is much younger and Harvard educated. He wants to make you laugh. He wants to make you think. He wants to criticize. He wants to offend. He often spins out, leaves without so much as a word, and then returns with some of his colleagues happy to see him and others bitter and resentful until finally he got stuck between two rocks and remained there. I think of the Lost Generation. I think of the Beat Generation. I think of Bogart’s Rat Pack. Creators. I think about comedy and satire and film and art and camaraderie and critical thought and censorship and PC culture and collaboration and writing. It is all short lived.
This is the End
They say that you never know in the moment when it is the last time you will pick up your child. You never know when it is the last time your dog will chase a ball. Metamorphosis. Escher. Beautiful friend. Can you picture it? What is coming. I want to lie in a field looking up at a big blue sky with the sun on my face. This is the end.