I must confess that I chose to be a surrealist from about the time I discovered the artwork of Salvador Dali at the age of fifteen. I did a report on Dali and Surrealism for 9th grade Art Class. I wanted to be a surrealist because I realized that surrealists got to draw really weird stuff and then pretend it meant something real in the modern real world. So let me show you some of my weirder high school surrealist messings on paper.
Of course, like most teenagers, I was obsessed with death and mortality at a time in which I had not yet learned how to live and stay alive… one of the serious dangers of being a teenage half-brain in a post invention-of-the-atom-bomb world.
So, I start this gruesome dissection of teen-y art apoplexy with a depressingly angst-y picture and poem about the urgency of nameless coming doom.
And at the same time I was basically an angst-y pre-Goth Goth, I was also a lollipop Disneyphile romantic… A pre-My-Little-Pony Brony as it were. I was goofy as all get out and determined to latch onto all the big-eyed art ideals of the many girls I stalked and watched and comprehended incorrectly while never, ever talking to even one of them. (Well, not counting sisters and the several non-aggressive Mickey-lovers who were chasing me and courting me while I was totally oblivious to facts of it.)
But I was also aware of a spiritual something that lurked in my church-going Sunday self that needed to metaphorically tackle ideas of God and life-after-death notions of something that I knew in my head weren’t really real, but were necessary to the heart I possessed and its dire need for love and life and laughter.
And then too, I was seriously teaching myself to draw. And I drew things like nudes from pictures in National Geographic and Post magazines… but of course, only non-sexualized nudes like kids playing soccer in the nude and in the rain in a school yard in Indonesia so they don’t get their school uniforms soaked.
But what is Surrealism that I can accomplish it any way as an Art movement that is really probably in the past and not relevant to anything in the real world now? Well, what I always thought it was… was a way of seeing the world through a rose-colored lens of imagination (with flying purple jelly-bean spots in it). It is a way of taking my Mickey-and-Goofy strangeness and mixing it into the Donald-Duck Soup of Art. It is a way to simply be true to myself rather than the truth nature insists on putting in front of my face.
Angel Thinking
Yes, you are about to read more Mickian nonsense about an agnostical atheist who believes angels are real. Heck, I not only believe in angels, I am one.
The word itself comes from Biblical Greek where angelos was the word for messenger. And because the pre-twelfth century translators of the Bible looked at the “el” part and thought of the Hebrew word that meant “God”, they used angel to mean a messenger from God.
Now, I am not being a sacrilegious atheist when I claim to be an angel. That is mainly because I am not technically an atheist. I do believe that a spiritual creative essence informs the universe, but I am actually an agnostic because that means I actually don’t know anything “A” for “not” and “gnostic” for “a know-er of stuff”. I am a teleological idiot because I actually don’t know anything about anything. But I do have the ability to look at evidence, weigh it, and reach a logical conclusion about what is most probably true, and I firmly believe in that only until more evidence comes along. I believe that particular thinking process is what is known as science (at least until better evidence comes along). So, scientifically considering the issue, I stupidly believe I am an angel. I bring possible knowledge from God.
Grandma Beyer used to have a picture like this in sepia tones on her bedroom wall in Mason City. I studied that guardian angel picture for hours as a child.
Thinking about stuff hard enough gives you insight, at least if you don’t over-heat your brain with hard thinking and catch your hair on fire. A lot of stuff has been happening that I have been thinking hard about. Here are some examples.
So, as an angel, here is what I believe God is saying;
“As human beings, we all need to learn to love one another more. Love is the only answer that cures hate.” – God (No, really, he said this to me!)
Seriously. We need to take the weather anomalies as a sign that the time for climate change denial is long over. We need to work together with all people on the planet to lovingly change those things we do that have caused the crisis. We need to lovingly make peace with North Korea. Fighting them will only lead to the Biblical ending of the story coming to pass. I have an anomalous agnostical faith that there is a lot of truth in the Christian Bible. (The spell checker doesn’t like “agnostical” either.) Loving other people besides ourselves and the people who know and love us is the only possible solution to the problems before us.
Of course, I am saying all this angelic crappola tongue-in-cheek because I am, after all, a humorist, and I agnostically don’t know anything at all. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mean what I say.
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