The artist and the critic

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Sun, 05 Jul 1998 15:24:00 -0400

This is a no-win situation for the artist and the critic.  

For the former, each hour is a renewed struggle on worn leather wings to
communicate his moment of pain to a dumb, usually hopelessly confounded
audience that can neither understand nor respond, but which greedily
gobbles up the his ashen fruit at $15 a volume.  The artist, usually
reluctantly, accepts the $15 to buy ramen noodles and charcoal pencils. 
He trudges home and takes a cold shower and a shot of whiskey and,
sweating, climbs back into his chair to wait.  His muse inserts her
sharp steel apparatus into his spine and twists hard to the right,
splitting his cocyx and stinging his soul.  He screams.  Through the
grit of his broken, bleeding teeth, he begs his God to explain his pain
to him.

The critic is not better off.  He greatly fears the spirit of fiction. 
It haunts him as he creeps reluctantly out of bed in the morning to
participate in a world lighted only by the elusive genius of the
creative artist--a genius, he is ever saddened to discover, that eludes
him entirely.  He damns the muse that will not deign to visit him with
her flippant and erratic favors.  Confounded by the intensity of the
higher powers of creative art, each night he snakes back to his critic's
hell, dank and crooked and mute, where envy fats herself on his aching
entrails and he, starved and helpless, ponders the horrid straits of his
blank existence.  Cold stygian winds sweep through his cavernous mind
like fires of frost as he knaws the dry, bare endings of his own bones
and cries to God to explain his pain to him.  


-- 
Matt Kozusko    mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu