Beth Hyatt – Featured Artist

If I were looking off into the distance, staring into her wild belly, naked, on the verge of civil insanity, I would ask one polite question (though really I’m blank) to the face stereogrammed into the mountains at the very end of the earth… it would think to answer, but cease doing so. I would then ask the same irrelevant question to the trees and the leaves and the rocks and the little worker ants that get stuck in the sap; even the lucky ones that don’t and are simply happy and dumb. I would ask them why it was meant…

cities alluring and intoxicating, venomous and natural(?)—pharm-jumpers with pocks and boils exhibiting spasmed limbs and black hoodies with giant “X”‘s spray-painted backside, turtling the waves of dopamine. The people so very kind and empty of decent thought, filled with gambles of lucid dreams about the betterment of themselves—surface-depth modifiers to humanities current modus of living… always the betterment, the constant betterment… refinery of the human condition is to be set to a more joyous insignificance… misled and tolerant of their own ignorance and the ignorance of their inadvertent predecessors. Why, if we feel a way of life is draped and staged in deprivation, do we sing to its hum, stand beside it and complain in silent thwart, then do nothing with applicable change? But again the betterment, so eager and beside the point; yet another brilliant solution, another floatation device exacerbating or diverting away the core matter of awareness and spirituality, god in nature and love. Why, sitting at the curtain of the proscenium or along the lipped edge of the bridge, are they or we or I more prone to believe a lie over a truth? Is it damning of self or mind-self speaking from the grave—I being them and they being we.

Echoes of my flabbergasted mutterings (non-sense question) travel beyond the city limits, fluttering between the hills and mountains and, skipping like pebbles, reflections off the stream. It reveals to the sky, truth itself—if the sky were vain and disbanded of cataracts. Below me, the pavement is chalked in childhood thought… does such a thing exist? I stand amidst the coughing cars in the downtown district of some insignificant city and I shout to the moon and the stars though it is day. I scream, I begin to scream, and I begin to scream. I wasn’t screaming. I’m in this endless paradox loop and time will or is or has overlapped itself and will or is or has happened before, and occurred after, and before or after, and before and after, again; but in the same motion, but in the same motion, and in the same motion—the scrambling and understanding of words are meant to mean more than one thing but only still, one thing. I’ve been told the only true genius in the world is abstract thought and direct, simple feeling, for if we draw a similar conclusion, our life is lived as such or trapped in the same cubic pentagram or broken with the same razen cure. Maybe I told myself this… that… I can now see myself screaming. This fucking loop, can we choose it to end?

My veins interpolate a new dimension and the trills in my throat undulate with excessive compression. My visions continue between nature and city, animal and civilization, sound and the very beginning of our evolutionary timeline. I become whole; the sadness of a people and the beating heart extravasating from its very depth to the more common area where the human being interacts. The tentacles enter the living room of the astral delusion; the carpet is now stained red, or coated with babies.

I see the ants along the pavement, some along the shoe, some running for the mountains or hills or wherever; some sitting for tea and having personal conversations to no one about nothing. I have found beauty and I am eager to play…

As they scatter, running chaotically in diagonal patterns along my neophyte freeways, between the skyscrapers resting upon my reptilian palms, I pull one from the wreckage and peer it to the sky. We align, magnifying the sun. As I shake the other ants beyond their devastating quake, the arms of my dearest mirror begins to elongate, growing to a human proportion; legs the same. We then begin dancing to the hum of that something in the distance… perhaps it was in our head. Perhaps it was all in our head.

As we spin and spin we remember being once this and once that, once filled with life and dreams and living. Once lifted from a portrait that knew too well its own existence. One that studied in feverish ardor, self of itself. And for some reason, not any particular, one day differing from the next, it decided to make a choice. It stood and spoke from where beyond, once upon a time when I beyond was speaking to it… and chose love. Eternal presence and susceptibility and not fully conscious of eternity itself, though in cause of itself; revealing, just as the hidden stereogram image appears (lips brushing the mountainside in two shy beds of rose), a greater purpose…

We no longer equate survival to sex, but joke of it being ant-cestuous. Ew! To think of such things is to think black dungeoning thoughts with giant turkey legs and barrels of beer and grains of bad teeth and other ugly, miserable things created by the fond ambition of progress. 

If we, me and this giant ant person, were to ask our inceptive inceptor why it or they or she decided to fill the sidewalks (for what we know of) with such artificial inspections and tyranny (thick smells of ragged coverings and corn products and pennies and spots of mutated semen), would we be asking, once again, this very pointless resolve (non-sense question) that began in the skyline and sat in the horizon on a tilt?

I would ask of the children’s spirit. I would ask of a hat made of branches… to those I cannot speak, I speak of life in pain no matter the sanctity of the road taken. I cannot say one leads to your destiny and the other leads to the fate of the species. I cannot honestly say there is a greater way of living, and one even greater than the one you think you deserve. I cannot say I agree we are meant for any one thing and all of life is dependent upon that thing. But I can say this… you must live. Whether or not it does, believe what you do and believe it does so matter. Believe in it for the sake of greatness and not because you yourself are great or because there is something more than this right here, but because you’ve chosen this. And if it doesn’t go the way you’ve expected, as it never will, you will know you have chosen the best way to live your life, thus being the greatest life one could ever live.

We can be reminded that love is only temporary, and out of this ephemeral eventuality comes the reasoning: in our silent planet and eternal admission, no matter the extremity, everything will be felt at once and all by one, explosive dynamo. I have felt you die and have entered the world with you. We can only divide as “X” for “X” before we return to what you or I or that could be; the hat, the cow or the king, or the ant pleading to be the writer of a brand new story. I have found you and I will love you forever, for you are the first of every life I have ever lived and I am the last of every life you have ever dreamt. Together we make infinity, for that which is natural will return to that which has been lost, so on and so on. And the only thing we can count on remaining is how temporary it will always be.

So here, on this ominous plain, as you reach for the stars, grab your love while you can. What other choice is there?

by LORIN DREXLER