...and every of his written literary thought!

Friday, April 26, 2013

Real Appearance


Wash off the over-soaked Mexican Soaps
Gag Tyra and all irritating talking traps
Plague public theatres—the epicentre of tramedies—
The youth’s mind, they corrupt and addle.
Sweep them clean of its melodramatic poems
Wipe out Homerians and blow up every weeping
Tragedians. And from page to stage,
Slash Shakespearean texts. Destroy his
Masquerades and those appearances of reality.

Acting, performing, sketching, singing,
And in fact all dramatic imitations
Are quite far removed from the truth
The plastic audience, engrossed in puerile art form
Excited like a goldfish in an aquarium
Blast the disdainful banal world of popular
Public performance. Where common people,
Charitably drawn, to peevish and
Surreal characters, are objects of satire!
                                            
Stab mortally Odysseus and his villains
For misrepresenting historical figures
Hang every Iliad hero for depicting turbulent events
While engaging in such questionable display
Of emotion as spinning out long melancholic lamentations
So disfiguring themselves in grief.

Bear not such intimate sorrows, condone them not.
Murder Hamlet. Slay Macbeth. Heed Plato:
‘If you receive these pleasure-seasoned
Muse, of song and epic, drama and poetry,
Speeches and soliloquies,’ he admonished,
‘Pleasure and pain will be kings in your cities,
Instead of law, logic and reason.’

Esteem the cold sweeping pronouncements
Of apostle Wilde summed up in his most
Unholy anti-arts argument: ‘All art is quite useless.’
But then, wasn’t he merely an elitist
Double agent of art? In his dark epistles?
When he began with a poetic onslaught,
And ended up writing one too many.

Cancel poetry readings and censure live theatres
There being free and accessible and raucous,
Gives them an extremely popular status.
Ban all mass entertainment. Instead of comedy
And poetry, and Socrates and Sophocles,
Read NY Times, listen to BBC and watch Al-Jazeera.

Reconstruct a Plato Republic, empty of all libraries
Theatres, cinemas and museums. Destroy all repositories
Of art, in case, God forbid, they have survived the Dark Ages.
Revive Plato’s personal utopia—that dream that never came
To pass! Disguise not your true disgust when it comes to art.
What art! What artistic expression! What inferior characters!
What art! What vulgar subjects! What corrupted audience!
What art! What confusion between appearance and reality!



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