Utility

My aunt passed last night.  That particular horror is over.  I'll think of her as she was when I was a boy.  She always tried to make things interesting and fun.  So long. . . so long.

"What do you do with these?"

I hear that all the time about my pictures.  They litter my studio by the hundreds, maybe thousands if I count the small ones.  I never know how to answer.  What does one "do" with pictures?  I mean. . . what are they for?

"You should show them.  They should be in a gallery."

To what purpose, though, I wonder.  For what reason might I trouble myself?  Would they make people happy?  Would they think something new?

They are like my life, a real reflection in some ways, a piling up of things of little use.  I love them.  They swarm about me in my dreams like the mops and pails in that scene from "Fantasia" where Mickey puts on the sorcerer's hat and robe.  I tried on some artist's clothing, I guess, and this is what happened.

I'm tired of trying to make my life add up.  I'm tired of trying to make it mean something.  It is the false assumption of our lives, I think, the search for meaning.  I don't believe my aunt thought about it much. She never spoke in that way.  I never once heard her talk about the meaning of life.  Nor my mother nor anyone in that family.  They were good country stock and lived through the depression.  They were happy with food in their belly and a dry place to sleep.  Hillbillies are hard to train.  They do not fit in well with the Utilitarian Dream.  I worry too much about it, I know.  It has caused me trouble all my life.  My aspirations have been many and vague.  I have ended up a tool.

There are those who learn to serve their society and those who learn to take advantage of those who do.  And then there is this "otherness" to which my mother's family belong.  They get co-opted, of course, and some of them go to work (supporting the rest of them who don't).  But they are the ones dropping the anchor while the captains of industry are throwing up the sails.  I have learned now to enjoy the hideous goodness of that act.  It is a rebellion against the "federal men" and the "treasury department."  Their heroism, in the end, is in refusing to live their lives for someone else's purpose.

I am learning that now, perhaps too late.  I think in the end my aunt was happier to have lived her life without wondering what it all meant.