Artistry
By Hogan
“If you look flabby and you feel overweight
And you wanna lose a couple of stone
Take a crash course diet, do your daily exercises
And you'll look like skin and bone.”
The man with the guitar continued to sing, saying skinandbone, skinandbone, skinandskinandbone over the top of his unremarkable guitar playing. He looked homeless. He wore a dark green beanie over overgrown grey hair which came down the side of his head and met a beard equal to the description. His old and large hands worked over the guitar and he leaned into the microphone to caution his audience away from carbohydrates and other like substances, at least until John was out of earshot, having deposited some change in the open guitar case before he left.
When called to reflect on why he had broken protocol and donated to the musician John was forced to conclude that he felt a kind of kindred spirit; the artist trying to make their way in the world, however different that art may be. The nights before and following their encounter John, a twenty-six year old man employed as an accountant, chomped away at an 180,000 word masterpiece destined to become the next great postmodern novel, wrought with more references than a law textbook, all essential to an unflinching maximalism designed to greatly irritate and ultimately filter out the “general reader.” To drop such a tome on contemporary literature was the only remaining way to make one’s mark without selling out.
The homeless man, though the more John thought about it the more he was sure he wasn’t homeless, was just a man playing songs. Who could say he had even written them? In a rare flash of insight John determined that such a thing did not necessarily have much to do with self-expression; the element which links all artists.
“That’s what’s different between men and animals,” he once explained to a woman on a first date, “us and animals. Animals have no means of self-expression. They can’t create art.”
“Uh huh.”
She hadn’t been an artist herself and after the date John realised that despite his profession this would be a hurdle for him — he could not enjoy a long term relationship with a woman who did not understand the soul of humanity. It was for this reason John insisted he was not an accountant but merely someone who was employed as an accountant, since such a role did not define his personhood or humanity; the shortest way of expressing this thought remained I work as an accountant. Such ideas had found little currency during John’s forays into the dating world, which stood as his only attempts at meaningful socialisation in this city. At present he remained as romantically unsuccessful as he was artistically, writing and writing away in his apartment block only able to pull from what he could observe in others and not what he could draw from them.
The homeless man with the guitar was the only other artist he knew. When John walked by him again he was playing a song familiar but by an elusive name, and stood as he was waiting for the little green man to appear, he nodded his head along and along while looking at the woman before him, at a very oddly shaped tattoo on the back of her right leg. It sat above the achilles and resembled two Cs vertically stacked and connected by an L between them, with enough loops on everything to keep it ambiguous. He took a discrete photo of her leg and that night was writing it into his novel, imagining it analogous to the post horn symbol with a circle, triangle, and a trapezium.
By the time John turned 30 he had in his possession one of the greatest novels ever written. Slimmed down to 175,000 words, the instant postmodern classic titled simply Warman featured prominently the logo he’d seen that morning while listening to the homeless man’s music, which was now visible on certain days in the office when the firm’s newest employee Kerry wore clothes short enough that the tattoo on the back of her leg could be seen. In the last four years they’d exchanged only small conversation, while John had imagined ripping off her clothes — her long officewear — to study her tattoo. At breaks he walked down the city street to listen to the homeless man, several times a week for four years, and it was not uncommon to hear that familiar track which he still could not name, reintroduced to him the first time he looked upon Kerry’s leg.
Warman was completely unpublishable. John could not even find anyone committed to beta reading the whole thing, though the Heavenly Post, a literary publication run in the afterlife with access to all man’s written words, including John (and Kerry’s) extensive (and oft-deleted) catalogues of erotica, determined that Warman was perhaps the greatest postmodern novel ever written — though many souls in the great beyond found it meandering and often pointless, which, had he known at about the time he was giving up on it, would have pleased John greatly. Such artistry was not meant for this world, but maybe for the next.
And one day after talking to Kerry in the single most stilted conversation in his life, John went outside for lunch to discover the homeless man, who had been performing that morning, had gone away. His things were gone. John stood and looked around but in the concrete jungle there was no sign he’d ever planted his feet down at all, and he went back inside to ask Kerry if she knew what had happened until he saw her sitting at the table with her little white headphones in looking down at the phone, and decided then not to bother her, not to bother at all.
And one week later John sat at home listening to a podcast which had been referred to him extensively over the internet’s many forms — Balthazar’s appearance on The Rick Broderick Experience had been incredible, beyond two hours of downright esoteric mysticism told by a guy who looked the part while keeping his charm, who perfectly played off Broderick and seemed like he was born before an audience. He talked extensively of the spiritual power of his music, how when he’d play a tune like Skin and Bone there would appear where he slept and on the scene the skeletons of the long-deceased while the spirits once attached to their bodies would stir in thoughts and dreams. He talked of “a hypercretichonist encounter with the demasticated spirits of Cormac McCarthy and [the still-living] Barbara Palvin,” which inspired him to write the song Beauty — available on YouTube minutes after the episode went up.
On various social media platforms attention swelled, though the most common comments remained declarations of love, characterisations of Balthazar as “our guy,” as “cunty”, as “slaying” and “based Balthazar” or “Balthazar the based.” Clips of his dialogue chopped and changed and edited over proliferated across the internet, and in this way the man received more attention than perhaps he ever thought possible. And along the way some people stopped and realised he actually was quite capable with music too.
John watched the homeless guy’s channel explode afterwards, where his music began to receive views by the order of millions, where he disappeared off the street almost entirely and announced the construction of his first official album, all made possible by the generous internet donors who enabled artistic expression for those willing to grab it.
John had become reduced to writing solely erotica and he never tinkered with a word from Warman again — the date on which Balthazar announced his first album is what the Heavenly Post uses as Warman’s ‘publication’ date. His final attempts at writing real fiction after that novel were marred by the continuous and prolonged interruptions of social media, by mental imagery of Kerry’s miniature breasts, and by the presence of a file in his computer which rendered the invention of all future fictions moot by its existence. John walked through the city streets to work and had no homeless man to hear play anymore, and thought to himself this was a world at last devoid of art. He and Kerry, passionate devourers of literature, writers of the foul word, critics of the space all around -– enjoyers of headphones and YouTube — said nothing to each other about it all.