MACON SUN

Pretenses drawled about her mannerisms as she thwarted any hopeful student’s idea of an art history professor grounded by societal norms. Sagaciously she professed her love of students and how her varying degrees in the arts would envelop us and subsequently bolster our bourgeois understanding of culture into aristocratic prowess. She spoke slowly with saccharine praise of the humanities, or human ties, as she gingerly perused the syllabus for the forthcoming semester. Damn it, I thought to myself as the incarnate of my spacey and altogether intrusive high school art teacher (whose specialties revolved around collages, I might add) spewed ambiguous art philosophy at the bow of the classroom. 

To evoke classroom discussion she posed questions without answers; What is art? What is music? After chatter ensued she followed with Can art be an idea? At this venture I planned to deride her inferential nodding with an early experiment in rhetoric. An idea is not expressed through art, it is corrupted through artistic licensing and expression. When an idea is portrayed it is no longer the acute depiction of the artist, it is polluted by interpretation and thus crumbles under societal pressure. Ideas are a cultivation of the individuals life experience and the analytical qualities they encompass; expressing an idea is possible only on an individual scale. Distortions ensue, facets of the idea remain but are misconstrued, for better or worse, by the masses. 

But instead I permitted her to bask in the revelation of art she’d planted in the docile left-brained, and so she nodded. 

Indicative of the illegitimacy of proper identification cozied in the wallets of the youthful “of-aged,” I dreamt myself at a watering hole I’d become familiar with merely on the external. Its coordinates are proximal to my house. Inside, I felt timorous in contrary to my intrepid bar hopping and rampant identity theft. Upon ordering a beer that I deemed tasty according to the elaborate tap, the bartender prompted me to prove my legality. When I handed over a card, it read New York State across the top as it should’ve, but the amplification below was empty. She handed back the blank card, and the beer I’d ordered. I searched vehemently through tiny notecards of information, looking intently for the one that I’d deemed most suitable, surpassing the one with my own information scrawled across. As I frantically searched for “legitimacy” I realized, at once, that the bartender had not required me to do so. A blank card was returned to me without inquiry, and my beer sat in front of me simmering to room temperature. 

This bar operated on nothing more than a loosely sewn facade of legality, a charade at best. I sipped on the beer that was, in fact, delicious, reveling in my newfound proclamation of content falsehood. A blank name, a faceless underaged drunkard with a barstool and a few faceless friends.