Art

I’m getting to know Tyler a lot better. He’s talked a lot about art stuff which honestly I didn’t really care about earlier. I still don’t but I care a little more than I did like yesterday fucking whatever shut up. He told me about a couple of his favorite paintings when he was at the art fair a couple of days ago. I wanted to ask my mom about it but she’s still not up to talk. He told me about some of his favorite paintings both from the art fair and just in general. Rene Magrit and John Everett Millais make some pretty good shit apparently. He asked me if I knew what the allegory of the cave was and I said no.

“Imagine that there are people living in a cave deep underground. The cavern has a mouth that opens to the light above, and a passage exists from this all the way down to the people. They have lived here from infancy, with their legs and necks bound in chains. They cannot move. All they can do is stare directly forward, as the chains stop them from turning their heads around. Imagine that far above and behind them blazes a great fire. Between this fire and the captives, a low partition is erected along a path, something like puppeteers use to conceal themselves during their shows.” To be honest I felt really dumb when he said this to me because I don’t know why he said it like this. Would it have killed him to talk normally? I don’t know. But basically what it means is “wouldn’t it be fucked up if some guys in a cave were forced to look at nothing but shadows and they thought shadows were what real life was?” And it would be fucked up.

I asked him what it had to do with anything and he just said “Are you sure what you see aren’t just shadows?” Which I thought was pretty fucking stupid because I know what a shadow is. Then he got a really faraway look in his eyes and just said “What happens when people display shadows for others to see, then? People think they know what a shadow is. But shadows can take any shape.” I told him that I wasn’t that smart but the way he said it just sounded dumb as hell. “Yeah, it does sound a little bit stupid. I can’t articulate sometimes, okay? Leave me alone.” He started laughing after that and changed the subject. I don’t know what any of that meant.

That’s a lie. He said something else that really confused me.

“I may not know you that well, but something’s telling me that you’ve got some shadows of your own. Maybe you haven’t even noticed them yet. Good luck with that.” Then he just went home without saying what he was talking about. What the hell? Where are my shadows? What’s the light that my shadows come from? Also shut the fuck up nobody goes to your forum anyway.