Art is pleasure in the largest sense, whether visual pleasure or thinking pleasure. Connection to art makes for happiness.

Here’s a little story about The Poetry Jukebox, illustrative of the future of art. The Jukebox is a performative act I offer as an auction item at fundraisers. 144 memorized poems are at the ready to be spoken in a one-on-one moment. Ask a “life question” and out rolls the verse. Here is the outfit that goes with it.

At the Friends of the Petaluma River shindig, a few years ago, our congressman Jared Huffman bid and won me—an hour of poetry at his party; paid but never collected. It bugged me (debt owed and lingering) and I pestered his office (a bit) but no response. Time marches and a few years pass. So, at our Town Hall on Monday 8/5/19, I cornered him in the parking lot after the event as he was leaving. We are in Point Reyes Station where the town clock chimes with MOOOOOOOO at high noon. Green thickly forested hills, fog rolling in, tinged pink with sundown…. “Hey Congressman, you never collected…etc etc”

“OK OK, we’re running late…just give me some Allen Ginsberg…”

Howl for Carl Soloman came spilling out as if he had dropped the needle on the record:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull….

I got that far, and then I said, uncensored (Ginsberg smiling approval in mythy clouds overhead),

“That poem ends with a whispered MOTHERFUCKER!! as so many of his do….”

Huffman flashes a giant white-teeth grin of joy and relief that I’m not asking more of this public servant than to live for a moment in art. And his political show-case smile becomes part of the scene as he and his admin haul themselves into the Suburban. Paid in full I said. A day in the life of the struggle to die happy. 

A clue comes around to explicate this die happy business. Have an idea, realize it in the material world. I tuck away this moment into the file of “happiness beyond its opposite”. Happily here in the parking lot of the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station, California. Art will not cure injustice, heal the lame, bring down despots and Mafiosi. Nor feed the hungry or right the ship of state. Art is for pleasure, mostly.

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1970 saw “The end of Art, the end of history” according to Arthur Danto, Sherrie Levine, Jack Burnham and a boatload of French post-structuralists. The end of meaning, the end of metaphor. Art Degree Zero. We’ve had fifty years of the “End” But what of the struggle to die happy? Are we? Are we struggling to make this “die happy” a reality? How does art help in this regard and we come to the question of what is human happiness? Are humans the only creature who think of this? Dying happy? Or better, living happy? Does art answer?

This was the question of 1970. Now that we had entered the pointless forest of post- modern, did art help answer? I feel the room fill up with figures offering perspectives. The English skeptic too cool to be bothered, having better things to do like perching on a high stool casting lifelines to those drowning in the high water of foolish optimism. Like the new-age tout saying love is both the question and the answer. A yawning chasm splits open. Filled with? Filled with a yawning chasm. Art won’t cure the suffering of the world—art can only make you happy—its own reward.