The gospels don't tell that Jews (or Romans) asked for Jesus; the emphasis is that God decided to send Jesus. A gift, voluntary, from the divine: human desire is not reported as being involved, human deserving is specifically denied: original sin.
Van Gogh decided to paint, according to the biographies, and biopics. No one encouraged him, he did it anyway. Van Goth enslaved himself and his brother to his enterprise. Van Gogh died without anybody but his shrink hanging a single painting of his. His brother kept track of them, now they auction for dozens of millions of dollars. In my youth you could look at van Goghs for free at the Met in NY. You could see more at MOMA for less than a dollar entrance fee: and see a buncha Picassos, Matisses, Calders at the same time. Now we see them in movies, online, in magazines: van Gogh vision everywhere: without a penny traceable to van Gogh.
But music was my thing: in youth, and now. I loved Bach. And I loved Louis Armstrong. I knew nothing nor cared about Bach's finances. I knew Satchmo had been poor as a kid: black orphan kid, went without saying. As I grew up I knew that Muddy Waters made a living, up in Chicago; but not an obscene living, not like Bing Crosby or Perry Como. And I knew of other great blues men and great jazz men who didn't have carfare to coat us with their genius: while we paused, and squeezed our pennies, then showered them on second third and occasionally first rate white imitators: Paul Whiteman, Elvis.
Jesus accepted being tortured to death in order to offer us immortality.
Van Gogh tortured himself to death in order to give us dynamic color, vibrant composition, a souped up vision.
And we never gave him a penny he could spend.
I just learned about Wagner. I'd heard Wagner was a son of a bitch, an inveterate borrower. He lived his adult life in luxury, way beyond his earnings as an opera man. Now I know that Wagner had no car fare even when his early operas were playing to packed houses. If the opera house paid the composer for a short run, then the opera house had the right to repeat the opera for any number of runs without owing an additional penny to the composer!
Fellini got money from Dino De Laurentiis to make his great movies of the 1950s: was any movie greater than La Strada ever made? at any budget? But Fellini always wound up spending more of the De Laurentiis capital than contracted for: so Fellini had to hock his share of the profits in order to make the movie as great as it is. De Laurentiis earned the monetary profit: Fellini impoverished himself for our nourishment.
What right do we have to glibly accept's God's gift of Jesus?
What right do we have to look at a van Gogh without immediately finding a starving artist and buying him dinner? How dare a movie studio quote Siegfried's brooding themes without immediately underwriting ... who?
That's the trouble: we never know who our contemporary Jesuses are. Oh, we give zillions to claimants; but how reliably does our abundance ever find its way to the major genius? to Abelard? when he most needs it?
Basquiat went from living in a cardboard box to being called "Maestro" in the most expensive restaurants. Mick Jagger and Paul McCartner have talent, have done good work, but they're been paid obscenely. How about some of Muddy's sidemen? Did James Cotton have his mortage paid? How about the multitude of harmonica men he learned from? We don't know their names! Though we do know that many a mortgage wasn't paid.
Study pk. Even if you despise everyone of my innovations, you can easily see that my mortgage wasn't paid. I never had a house to have a mortage. I did without family, without cars. So I could offer you what I offered: a comprehensive reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to Western theo-cosmology ... science fiction stories that emphasized the basic themes of life: entropy / negentropy, communication / non-communication, redemption / damnation ... I offered the world a low-cost internet, cybernetic librarianship, social networking ... in 1970, as an alternative to coercion, to fraudulent institutions ...
What's the public going to do when God goes over our accounts at Judgment. What will you do when God shows what benefited you, what harmed you, and what you paid for?
It isn't just that van Gogh didn't get paid for his genius. Jesus didn't just get scourged, then crucified: he got dissed! Once the Romans arrested him, then every gutter girl could throw a turd at him. Once Wagner is evicted, while his operas are performing all around, every syphlytic whore can spit on him as he slumps in the gutter.
Enjoy what you've stolen from Crazy Horse, from Sutter, from slaves, from falsely arrested labor gangs ... from Jesus, Ivan Illich ... from pk while you can. Elbow me in the balls, no one will protest on my behalf, and if I protest, the elbowers can just have me put back in jail. Just pray that no other world follows. Pray the Nazis remain in power till every last drop of oil is wasted.
Pray that sentience remains stuck, that evolution will not shift from reverse.
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