A White Square

I try to make my humor as offensive as someone who leans left could make it. Transgressive humor when you're leaning left means that you try to demolish sacred cows of the right, offend their sensibilities, and find ways to be absurd and show the sexual subtexts of various varieties of right-wing idiocy.

Try as I might, however, I could not think of any way to assault the status quo in a productive manner. I could do it and be uncreative, but nothing that sparked my sense of creativity popped into my brain. My style was to combine esoteric symbolism with political reality, to show the metaphysical assumptions that contributed to politics. I stared at the empty, white square on my graphics editor. There were many effects I had mastered, and a lifetime of analysis of the effects of symbolism on the subjective consciousness replaced any real understanding of semiotics, but my staring continued unabated and I had no idea what to create.

There were many easy targets: Reagan was a favorite, Trump was an easy target, Vladimir Putin could be knocked off of his high horse. These men had worked to embarass the human race and caused untold suffering, yet it was difficult to penetrate the thinnest veneer of reality that these men haphazardly wove into their narratives for anyone who wanted to believe it, or at least be on their side. I had shown George H.W. Bush splattered with oil, Trump covered with feces, Putin red with embarassment over being a failed megalomaniac.

Inverted pentagrams were employed by myself with what I thought was elan. This usually haphazardly used symbol of underground anti-spiritual currents of occultism had been studied by me, and I knew what it represented to the type of people who sit around philosophizing about esoteric symbols. The point on the bottom was spirit, and it was ruled over by the four elements of matter instead of the situation being the other way around. A non-inverted pentagram was supposed to represent the proper order of nature, with the superior force of "spirit" ruling over "matter".

I brought up a pentagram as a layer on my image editor. It didn't seem right. I felt that rather than showing and unveiling a certain reality, I was merely reinforcing it. To most people, the pentagram just meant "Satan" and that was the end of it, and a lot of these people were the type of people who followed right-wing figures. I felt it was too hamfisted to just say "this guy is Satanic" because for one, I wasn't exactly a Christian and I felt like the message wasn't sophisticated enough. No, a well placed esoteric symbol should take someone down a rabbit hole where they can find a wealth of information that shows exactly why the symbol was used in the way it was.

So when I say in one image that Donald Trump has a "micropenis" and put an inverted pentagram while presenting a dual-headed Donald Trump as four pairs of human testicles, the pentagram is supposed to tie the whole message together on a subconscious level. Donald Trump allows material reality to dominate his mind, showing no desire for a more enlightened state, and these things that he prizes in the material world rule over his consciousness, or "spirit". I say that he has a micropenis because his interactions with these things is ineffectual and compensatory, and he allows the duality of his egoistic understanding of reality to give him "two heads" which are the twin, testicular beast that he is presented as being, which I display in four frames, perhaps to represent the elements of nature being in duality with each other within himself.

As I stared at the computer screen, I felt that I had made enough of a statement with the pentagram; it was time to explore and utilize some other symbol. None were known as widely as the pentagram, however. There was the cross, which I had worked with recently but felt was dangerous and easily misunderstood, being a symbol of a god-man being executed and all. There had been a point where my ego was inflated to spectacular proportions and I felt an aversion to every crucifix I saw, as if I were being murdered by it everywhere I encountered it. This, however, was not the case anymore. The pentagram was deleted from my screen, I balked at loading a crucifix to work with. I was an artist without a vision.

Feeling stuck, I went into the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee. Did I really believe in any of this crap? I thought this to myself as the coffee came out of the caraffe into the cup. I decided that I didn't believe in any of it, but that if it didn't go away despite my disbelief in it, that I should definitely pay attention to it. I took a sip of the coffee and winced at the pain of the heat, which I was not expecting to be so intense.