Sebastiaan Schlicher

"Apples, Bums, Puzzles, and Eggcups: Oh The Guilt"

My friend is a director. He is not just a director, he is an auteur: he writes his own material and doesn’t do other people’s screenplays. To me that means he is an artist. He tends to deny this but I think that is just because he gets nervous about his art. He always tells me one should not get into conversations about one’s own work. “Stay away from the how’s and the what’s and the why’s,” is what he says, but I’m never sure.

I like talking and occasionally I try to have a conversation about my work, even if my friend is right in the sense that on a certain level, our conversations are invariably failures. They never help either of us get the answers we are looking for, and in my case, they only help me get nowhere and lose the argument I started by bringing up the how’s, the what’s, and the why’s. It’s a very depressing situation. It’s very easy to sabotage a conversation on art.
Common sense usually does the trick.
I guess that is the problem. Art and common sense do not mix.

I don’t believe in common sense.
I believe in uncommon sense.

1. A drawing of an apple has nothing to do with common sense or uncommon sense
2. A drawing of an apple that is titled ‘Uncle Eddie on a late night cruise’ has something to do with uncommon sense If you understand 1 and 2, you will also understand that:

3. A drawing of an apple called ‘Apple’ has something to do with uncommon sense

I never call anyone’s bluff even when I know they are full of it. I just look and listen and take it all in. I think
it’s easier to do than call a persons bluff. Calling someone’s bluff is common sense. I don’t think there has to be any difference between bluff and not-bluff. The best people to hang around with are the ones who never call your bluff and allow you to have all the uncommon sense you like. These people are easy to find unless you are doing something wrong and have too much common sense.
Some artists who have too much common sense sometimes try to call their own bluff. That must be because every artist at one point was not an artist. So that is what you have to forget about; that once you were not an artist. Just forget it. If you have uncommon sense you don’t really need a memory: Artists should remember things like how to tie their shoelaces, or how to peel an orange and that’s about it; they can forget about their memory and all the common sense it inflicts on them.
Forget everything and then remember it all like pictures in a book: Like a found book; Like someone else’s book: like pictures of events that probably never happened in the first place.

I have only seen Marlon Brando in one or two films, but I read an interview once in which he stated that acting –being an actor- is “a bum’s life”. He went on to explain that; "Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. Quitting acting is a sign of maturity." Marlon Brando thought actors were immature people.

Between acting jobs, actors really lived like bums who slouched and slacked and didn’t even know who they were themselves. Well that’s what Marlon Brando thought. I think everybody is a bum. Those who don’t think they are bums are simply acting. At the end of the day even the busiest people are still bums. It’s uncommon sense. Through his acting in films, Marlon Brando really showed everybody exactly how much of a bum he really was. If you don’t believe me just look at the amount of weight he put on over the years. You don’t tell me you gain that kind of weight from working. It really is best to be okay about the bum you are.

If Marlon Brando were alive today, someone should explain to him how to use a computer and download songs and movies off
the Internet. That would really prove him right: that would really show him how what he had to say was seen and heard by his favourite audience: us bums bumming around on the web, wasting our time, looking at stuff created by people who were on a temporary break from doing sweet fuck all.

*
I’m a believer. I believe in things. It’s uncommon sense. Uncommon sense makes you have to think about things much harder: exactly because they don’t make sense. But then you think about them really hard and then they do make sense: in an uncommon way. Whatever makes sense easily doesn’t stick with me. Not like uncommon sense does. You may instantly recall something that makes sense to you, but as soon as you do, it’s gone. When I think about rain, I think; ‘rain makes sense’, because it does. But what does that mean? It means nothing and it doesn’t prevent you from getting wet.
I guess everything in the universe makes sense when you stick to things like ‘hot air’ and ‘cold air’ and ‘humidity’ and ‘clouds’ and ‘raindrops’, still that doesn’t allow you to travel away from it. And even if it did, we would just find more things that make perfect sense.

Everything is a puzzle and every puzzle can be solved.
Especially when people figure out how to stop dying.
That’s when we can afford to be patient and sit down and try to solve everything.

Puzzles are not something to believe in, they are something to spend time on.The best puzzles are the ones that can’t be solved. So they are not actual puzzles, but fake-puzzles. Fake-puzzles can be just as interesting as real puzzles, and often they are. Once you have a fake-puzzle to solve, you don’t need another
fake-puzzle. You can just play the same one over and over. Fake-puzzles can make you feel like you have already travelled away from the universe, looked around, figured out it all makes sense, and come back home.

Fake-puzzles tell you what we will feel like when we have figured out how to live forever. When I was a kid, my friend’s mother used to collect eggcups. Every wall in their house was fitted with lots of narrow shelves, and each and every shelf was stuffed with eggcups: hundreds upon hundreds –if not thousands and thousands- of
eggcups.

Collectors really are the cleverest people.

Just like they know they will never boil thousands of eggs for their breakfast, they know they will never be able to collect all the eggcups in the world. They will never solve the eggcup puzzle.

Collectors have uncommon sense, but hoarders have even more uncommon sense.

There is a solution to everything but not enough time for anything.
So really we should be collecting time. But who can afford it?

Time really slows down when you are bumming around.
So instead of wasting time, you are actually elongating time.

Work harder. Kill for Satan. Have a nice day.
Live properly. Sweat blood. Become superior.

Eggcup. Eggcup. Eggcup.

Tick.
Tack.
Toe.

Man is a senseless thing.
I believe in everything.