Day 30--Abstracts of Additional Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Augusta Savage leaves her Art in the skilled hands of Harlem’s young because the Body is a Harp, No Matter who Plows it under and tries to forget

Thomas Cole on The Course of Empire and the Eventual Superiority of Nesting Birds

Edward Kemeys discourses on wild beasts who lurk in public places for public purposes such as assisting humans in offering perpeptual prayers for rain

Carl Milles defends the scale of his bronze gods, particularly Poseidon’s privates, while standing beneath the Sun Singer in Allerton Park.

As a brass band marches by, Charles Ives sings his favorite hymn and sells me life insurance, though he has been long dead.

The dead lead singers from several mediocre bands denounce Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain but sing the praises of Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday, and, oddly, Elvis. They do this in harmonies worthy of a Bach chorale.


Hannah Cohoon sees heaven again with its rounded fruits, its blazing leaves of vision, and offers it to me as a token, but I am too busy humming “Simple Gifts” to hear her







Finally:

Rembrandt challenges Thomas Kinkade to a cage match in the Mall of America over fair use of the phrase Painter of Light®

Day 16--The First of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Manifesto One: Van Gogh on the Possible and True*

Even here there is no blue
 without yellow and orange,
  and color must still do everything.

My bedroom (precisely as I have always seen it,
 flat tints and a thick impasto, lilac doors, the green-citron
  pillow and scarlet coverlet, the pale violet 
   walls and floors of red, the basin blue
    which requires, as I’ve said, other colors)

Is heaven. I smoke my pipe in bed
 for days on end and live
  in paintings I never have to make.
                    
And there is nothing in my mirror.

*A number of these lines are cribbed/adapted from Van Gogh's letters, as included and translated in Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book. As far as I know, Van Gogh wrote no letters after his actual death.