"...Creating isn't more difficult than destroying, as the artists say. there's a joy that can only be found in molding the world to your heart's content. not even destroying can bring greater pleasure, but because of it nothing done can ever truly be undone.
creating and destroying are one and the same, but not in the way life and death are. we don't create and destroy at the same time. we find a new place for things, and when it's time to let them disappear, we disassemble them. that's something life and death don't have in common, that paint and canvas instead share. The dead can't be undone, it can only find itself piled up in technicolor in aseptic corridors filled with dreams, the same way it can also be found in a ditch among piles of different, equally dead things. Life and death aren't the same.
A discarded life is dead. The spark is lost into the chaos, not reabsorbed into the cosmos. Life, itself, is not death present, but death future. death is a promise that relief will come.
Such relief won't come to you through art. Art is futile in the sense that it will never have nor give the gift of true life. Still life is the closest thing to life dead matter can have. So paint with care, give death the liveliness we as humans so desperately want it to have. This semester, you will be-"
A raised hand, bracelets tinkling in the otherwise monologue-filled lecture hall. Its long blue shadow left wobbly stripes on students' faces, painted a darker shade on the sage green wall.
"Park, Professor. Park Jimin."
"Mister Park, do you have a question so poignant it can't wait until the end of the class?"
The boy's Adam's apple bobbed, long pale hair brushed against his sun kissed neck. Nobody would have noticed his anxiety hadn't the angel calling bells on his wrist jingled a little louder.
A deep inhale. A loud, steadying exhale.
Silence tense of unmet gazes and pursed lips.
The woman sighed, an acid rasp in her up until then mellowed out voice.
As gasps of broken boredom echoed in the room, he let it happen.
Jimin's still raised hand blurred, and out it emerged, bright orange in the sunbeams.
"With all due respect,"βIt lazed its way to the front of the class, delicate fins swaying in the air in watery slowness.β "I don't agree with you."
