---
title: 4. The Sixteenth Chapel
genre: verse

epigraph:
    content: "Canadian High School!"
    link: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_pwLyeoqk'

dedication: Max

project:
    title: Stark Raving
    css: stark
    order: 17
    next:
    - title: Last bastion
      link: last-bastion
    - title: |
        Something about all music being performances of *4'33"*
        in places where other bands happen to be playing
      link: music-433
    prev:
    - title: Worse looking over
      link: worse-looking-over
    - title: Riptide of memory
      link: riptide_memory
...

If Justin Bieber isn't going for the sixteenth \
chapel, I'm not either. I admit he is my role \
model. He's so current, so fresh and so new, \
and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated. \
Where is the love in those old paintings? All \
I see is creation, judgment, and death---

and I don't get the preoccupation with death. \
I'm about life! Ever since my sixteenth \
birthday, when me and my two sisters all \
nearly died when the car I was driving rolled \
into a creek. Even though I've forgotten the date, \
I think it keeps me thinking on the new,

something Biebs would be proud of if he knew. \
I look at him, and see the opposite of death \
in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday \
he may be a father, and later host a Sweet Sixteen \
for his daughter (who I know he'll buy a Rolls), \
death will never find him. Living will be all

he'll ever do, because it will be all \
he'll ever need to do. He is the eternal new, \
the forever youth: this is the simple role \
of every celebrity, to let us forget death. \
Bieber didn't make a mistake on the Sistine \
Chapel's name. He merely showed that someday

all old names must go, that on some day \
a name must die so that the thing, which is all \
that matters, can stay as it was in the sixteenth \
century: fresh, ostentatious, and brand new. \
In a way, the name becomes a Christ, experiencing death \
so the world doesn't have to. But I am wary of this role

for a name. It seems a name gives meaning, rolls \
the general idea together with the concrete, daily \
toil of the mundane. Are not life and death \
intertwined? Is not everything tied up all \
with everything? I guess I'm saying the new \
necessarily comes from the old, as every sixteen-

year-old has a parent. Life rolls to death, and all \
is tied together. Each day is born of night, and dies so new \
morning can occur. Even the sixteenth chapel holds death.