sixteenth-chapel.html


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<h1 class="title">The Sixteenth Chapel</h1>


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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_pwLyeoqk">Canadian High School!</a>

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<p><span class="line">If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth</span><span class="line">chapel, I’m not either. I admit he is my role</span><span class="line">model. He’s so current, so fresh and so new,</span><span class="line">and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.</span><span class="line">Where is the love in those old paintings? All</span><span class="line">I see is <a href="creation-myth.html">creation</a>, <a href="movingsideways.html">judgment</a>, and <a href="deathstrumpet.html">death</a>—</span></p>
<p><span class="line">and I don’t get the preoccupation with death.</span><span class="line">I’m about life! Ever since my sixteenth</span><span class="line">birthday, when me and my two sisters all</span><span class="line">nearly died when the car I was driving rolled</span><span class="line">into a creek. Even though I’ve <a href="riptide_memory.html">forgotten the date</a>,</span><span class="line">I think it keeps me thinking on the new,</span></p>
<p><span class="line">something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.</span><span class="line">I look at him, and see the <a href="death-zone.html">opposite of death</a></span><span class="line">in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday</span><span class="line">he may <a href="i-am.html">be a father</a>, and later host a Sweet Sixteen</span><span class="line">for his daughter (for whom I know he’ll buy a Rolls),</span><span class="line">death will never find him. Living will be all</span></p>
<p><span class="line">he’ll ever do, because it will be all</span><span class="line">he’ll ever need to do. He is the eternal new,</span><span class="line">the <a href="about-the-author.html">forever youth:</a> this is the simple <a href="words-meaning.html">role</a></span><span class="line">of every celebrity, to let us forget death.</span><span class="line">Bieber didn’t make a mistake on the Sistine</span><span class="line">Chapel’s name. He merely showed that someday</span></p>
<p><span class="line">all old names must go, that on some day</span><span class="line">a name must die so that the thing, which is all</span><span class="line">that matters, can stay as it was in the sixteenth</span><span class="line">century: fresh, ostentatious, and brand new.</span><span class="line">In a way, <a href="nothing-is-ever-over.html">the name becomes a Christ</a>, experiencing death</span><span class="line">so the world doesn’t have to. But I am wary of this role</span></p>
<p><span class="line">for a name. It seems a name gives meaning, rolls</span><span class="line">the general idea together with the concrete, daily</span><span class="line">toil of the mundane. Are not life and death</span><span class="line">intertwined? Is not everything tied up all</span><span class="line">with everything? I guess I’m saying the new</span><span class="line">necessarily comes from the old, as every sixteen-</span></p>
<p><span class="line">year-old has a parent. <a href="ouroboros_memory.html">Life rolls to death</a>, and all</span><span class="line">is tied together. Each day is born of night, and dies so new</span><span class="line">morning can occur. Even the sixteenth chapel holds death.</span></p>
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