“In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?”
Pablo Neruda

Centro de las Artes is a former prison in San Luis Potosí, Mexico that was converted into an art school.  Built in the panopticon style in 1904, it was used as a prison until 1999.  The art school opened in 2008.  Each branch, spoke, cell block, or whatever they're called, is devoted to a different artistic discipline:  Music, Visual Art, Performing Art, Literature, and Art & Technology.  If I had kids and/or was the guardian of an artistically-inclined young person, I would seriously consider sending them there.  It is by far one of the coolest places I have ever been.

If you're a walker, like me, the Centro de las Artes is a pleasant urban hike down from Plaza del Carmen and the central historic district in San Luis Potosí.  When you approach the gate, you are greeted by The Psychedelic Penitent,

Which is the artful, demonic-looking version of the actual penitent-penitent, kneeling outside the OTHER penitent-iary, which is of course the Catholic church a few blocks further down the street.

If they converted the prison into an art school, it stands to reason that they'd have to balance things out by turning a church into a prison.  Fortunately, the joke's on them.  The church is not a building.  Tell the other prisoners.  But don't tell the warden.

He's sitting in his lightbringer-house, his lucifer-house, trying to figure out a way of turning art students into parishioners.  Or prisoners, if possible.

“I unscrewed my own scrap of paper and read out:
'Help!  I am prisoner in the tower.'"
Leonora Carrington

After you pass The Psychedelic Penitent and walk through the gates, you enter the courtyard, where strange men playing stringless ravens like harps serenade a stoic race of horned sculpture people, who may or may not be working for the serpent warden-priest in the lighthouse. 

Wow, this place is creepy.  The warden is obviously weird.  Am I a parishioner, or a prisoner?  A maestro, or a dice throw?  Shall we gamble with the brambles?  My language is in anguish.

Will it ever end?

“How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash
away their ghosts with common sense?”
Leonora Carrington

Let's explore the actual campus of the bronze and painted dream, and see how deep it really goes.  Under the watchful slit-eye of the warden, words and sound and drama, colors in the kiln, are incarcerated behind walls of stone that are 2 feet thick, where no one can hear them scream.

But what/say/what if the screams of the muse are screams of joy?  In an age in which love and beauty and reason are under assault, perhaps the arts should retreat to monasteries of beauty, behind the walls of which they can learn to fly again, in freedom.

For a season, if not forever.  Perhaps when native speakers of Languish finally turn their prisons into art schools, and not the other way around.  Didn't Van Gogh check into a "sanitarium," so he could find the peace he needed to get some work done?

“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try
again and again to console my heart and pick the
flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
Hermann Hesse

Perhaps there are still sanctuaries, places where prison yards have been converted into De Chirico paintings, where the harps are shaped like ravens, and the walls serve to keep the languish OUT, where it belongs.  Shall we cast our pearls before swine, our flame unto the dogs?

“Poetry is an act of peace.  Peace goes into the making of
a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”
Pablo Neruda

Thanks, Pablo Neruda.  Now I know why so much of my old writing is so bad.  Peace is as foreign to me as Mexico.  In what language does rain fall over tormented cities, anyway?  Spanish?  English?  Anguish?

Languish?

Languish.  That's it.  This is the age of languish.  The languish age of beauty, of reason, and of truth.  The languish age of language, in which art schools and cultural institutions have been converted into prisons, and birds are trapped in churches.  An age of liquor stores, and drag queens.  An era in which you go to the library for a shot of whiskey, or the bathroom for a beer.  Storefront cathedrals full of demons.  The black & lazy Stasi, eating Oakland like a cookie.  Philadelphia and Port-au-Prince, vying for position.  Who will be the zombie worst?  Will we be dead last, or dying first?

The CIA on Broadway.  ISIS in the Kremlin.

Or is it the other way around?

“Do not give up hope entirely in spite of the horror of your
situation.  I am mobilising all my mental capacities
to obtain your unconditional freedom.”
Leonora Carrington

If I had kids, I would send them to a monastery of beauty.  A sanctuary of brains.  An oasis of reason, where the guards and cultural priests are wasted to the brim on harmony and peace.  No one would demand compliance, except perhaps to the rules of grammar, or the proper embouchure with which to hang a spliff from one's lips while giving the Politburo something to be jealous of, which is all they really want.

Remember kids, "if you want to say no, say no."

Thanks for listening.