---
title: The Sixteenth Chapel
genre: verse

id: sixteenth-chapel
toc: "The sixteenth chapel"

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

dedication: Max

project:
    title: Stark Raving
    class: 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 (for whom 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.

[role]: words-meaning.html
[death]: deathstrumpet.html
[opposite of death]: death-zone.html
[creation]: creation-myth.html
[judgment]: movingsideways.html
[forgotten the date]: riptide_memory.html
[be a father]: i-am.html
[forever youth:]: about-the-author.html
[the name becomes a Christ]: nothing-is-ever-over.html
[Life rolls to death]: ouroboros_memory.html