Thank you Deborah. It's funny to me that for my entire life I've known these things intrinsically. But here's the rub, for others. Whether I like a particular piece of art or not, I've always had respect and appreciation for the creator. Case in point, I don't like Rap music. I see most of it as not even being music. I do, however, recognize it as art. I appreciate the creativity of it. Yet for myself, my own creative produce, not so much. Anything that I wrote, anything that I fashioned out of metal or wood, was just meh. I've known my whole life that I am an artist, but I denied it. Until I started writing again after a 30 year hiatus.
My father was an artist, yet he didn't allow himself that self recognition. It was not a title permitted to him, not by his father nor by society. It's interesting that he died at 54, convinced he was an abject failure and I came to accept what I am at 54.
I may never see my avocation provide a living, but I'm now more cognizant of my needs vis a vis what I do for that living. I've mentioned before in one of posts that the satisfaction I've derived from a job is directly related to the amount of artistic expression it allowed me. Whether it be landscaping, carpentry, as a machinist or even in retail. My soul suffers when I cannot create. Now that I'm older than my father ever was, I have that much more love for him and a deeper understanding of his suffering. The horrors I inflicted upon myself in my life seem to all have been caused by this willful blindness. I'm much more at peace with myself now. Still dirt poor, but that doesn't bother me as much.
Yes, I'm much more at peace now with things as they are, myself included, than before. Thank you for sharing your story. I'm glad you've found the creative outlet you need through writing. It's given me so much pleasure over the years and continues to do so. I've found that the few things I've published don't add that much to the pleasure. It's thrilling for a short while, then dulls. The real lasting pleasure is in the act itself and in the satisfaction I feel when I've completed the work and feel its worth. It doesn't really come from me anyway. It passes through me, a kind of dance with my inner muse, these ideas, images ,insights, characters, whatever. There's joy in that.
I liked this piece ... reminded me of so much of myself when very young, lost in the romance of art. Walking through a forest of symbols, a la Baudelaire. I think art though, can lead one astray. Rimbaud might of been right, it is a false door but a beautiful one, nonetheless, this meaning making art washes oneself with. Throughout the years, I've written about the meaning of art, why it exists as a cultural form. There are many answers. At bottom, it is like you allude, to live outside ourselves, a wish to exist outside the strong hands of time, to be more real, to be timeless. It is a revolt against entropy. Ultimately a failure, even Shakespeare will one day be forgotten. But for our moment here, in time, it suffices. "Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives" Auden. Thanks for surfacing these memories in me!
Thanks David. It's strange though, the older I become the more real things that lie outside time, like art, seems. It's not that the artwork itself will survive, but the insights and ideals that they reveal, as well as that fire to create, to not only make meaning, but to become the thing we create. Mozart's music is as alive and vital within me today as it was when he created it, while all the wars and chaos and poverty of his time have no impact on me whatsoever. I don't care if he was a saint or a lecher, but whatever it was in him that inspired him to write that music in the way he did speaks to me today and inspires and enlivens me. I don't imagine the art I make will survive me, and its not necessary that it does. But the thing that inspired me to make art, that fire in the belly, that thing that responds to the artwork that others make, that I know to be the essence of who I am, and I don't believe its bound by the laws of time. It's not even "me" really, it's the thing that makes me and all other things possible. A revolt against entropy? Entropy is just the dissolution of time-bound things. Time is as much an illusion as the stuff of matter that dissolves under the microscope of science. Rimbaud was wrong, it's not a false door. There are no doors. It's all wide open. Here and now. This word, you reading it. It's what lies in the gap.
Oh I'm terribly glad that you are enlivened more and more about mystery, by art, questions, flights of fancy and a 1,000 other terms. It's good to remain as a child, even become younger. I was older then, I'm younger than that now ... to paraphrase Dylan. Pessimism is easy, Wells, probably the greatest "optimistic" writer fell on the sword of pessimism with his last pamphlet - At The End Of My Tether. I sometimes think I will too. Rimbaud, he abandoned art for life. And that's ok too - your life can be a work of art. The only thing I'm against in your writing truly is the making of the creator, the artist into a genius, idol etc ... I'm really with Barthes who wrote long ago about the death of the author. Looking at art as an ARTifact, without the hyperbole and illusion of ego and attachment to the persona. Ultimately, the artist is a random chance, a freak, a one in a million ... so many go unnoticed in equal power and skill. I end quoting Gould, one of my heroes. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Well I think we can agree on one thing, I certainly don't think of artists as geniuses or idols and there's much art and poetry I dislike and would even argue it's not art. And I believe that every person who died in the cotton field of equal weight and importance as Einstein. I think the word we are looking for at the top of your last response is love or God or Tao or vital life force, the Thou art That which connects all of us and all things. I hope you find that someday. It's a heady brew. It will cure your pessimism, which does no one any good, least of all you.
Thank you Deborah. It's funny to me that for my entire life I've known these things intrinsically. But here's the rub, for others. Whether I like a particular piece of art or not, I've always had respect and appreciation for the creator. Case in point, I don't like Rap music. I see most of it as not even being music. I do, however, recognize it as art. I appreciate the creativity of it. Yet for myself, my own creative produce, not so much. Anything that I wrote, anything that I fashioned out of metal or wood, was just meh. I've known my whole life that I am an artist, but I denied it. Until I started writing again after a 30 year hiatus.
My father was an artist, yet he didn't allow himself that self recognition. It was not a title permitted to him, not by his father nor by society. It's interesting that he died at 54, convinced he was an abject failure and I came to accept what I am at 54.
I may never see my avocation provide a living, but I'm now more cognizant of my needs vis a vis what I do for that living. I've mentioned before in one of posts that the satisfaction I've derived from a job is directly related to the amount of artistic expression it allowed me. Whether it be landscaping, carpentry, as a machinist or even in retail. My soul suffers when I cannot create. Now that I'm older than my father ever was, I have that much more love for him and a deeper understanding of his suffering. The horrors I inflicted upon myself in my life seem to all have been caused by this willful blindness. I'm much more at peace with myself now. Still dirt poor, but that doesn't bother me as much.
Yes, I'm much more at peace now with things as they are, myself included, than before. Thank you for sharing your story. I'm glad you've found the creative outlet you need through writing. It's given me so much pleasure over the years and continues to do so. I've found that the few things I've published don't add that much to the pleasure. It's thrilling for a short while, then dulls. The real lasting pleasure is in the act itself and in the satisfaction I feel when I've completed the work and feel its worth. It doesn't really come from me anyway. It passes through me, a kind of dance with my inner muse, these ideas, images ,insights, characters, whatever. There's joy in that.
I liked this piece ... reminded me of so much of myself when very young, lost in the romance of art. Walking through a forest of symbols, a la Baudelaire. I think art though, can lead one astray. Rimbaud might of been right, it is a false door but a beautiful one, nonetheless, this meaning making art washes oneself with. Throughout the years, I've written about the meaning of art, why it exists as a cultural form. There are many answers. At bottom, it is like you allude, to live outside ourselves, a wish to exist outside the strong hands of time, to be more real, to be timeless. It is a revolt against entropy. Ultimately a failure, even Shakespeare will one day be forgotten. But for our moment here, in time, it suffices. "Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives" Auden. Thanks for surfacing these memories in me!
Thanks David. It's strange though, the older I become the more real things that lie outside time, like art, seems. It's not that the artwork itself will survive, but the insights and ideals that they reveal, as well as that fire to create, to not only make meaning, but to become the thing we create. Mozart's music is as alive and vital within me today as it was when he created it, while all the wars and chaos and poverty of his time have no impact on me whatsoever. I don't care if he was a saint or a lecher, but whatever it was in him that inspired him to write that music in the way he did speaks to me today and inspires and enlivens me. I don't imagine the art I make will survive me, and its not necessary that it does. But the thing that inspired me to make art, that fire in the belly, that thing that responds to the artwork that others make, that I know to be the essence of who I am, and I don't believe its bound by the laws of time. It's not even "me" really, it's the thing that makes me and all other things possible. A revolt against entropy? Entropy is just the dissolution of time-bound things. Time is as much an illusion as the stuff of matter that dissolves under the microscope of science. Rimbaud was wrong, it's not a false door. There are no doors. It's all wide open. Here and now. This word, you reading it. It's what lies in the gap.
Oh I'm terribly glad that you are enlivened more and more about mystery, by art, questions, flights of fancy and a 1,000 other terms. It's good to remain as a child, even become younger. I was older then, I'm younger than that now ... to paraphrase Dylan. Pessimism is easy, Wells, probably the greatest "optimistic" writer fell on the sword of pessimism with his last pamphlet - At The End Of My Tether. I sometimes think I will too. Rimbaud, he abandoned art for life. And that's ok too - your life can be a work of art. The only thing I'm against in your writing truly is the making of the creator, the artist into a genius, idol etc ... I'm really with Barthes who wrote long ago about the death of the author. Looking at art as an ARTifact, without the hyperbole and illusion of ego and attachment to the persona. Ultimately, the artist is a random chance, a freak, a one in a million ... so many go unnoticed in equal power and skill. I end quoting Gould, one of my heroes. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Well I think we can agree on one thing, I certainly don't think of artists as geniuses or idols and there's much art and poetry I dislike and would even argue it's not art. And I believe that every person who died in the cotton field of equal weight and importance as Einstein. I think the word we are looking for at the top of your last response is love or God or Tao or vital life force, the Thou art That which connects all of us and all things. I hope you find that someday. It's a heady brew. It will cure your pessimism, which does no one any good, least of all you.