Coming up for air was a mistake. I should have stayed submerged, chipping away at my rock of fiction, my own way, my own tools. But the shimmering mirror above drew me to break the surface and gaze about. Toxic reasoning, broken ideologies, plain wrong thinking found me struggling in the froth at the top. Best to sink back down and return to rooting among the muck and sludge that is my domain.
But isn’t it the affectation of all creators to seek affirmation of their work?
Are there truly artists in the world who work solely for the work? The painters and sculptors and potters who toil away in their hidy-holes, furiously producing piece after piece? Producing with nary a thought as to their creation’s effectiveness, impact, or value?
Perhaps those types of art differ from lexical art like writing & songs. Why communicate through words (the foundation of a society) if those words might never be read or heard by another human? Music? I think music might be somewhere in between.
All artists no doubt suffer the burden of mediocrity in concert with self-doubt. Word artists seem unique, however, in their suffering. Failing to communicate through a communication medium must be the ultimate of failure.
Thoughts?
If y’all are about sick of this daily barrage of content from me, worry not, September will come to an end soon and so too this flurry of activity.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Given this topic, I think it good to recall that Gauguin was one hell of a writer. If you haven’t read him you should. He had lots to say about art and thought.
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I pulled up this through Chrome (which translated it for me): http://gutenberg.org/files/62340/62340-h/62340-h.htm
I can see how you might like his writing: emotive and descriptive, almost like his paintings.
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Why demean your work by referring to it as rooting among the muck and sludge that is your domain? Nonsense say I. It is in exploring your so called “muck and sludge” that open you up to tap into the basic humanity that lies within you and everyone else and from which you can most deeply touch and even change for the better your readers own understanding of their own wrongly called muck and sludge. We are all trying to understand life and honest prose help us see past the darkness even if just a bit. Stories and songs are as old as the species and universal in all tribes who have ever lived upon this earth. Tell your tales.
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And tell them I will.
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Music isn’t in between. Along with other performance arts it is the moment. Not in the moment, but the moment. Everything vibrates, at least that we understand. Music is one with the cosmos. Regardless of content it is completely free to vibrationally interact. Words are inadequate. Resonating with a psyche is a crap shoot. Resonating with the is? Evanescence. Regardless, if we’re here for the $ and the attaboys we might as well be selling cars.
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I think the desire for affirmation can border on a hang-up if we’re not conscious of it and allow our mother’s voice in our head to dictate to us (errrm, maybe that’s just me). I love and seek affirmation in every area of my life bc I’m insecure and my mother is judgmental and critical. But in all seriousness, I think we do want to know that others appreciate what we have to say, to feel that our efforts were worth it. But I do think it’s possible to work at your art knowing all the while that no one may see it, if it’s important enough to your sense of your own life-force or soul or whatever name you’d like to call it that you need to simply release it from yourself and give it an objective reality. On the other hand, the fear of what others might say can keep us from revealing our work. I too have subterranean works-in-progress that will probably never see the light of day out of fear. I am a pretty serious, intense person at heart, but I write stupid shit for jokes so it doesn’t really matter if someone thinks it’s lame.
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The artist and her audience, can one even divide them? Are they not a symbiotic entity?
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I hope that they can be, at least as far as a person can be their own independent self.
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“I was a painter.”
“Oh, yeah, can I see any of your work?”
“I burned it all.”
“Uh, right. And I’m the King of Siam.”
I’m a writer.”
“Oh yeah? Can I read some of your work…”
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Eh, the audience isn’t God and gets to decide if something exists or not. Suppose your house with you and your yet-to-be-read magnum opus burns down with you in it. Were you never a writer?
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If a tree falls in the forest…
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..it’s still there.
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Probably. But did it make a sound? Without a witness…
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Don’t matter 😉
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Philosophically speaking, titles of occupation are social constructs. Society determines if you’re a painter or sculptor or writer. Without society’s label you’re just somebody in the woods, doing your thing.
This topic may be worth a proper post…
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Ugh. You sent me back to when I was in grad school philosophy and the professor and the class audibly snickered at me when I outrageously declared that I believed “minds” exist. I hope you’re kidding about society’s labels. Fuck what society thinks. If we meet people or discover works of any kind along our pilgrim path with whom we have mutual influence, then that’s wonderful. Otherwise, who cares what labels they affix.
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See. I think this topic deserves its own exploration. It meanders into a blend of tautology and anthropocentrism; one of those “I think therefore I am” discussions. Or if you prefer, how can we discuss language without language? And in doing so, how do we know when we’ve delved into a self-referential Mobius-like conversation?
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Yeah time for a post.
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Everyone’s a writer now. The answer would most likely be “Oh, how nice. See you later.” It’s a lot quicker and easier to look at a painting and say something appropriate. If you offer to read something, you’re committing a block of time. Who has enough of that? And then you have to say the appropriate thing too.
Now you don’t have to burn your writing. The Delete key awaits.
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You’re writing faster than I can cleverly comment, which is good because nobody comes here for the clever comments.
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I’m certain there are those who eagerly await critiques from various participants.
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Hi A. Mole,
I recently was talking to a virtual pal and I wrote, there is no reality without language. He didn’t agree and then I said, language is holy in its original form. He really didn’t agree with that. I tried to explain that there must have been a word for reality before its creation, or else everything would be totally random and there appears to be some consistency in the universe, so for me anyway, consistency implies preexisting language. I should also point out that language would include all of the five senses and any other unknown to us. Much of what I believe about this comes from LWittgenstein, who had the inconsideration to tell the world that most of his work was wrong. So there is that, but once again it is all about language. So let us fuck it. Thanks. Duke
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Before and after language. I’m not sure I’m capable of imagining the multi-millennia long transition of our species’ evolution of that feature.
What was once only vagueness and confusion somehow morphed into rationalization and assumption — a sort of understanding?
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