Art and "Why?"

I suppose no one ever stops thinking about the "Meaning of Life" or whatever you want to call it, even if they feel like they should stop thinking about it and just live. There are a few things I've concluded in the past few years, though, without really meaning to do so, and I'd just like to jot them down before I forget.

Art is life.

My favorite quote from Dead Poet's Society is this:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

We live for art. That's basically what he's saying. And this is what that means to me:

As humans, we each lead singular lives. We are all individuals with our own individual perspectives, views, feelings, thoughts, and these defining elements will never be reproduced in someone else in exactly the same way. At the same time, while we experience separately, much of what we experience is the same, and while we embrace our uniqueness and celebrate originality and independent thought, we embody a strange yet innate contradiction by constantly seeking companionship--by looking for ways to assure ourselves that in fact, we are not alone.

No one wants to be alone. Even if a person takes cold comfort in desiring solitude, it's not truth. No one wants to feel like he is the only person on earth in history to ever experience what he is experiencing. Everyone wants to be unique, and everyone is--but everyone also wants to be understood and heard.

To me, this is the cause of all art.

Art is the attempt to share your perspective, you own individual assessment of an experience, with someone else who can identify with your experience. It's letting others see an experience that they share, through your eyes. It's communicating your thoughts and emotions and ideas. It's introducing others to your way of seeing and feeling. It's inspiring them to reevaluate their own way of doing this.

Art brings people together. It gives them a shared human experience. It makes them feel like they are not alone. It lays the groundwork for connection on a deeper level. I don't think you can love art without loving people. Though sometimes art is making people feel uncomfortable, forcing them to confront something real they would rather avoid, it is still truth. Art is truth--personal truth in words, images, sounds, movement. To create real art, you must believe in what you're creating. You have to be passionate about it. If it doesn't mean anything to you, why should it mean anything to anyone else?

Art is courage. It's risky. It means finding your own personal truth, embracing every vulnerability, channeling it, and opening it to the world. And the world is frequently unkind. I think that stops people from trying to get people to listen and see them. It stops me. I have this habit I've developed of assuming that 1) no one cares about what I have to say, 2) I don't have anything to say worth listening to, and 3) I don't really want to lay myself out so vulnerably, anyway. It's terrible. They're awful excuses, and they shouldn't stop anyone from trying to make himself heard. We're constantly bombarded by images, sounds, words, all the time. There's a lot of garbage out there, and a lot of stuff that just doesn't mean anything to us--but it may mean something to someone. By not sharing, we're potentially depriving someone else of something meaningful. (I've gone off about this before.)

The Pop artist Ronnie Cutrone said that Andy Warhol taught him not to waste time trying to define art because you can't do it. I don't think that's true. I think you can define it--it's when you try saying what is "good" and what is "bad," that's when it gets tricky. I think that to me, "good" art is something that successfully communicates the artist's perspective, inspires interpretation, or both. There's plenty of entertainment that is not art, and I can appreciate it--but it doesn't mean anything to me. The only way I can criticize anyone's creation is look at it and ask myself, "What does this mean to me? What could this possibly mean to someone else?" If either answer is anything of significance, then I can't just dismiss it, can I?

But now I'm getting off on a tangent, and a really complicated one at that. I didn't mean to make this so long. These thoughts are full of contradictions. There's no logic to any of this. If you can find some, congratulations. If you can use logic or reasoning to destroy the validity of any of this, that's cool too. There's not really logic to anything I stick up here, 'cause that's not really my thing. This is all just what I know based on my own intuition, my own feeling and reaction to what's around me. It's just how I feel, in the most basic sense, about what I love and what I see.

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

T. S. Eliot was pretty awesome. If for no other reason than for having written my favorite poem ever, and for having said that. That said, I stole this quote from a friend's profile the other day:

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversation, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery--celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Goddard said: 'It's not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.'"

- Jim Jarmusch

I like that. First of all, because I happen to enjoy devouring everything he mentions--including the random conversation, bridges, architecture (cathedrals!), bodies of water, and light and shadows. Light is my favorite part of photography. And I love it when I find other people who "devour" everything he mentions too. They pursue what makes them curious, what interests them, what they question. Secondly, the demand for "original" work is intimidating and doesn't so much inspire me as nurture feelings of inadequacy. Third, it reminded me of David Lynch and how he says you need clarity to create.

I was reading an article today on a New York Times Online blog called "Proof." One contributory, a novelist named Brian McDonald, wrote a post entitled "Under the Literary Influence," about how he used to be addicted to booze-addled authors: Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Eugene O'Neill. McDonald loved reading their works and reading about their lives. To him, there something romantic about seeing Hunter S. Thompson catching fire when downing flaming shots of Bacardi 151, that made him see "a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and a pint of raw ether" instead.

Now, I like a lot of these writers. I love Fitzgerald's lyricism, Chandler's tone and distinct dime-novel style, Kerouac's poetry, O'Neill's tragedy. I've read a little Bukowski, which I thought was alright, though outrageous, and I tried to get through A Farewell to Arms but I just couldn't do it. I respect that these guys wrote some great stuff, and I understand that a lot of it wouldn't exist without all the drugs and alcohol they took. At the same time, I wouldn't be able to do that myself.

I guess it's my stubborn pride (me? proud?), but I wouldn't be okay with taking responsibility for something born of a substance-induced inspiration. I think I mentioned this in my "Clarity" post too. It'd feel wrong--it wouldn't feel authentic, to me. I'm finding more and more that I'm not very adept at expressing myself in any medium. I have problems when I try talking to people, and I feel like I'm not a particularly sophisticated or notable writer. Screenwriting is showing me that it's not a great medium for me, and I'm beyond awful with poetry. I can't paint or draw and I just can't seem to grasp the technical aspects of photography. But what stuff I do write and plot and paint and photograph is mine. I can take a little pride in that it's authentic, it's real, and it belongs to me--it's my own expression, my own view, my composition. It doesn't belong to an altered state of mind--to the alcohol I drank or the drugs I took or any other crutch.

At the same time, that strikes me as extremely self-righteous and silly. If I feel like I would have to give credit to psychotropic substances, then wouldn't I feel like I owe credit to all sources of inspiration--everything from which I steal? "Old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversation, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows." Wouldn't my work belong to all of that, to everything that contributed to it? In that sense, I enjoy the idea that something created is the sum of everything that inspired it, and that it wouldn't be what it is without one of those parts. "J. Alfred Prufrock" wouldn't be the same without the opening from Inferno or the allusions to Lazarus, Michelangelo, or Hamlet. The Great Gatsby wouldn't be what it is were Fitzgerald not so influenced by the old Roman story of Tremalchio. Again, though, to me, interpretation and reinterpretation are creation, and to steal from all over and use those thefts to assemble something else is, in a way, creation, too.

Plus, that's just the way that I feel about it. I don't have a problem with other people writing through hazes--clearly, since I love Fitzgerald and Kerouac--it's just a personal thing. I've gotten pretty decent at not judging others by my own standards for myself--most of the time.

...

I had more to say but I'm sticking it in a separate post because this one is already absurdly long and incoherent and lacks any semblance of unity whatsoever. It's just all been on my mind and I had to get it out before I forgot. This just took over two hours. Yikes. Way past sleep time now.

Edit 2/22/09: I split it up. This was just too damn long.

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

"When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.' It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart...

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary...

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

- Steve Jobs
Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

Clarity.

So I don't have it on me, because I lent it to a friend, but I read recently a book by the film director David Lynch (Mulholland Dr., Eraserhead, etc.) about his film career and his fascination with transcendental meditation. In the second chapter (each is only a couple of pages long), he writes about the "Rubber Clown Suit":

When I started meditating, I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger.

I often took out this anger on my first wife. After I had been meditating for about two weeks, she came to me and said, “What is going on?” I was quiet for a moment. But finally I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “This anger, where did it go?” And I hadn’t even realized that it had lifted.

I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom.

Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.

There's more that I liked, but like I said, I don't have the book on me. He mentions something else about how he never was into drugs because that would ruin his clarity. It made me think how that's just another reason not to smoke, drink excessively, or use any other kind of substance. I want my work to be purely the result of my thoughts, not the result of an altered state of mind.

It also made me think of how we ruin the clarity of our experience of everything in life by hiding. There are so many things we hide behind, whether it's through substance use, a facade of toughness, fictional worlds, materialism, or fear. I suppose in some ways these things could heighten our experiences, but more than anything else, I think they lessen it. In excess, at least. In small doses, in moments, I guess they're merely isolated experiences in and of themselves. But if you make a habit of hiding behind these things, they become a way of life, and a way of cheapening life. If that makes any sense.

In that sense, part of me is determined to live with as much clarity as possible, as much strength as possible - embracing pain and fear instead of relying on something else to numb it, take it away, to dull it, to soften the blow. Because really, that's what all that stuff does. It makes it easier. And I guess in some ways, we have natural defenses to help us through life, and it's okay to rely on them when the going gets tough, but at the same time, I can't help feeling like I'd rather either fight or embrace everything that comes than try to make it go away without facing it. And hiding behind these things, that's not facing the pain. It's running away.

I'm fairly certain tomorrow I'll reread this and disagree with myself entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but I think I'll feel differently. After all, "I know that night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started." One of the two parts of A Farewell to Arms that I liked. Haha.

Speaking of literature. I'm presently finishing up Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, and it's absolutely fabulous, like everything I've ever read by him. I'll probably write more about it soon.

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Now playing: John Mayer - New Deep

"All that hatred down there...

...All that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart."
- Sonny ("Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin)

Sometimes it feels like the world is so empty. There are lifeless people, shells that don't hold anything, wandering around, chasing something that doesn't exist. Everything is an illusion and nothing truly exists and no one can feel a thing. There is no worth; there is no reason to persist or try. No one knows anything but what they think they see and hear, and all words have no meaning behind them - they are but empty vessels floating through our ears.

Other times it feels like the world is so full. Full of life. Full of love. Full of faith and hope and inspiration and reason. Intangible everythings. Peace and freedom and spirituality and purity. Some shadow and darkness, too, but it's outstripped, outshone, by the lilting grace of everything else. Then it feels like the world is so full of everything that nothing could possibly hold it in, and it shall explode into a supernova that glows with flames that are streams of golden, luminous life and dreams made palpable, that literally flow from our fingertips and lips and eyes and hair and heart. And this phoenixlike blast will be a blessing, a celebration and rebirth of all that is good.

Perhaps like a phoenix, though, the world is left in a state of ash, completely devoid of wonder - emptied - until the good people of the world fill it up again. They renew it over and over within themselves until the world is full once more. And unless the good people patiently and tirelessly work to refill, the world will never reach this apex, where only for a moment, all is right, and we can't want for more.