It's been a dramatic year thus far for me: I fell in love (albeit briefly, if truly, madly, deeply). I was dissappointed by love (was it love or just the appearance of it and was I subsequently more in love with the rejection of love? If I went to a shrink - I don't because I think they encourage an obsession with the "self" and tend to just perpetuate one's own narcissicsm and god knows we have enough of that in the culture already - I might explore my love of the unlovable instead I just blog about it to total strangers). But I quickly fell out of love though it's effects have lingered on...
I also had my first glimpse into the mortality of my parents: my father had a brush with his heart and I, in turn, had to deal with the reality of time and the cycle of life (?) in a way that was not just an excersise in abstract thinking about "when" and "what if"... I am getting older, the life experiences are starting to add up: the joys of my life grow as does my gratitude of being alive but so does my horror of just how brutal life is (I've been reading the articles on the Hadatha massacre which give new meaning to the not-so -banality of evil and makes one shudder for the deep wellspring of outright cruelty and savagery human beings are all too capable of that, in extension, I am capable of...right?).
In the past year, I have worked harder and longer and more consistently than I have, probably, since my first year out of college - 2 jobs, 7 days a week type of thing. And, despite a grinding schedule (a grinding schedule of my own choosing so I am not complaining) I have continued to try to nurture my artistic life, like so many of my friends - my peers who have, like me, foregone the lure of the (now dissappearing) middle class American life and decided to pursue an artist's life in the biggest of big cities. We hope that one day we will be able to fondly look back at our days slinging hash just to be able to rehearse in parking garages, begging and stealing and borrowing to make our theater, write our novel, paint, bang on the can, what have you. But, my question is what if we can't? Does creativity stop when it becomes apparent at some point that the money isn't going to come in? And, when did we start believing that artistic legitimacy was qualified by the amount we got paid for it?
In the midst of these life changes (?) or are they life realizations (?) I am more committed now than ever to being an artist, an artist-citizen. Despite my new-found commitment I refuse to buy (and buy is the right word to use for this) into the notion that my artistic life is quantifiable by how much I get paid for it. Would I like to make money eventually and work solely as an artist? Hell yes and I hold out the hope that I will! But I don't think Bruce Willis is a more legitimate artist or Matthew Barney for that matter because their coffers are loaded with greater stock options than mine. The full-time artist is a relatively new phenemeneon in history, and, yes, I am fully aware that the Medeci's sponsored more than their fair share of the greats and that Leonardo didn't do much else but paint but history ( museums and Shakespeare's folios) is litterred with the works of people who toiled and gleaned by day only to create in their spare moments (and remember leisure time is a relatively new development).
Finally, I think you create because you have to, because it's a relief and it's mysterious and, yes, I have to say it, it's transcendent and you do it because it gives you some measure of control over what you see in the world. You'd do it, I do it, for free, I do it because I love it, I do it for reasons that can never be broken down into check-form.
All that being said: I look forward to giving up the day job.
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