The secret to life, perhaps, is obscurity. Think of it. How many artistic people, people sensitive to the arts, are there, first of all. That means, let's just assume for the sake of argument, that if you achieve something in the field of arts, of an artistic nature that is somehow simply fine and good in its own right, sensitive to life as art should be, must be, that if you make something that is art, there will not be but more than a very few out there to actually receive it, given that the other artistic people of the world will probably be engaged, engaged either in their own survival, or in the appreciation of art, or in the making of art themselves, or in simply, perhaps stupidly and haphazardly, enjoying some form of relaxation be it of mindfulness or less so of mind. (This too, of course, is intelligent, a renewal, a grist for the mill found in random and rhythm. Einstein knew well enough the source of his own creativity, something like goofing off and daydreaming out windows.)
And think of it again. How much art is there now, given that there are many people on the face of the earth. Even to catch up with the essentials of the history of art would take years, and then add on top of that the ever volcanic cascade of current art, dubious or not, satisfying the style of a time, that must be kept up with, an ever more complicated situation, increasingly complicated by the strangeness of the tastes offered through friendship. If, say, you were to come across a person sensitive to the arts, and by some incredibly rare circumstance that one person were to read, take in, listen, comprehend, absorb some form of art you had helped create, get the culture behind it so that the great embarrassment fraught in such dealings would be minimized such so that the encounter happens on the same planet, if by some miraculous circumstance such were to happen, it would be startling and pleasant all at once.
Dear reader, so many, thousands of millions of us, and each of us is by birth entitled to making art, enjoying the creativity of life. But what if we all, say, 5 percent of us, or 1 percent, or, put a decimal and zeroes in front and go to an even smaller group, were to write, or paint, or make music, how many of us remaining would there be to find the raised questions posed to be so deep that would warrant attention from our own individual spheres of consciousness?
But who does one have time for now? Beethoven? The Beatles? A glass of wine? Abraham Lincoln? Kundera? All, one shrugs, a matter of taste. And yet, where does taste come from? From the ghosts that inhabit the lives we lead?
But the match. The match between, let us just say, two people. Both artists, both in a relationship, the relationship of writing which is reading and reading which is writing, of listening that is music and music that is listening, of standing and being seen and seeing and standing in a background that is relational and of the same flesh.
Point being, that a great artist is one ready for the match and capable of maintaining the relationship, and that all he/she has created is the making of his/her own attachments back through life and into the reader who is, of course, living and quite alive and dealing with life in all its baffling frightful joyful business, tedium, satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Our time is saved for those who are widely popular, living and dead. They have told, are telling, the myths we need in a complete enough ever unfolding way. They are a reference book for the living of life, and each small act of art helps us in our journeys immensely. We could indeed jump in to the middle of the river of art, and find that which greatly sustains. We wouldn't even need to look for anything new, not bother ourselves with the current fashions, as fashions merely repeat and reiterate and exist only to delineate a style, an in group of knowers opposed to those lagging, even though we all know basically that its the same stuff reinvented, digested, offered up in new form but, the same.
In life, we take a chance on a friend, on a reading, on an evening, on a story, on a thought, on a song, on a peek at the newspaper, or a browsing of movies offered through cable TV. Sometimes, we connect. Sometimes we are in the mood particular to take in, say, The Shining. To pay attention to the living creator, to wade in, I would say that is probably an act of sainthood, high, I mean, wild and organic in the sense of nature having its own ways.
When we are all dead, then it's probably a lot easier. "Oh, that is a good book, that one," someone will say, long after us, though we know not their future judgments. "I like Beethoven, and Mozart, and I also like Fauré, and Stravinsky." But yet, there is a part of us that knows, that we must send up our own little shoots, and do what little we can, even if it falls short a bit. That is within our nature and in our will to survive, digesting life through things like words and memory.
Do we now, in our own time, have the right or the duty to create, yes, no, maybe? Saying we do, we know it not to be taken lightly.
Something worth looking at: "Dead Horse of Confederate Colonel; both killed at Battle of Antietam," by Alexander Gardner, a photograph belonging to the Library of Congress, and written about in
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