Okay.  "Spiritual being."  That's what an intimate might say about someone like Jimi Hendrix, perhaps, in a documentary that covers his death (in mysterious circumstances.)  It refers to people who have a broader imagination or some sort of calling.  It doesn't have to be artistic.  Lincoln could well be such, but he was quite grounded in the legalities of getting things done in a very real and practical realm.

Leave it to the individual to choose whether or not to attempt such a thing, be a Keats, whatever.  But what you may quickly run into is the growing status that you are a creep.   Yes, that is the payment for doing a good deed, the punishment.  You are a creep.  In an isolated spot.  People don't get what you are really up to.  The economy doesn't get what you are really up to, maybe because you don't have much to do with it, converting your spiritual values and insights into economic units sold on a trading floor.  You might be lucky to end up like Platonov, as a janitor.  And perhaps it doesn't help if you are a weak person, susceptible to enjoying too much wine while you go about the business of maintaining things, dishes, cooking, laundry and the like, at the odd hours when restaurant people do such things, like that Big Friday Night grocery shopping.  Yeah, take that weirdness to figure out how to approach Match.Com.   Uhmm...   Errr....  I...  Oh, forget it.

Service industry.  Could be a lot worse.  That's probably what spirituality is anyway--service industry.  Do it in hospitals.  Share your observations at the end of the day with a friend.

But yes, back to being a creep.  Maybe you start believing it yourself.  But probably around the same time that you also stop giving a crap what people think in general, not that that would be a particularly dramatic or noteworthy thing.  Well, you never really stop caring.  Whatever you observe goes in to your deeper understanding of the human ego, part of your own caring about people.  Which is probably creepy, and to be kept to one's self, thank you very much.

A lot of people pack up what they do, it seems, and make it sellable, like being a style consultant, a PR agent.  Or they pick up a duty known to the world, like 4th grade teacher, or train conductor.  Things have to be taken from whatever nature they crop up from and sold as units.  Pop music, for example.  Knowing what sells, well, yes, an excellent sensitivity to have.

But is that the way the gifted, the way the genius, the way the one who is comfortable doing whatever it is that they do, goes about it?   As MacGowan says, music is just music, it's everywhere... people just put it in boxes...  To the great hearer, to the open eye, yes, indeed, 'music' is everywhere, evident in its strains.   And if you are 'a writer,' well, maybe it just seems silly to take that which is everywhere and all around us and flowing through us, and write it all down as a particular thing with a particular plot or like a television show.  That's just how you would look at it.  Each day is worth writing about.  Each thought is worth writing down.  Like Joyce.  Or Hamlet.  Tell one of them to sit down and write about a particular topic or a story with a direct plot-line.

You bloody tame all of nature with a few good lines, and some snotty critic comes along and says you let it all fall into a mire of plotless repetition and needless characters and cliché.  And then because you've been 'defined' by another mind outside of your own, you start to feel like a creep again.

Eh.  That's just how it goes.  Loneliness won't change you too much as a person, and might even make you just a bit kinder.






Perhaps you go through the turmoil of making art, which entails surprising yourself occasionally, as a way of finding out about ego.  You find that the ego is an entity separate and distinct from your own essential being, and that it even need not be taken seriously.  Something may have seemed important at a certain time, thus a basic plot line of trying to achieve where that something may lead, but ultimately that seemingly important thing is washed away, a grain of sand.  To make art helped you realize that, and maybe you knew something of it all along, art reflecting the fact that ego takes form.  So the greatest art has, at times, a detachment.

Eventually, you learn, I suppose, to not hurt yourself with going through the twitches of egotism that art entails, making somethings more important than they need to be, but rather, standing back.