detox

I've seen plenty of evidence to suggest that creativity needs a little "suffering". A writer needs a story of privation, of struggle, or even the need for hope, in order to tell a story to others. The artistic works of great creativity are often then composed by people who suffer internally with a deep sense of disconnection between the accomplishment, the accolades, and the provincial title of fame that they earn by these achievements and the eternal penalty that they pay in self recriminations, doubts, or even mental instability of a sort we might find as a qualified ailment.

Be that as it may, I would prefer if all that came along with a swift kick in the ass once in a while. Looking at the world from a unique perspective is hardly an artist's gift. It's the refined ability to express that perspective in some measure, and ideally in some measure that others will receive and appreciate, even if it is warped and askew from their safe compliant assertions, that is an artist's gift. It is not worth much to reflect on the state of affairs around you if nobody notices the reflections. Or where there is no inclination and harnessed ability in which to express and share them.

I come back to Plato frequently when this dark and wooded path of thought accrues over a period of a few weeks time (though I do not meet suddenly with Virgil). It's not a particularly insightful philosophy that the Republic expresses through the allegory of the cave. But it does appear to speak truth that most of the time human beings prefer things as they know them to be rather than as they really are. That makes it extremely difficult to see things as they really are and want to tell people about it. Oscar Wilde put it "A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world". It is not, I assure you, a fun way to go through life. To see others look around with hope and know that their hopes are unrealistic, even unnatural or already shattered into a million pieces before they even set out, is not a recipe inclined to give yourself many positive goals of your own. It also becomes difficult to see paths to from where you are toward a position of what you can see. And the incessant chanting of lunatics from the sidelines makes murky what would and can be carefully considered. I prefer these dark quiet illusions that I can see for myself all too often to the airy and bright spaces that other people would have me walk in. Not because I fear the blinding dawn, but because their spaces are usually emptier, colder, and full of mystery rather than perception.

Perhaps I am, like them, far too comfortable with what is known rather than what is. But it also doesn't give me much motivation to provide people with what is really possible when they refuse to face facts. Facts, like me I'm told, are stubborn things. Living in a world of passive receptivity to the facts and opinions of others, and appreciative of their objectives, if not always sharing their aims, is not a bad place to be. But if it is not the world that you would choose to make, it is not either the place to be. It is ultimately a frustration to be at arms length from the contest where ideas and principles are discovered, drawn out from the circumstances that surround us, and illuminated to others. Whatever gifts I imagine others might perceive in myself are of no consequence next to this sort of failing to contextualize something new and imagine what is possible. Rather than to apprehend the difficult and to discourse at length on the impertinent, the mundane, the politic, or the private within an equally droll accounting, it is better to have the boundless leaps of intuition, the insight to see through the complexities, or to account for them, and to see what was actually there where nobody knew of anything imaginable.

To matter, as it were, seems to be the only currency worth having. But it comes with such a high toll to exact on its proprietors and financiers. As difficult as it is to try to understand people, especially those arriving at their distinct impressions by a less rigorous means of testing them than someone full of self recriminations as myself, it becomes ever harder to get them to understand what it is you wanted to say. The curious vexation emerging of a blurted statement of fact then becomes a painful reminder of the cost of action rather than the incentive to repeat it. Moving quietly and with stillness behind the curtains gives a great deal of liberties to recover, to adapt, to change, and to re-enter the stage of life at some new vantage, with great advantage over the openness of those already there and fixed for all the world to see. But that all sort of implies that you want to go on at all and relies on the hope that the fruits of that labour will be paid. I have no great Pacific Ocean at the end of a long tunnel in sight. Without that clarity of purpose, it gets easier to accept the walls and to recycle the great pains that put them there in the first place rather than to enslave them to some great master stroke.