A radical confusion between art and action is at the heart of this. What we consider unacceptable in human behaviour, we consider unacceptable in art, forgetting that art exists precisely to say the otherwise unsayable.
You know what this means, don’t you. It means that art, the practice of art of any kind, is a necessary human function, as if given us precisely to do something with that which would otherwise remain outside of life, perhaps kill us, drive us to kill someone else, or any of the thousand other terrible things people do when experience overwhelms the spirit and the mind.
Or, in those people you don’t like very much, cause the inter-psychologic splitting by which some are capable of sealing off, as it were, the feeling part. Actually, it’s not so much that you don’t like them, as it is a matter of finding next to no response. We are the instruments that play each other—and if you don’t have resonance, I’m not going to attune to you. Be drawn in. No melody.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I guess what I am talking about is why we creative malcontents tend to hang with our own kind. Read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. His explanation divides people into two camps (I always like two camps) those who spend their lives in the successful denial of their upcoming death—and those who wade through the various manifestations of death that are part and parcel of being alive. Being human.
The animal, Rilke writes in the Eighth Duino Elegy, has its death behind it, and leaps forward for all eternity, as if a running spring (depending on which translation you read) and while of course this is the most enviable freedom we can imagine, it is also not Ours. That option was already lost. When we were born human—a member of the only species aware of its own, personal upcoming death.
I think a whole lot of the big, unnecessary, fruitless stink manufactured by persons, in this life, is for lack of having a way to do art. Or courage for the struggle.
Something like that.
