The Artist Reality
If you’re going to try, go all the way.
Otherwise, don’t even start.
If you're going to try, go all the way.
This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe even your mind.
It could mean not eating for three or four days.
It could mean freezing on a park bench.
It could mean jail.
It could mean derision, mockery, isolation.
Isolation is the gift.
All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.
And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds.
And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.
If you’re going to try, go all the way.
There is no other feeling like that.
You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.
DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way
You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
Go All The Way - Charles Bukowski
Ideas and musings require a commitment of the undistracted self to articulating that which is knocking at your door.
It recquires you to one, hear it knocking.
Two, be prepared for its arrival.
Three, be willing to open the door and entertain them.
Being an artist, particuarly full time (which seems to be the only way to be an artist), is demanding of your attention, impulses, discipline and courage.
It implies a deep commitment to traversing the unkown, as a daily occurance. Alone.
There is a particular romanticisation around the life of an artist, that is somewhat accurate, and mostly doesn’t even slightly touch the magnitude, nuance and depth that floods a life devoted to the mystery.
"I was born like this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice." - Leonard Cohen, The Tower of Song.
What accompanies such a life is the sense of this not being a choice. There is something about that which gives you purpose and simulatenously can feel binding and torturing.
The gift of an extreme level of sensitivity to self and others can feel like having your skin constantly exposed. When the world touches you, you have no barrier between the internal and external. Everything seems to sift in and out, sometiems with a sense of wonderous awe like the ocean through an oyster. And other times it feels like your nervous systems delicate pathways extend through the whole world itself, leaving you completely vulnerable to the stimulus around you.
Could this be something you learn to work with? It seems that being an artist has sometimes less to do with learning to make and sell art and more to do with working with a deeply sensitive nature in an abrasive world.
Abrasive is not to imply an inherent negativty, but more of the unrelenting, ever moving forward of life itself. Think of the detail and infiinite scope of interaction happening in each moment across this planet alone. Every ant that finds a crumb, every young person falling inlove, every halting movement of traffic across a nation. It is enough to find you discombobulated.
But I guess that is the task of the artist, we so bravely pursue and shudder at the magnitude;
The ability to receive all the signal our antenna perceives and translate it into something tangible.
To not be weighed down by the gravity of perception, and let the idea lift you through its transmission.
The experience is akin to touching something in the dark with your mind, whilst you simultaneously materialise it in reality.
‘I said to Hank Williams, "How lonely does it get?"
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me in the tower of song’‘But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the tower of song’
As an artist you belong to an invisible collective of those present, and those who came before you choosing to live a life dedicated to making.
I say invisible because creative work of this nature is primarily done in solitude. And then shared collectively.
The act of sharing it, giving the viewer a window back into their own inherent solitude.
‘I'm just paying my rent every day in the tower of song’
The rent that you pay to live a life of heightened sensitivity to the beauty and gifts of the world, is the work that you make of it all. The rent you pay is the art you make. And if you dont pay it, its unlikely you’ll still be living in the swirling awareness of it all. It seems that the more you translate, the more offerings you are gifted to transmit.
Although, there is an accuracy to the romantic stereotype of the artists life. The intensity of a life well lived, that movies try to give us a window into. Its romantic because it is at the heart of the way we all yearn to live our life. In truth. In freedom. In commitment to the depths of your being. It is a rare thing to find a person concerned with this, let alone devoting their life to the unravelling of this. I would say “if you find one in your lifetime keep them close”, but thats not really how it works with people, let alone artists.
