One thing about me: I used to be terribly critical of other people in that I had/have a hard time listening to anybody without an intense questioning of a person's motivations. I never decided to be critical, it was automatic. And let me tell you, I used to find pure motivation (my own made up standard for acceptable motivation) to be virtually nonexistent. ...either that or I used to just project my own impure motivations onto everyone else. At any rate, I was also big into seeking approval from....everyone, so even while I was hugely critical of character I would still try to be universally well-liked. I used to be so worried about what other people thought of me that if I couldn't say something perfect I'd say nothing at all. And so, I was pretty much set up for social disappointment. I was your model "nice-guy." Well, to an extent, I still am. These are terrible habits that were formed in me (no doubt the result of some childhood trauma...just kidding) and, combined with what used to be my basically virginal and prude-ish personality, I tended towards social gawkiness and, sometimes, self-isolation. We can call this one of my "hang-ups."
Well, I grew a bit between middle and high school and a lot between high school and university. But growth hasn't been automatic. For me, this growth is born (with great pain, as is customary of birth) out of conscious every day determinations to mold my self into something I can respect. Nearing who I want to be has been a painfully slow process. I often battle regression. And I'm afraid I will never be satisfied. Maybe I can at least keep dissatisfaction in check. But my hope will continue to be that I will one day feel like I am completely who I want to be and only ever have to work on maintaining that.
My work is before me. My work is my life, and vice-versa.
I am my work.
I am art and artist. Life is creativity with limits.
This theme has been echoing around in my head for awhile. Case in point, something I wrote in January of this year:
for knowing so clearly what i think will raise the quality of my life, i am terrible at getting what i want. felt like i was getting somewhere for a while there, but then my momentum petered out. still going, but slowly. which might as well be not-at-all, 'cause life seems like it's going to be short. i don't generally regret things because i don't generally have any cause to regret them. but if my present were my past, i think i'd regret it right now. yet i feel attached to this situation, to "my life." not sentimentally attached, but tied down. i don't want to be a "product" of my life. i don't want to do the same things over and over and i don't want to just react. i think this is what disillusioned middle-age must be like. wanting other things in life, yet feeling resigned to your current family, job, friends, lifestyle -- things that pull from you your energy to create and leave you feeling tired and reluctant about life.
i've read it in books and even in song lyrics the idea that a person is an artist and a work of art. you are your medium. make of it what you will. when i think about things this way i feel like i get why some people dress differently, absurdly, or wear ridiculous make-up or get tattoos and piercings or walk with character or do those creative things that no one appreciates in the same way that they themselves do. they are artists. and they are performance art.
i don't think everyone is an artist.
At least my preoccupation with my own self-development is consistent. However, I reject the idea that I am running around in circles and that, as the popular saying goes, I have "come full circle." I patently reject the idea.
I may approach this same idea any number of times, but never do I close a circle in my thinking. Each time, my "angle of approach" is different, if only slightly. So my thinking travels in spirals, not circles. And this is important because I do not believe that all this reflection is worthless. I am going somewhere, if slowly. Spiraling upwards.
I am art and artist. Life is creativity with limits.
"A man’s character is his fate."
~Heraclitus
"In the end, we get what we are."
2 comments:
But, as the aesthetic movement of the late Victorians and the 19th and 20th century French Decadents movements argue, art is utterly useless and its valor is teleological for its own sake. Artist as ideal is a bourgeois concept that no artist actually has; those who do are not artists but naive and Caliban-like politicians who can produce and sell labor. Cf. Walter Pater's "Conclusion", Joris-Karl Huysmans' _À rebours_, or Oscar Wilde's "The Preface to Dorian Gray".
Also, obviously, to bring this to a somewhat contemporary time-period, read Walter Benjamin's notorious "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as to avoid having to read J.J. Bachofen. Theodore Adorno's book _Aesthetic Theory_ is also important in taking the wind out of the sails of the artist and placing it back in the art. Adorno's no easy read, though. It took me two years and I still am not fully sure if I understand anything.
"art is utterly useless and its valor is teleological for its own sake"
But this just *is* how I feel about life!
Thanks for all the reading suggestions.
Post a Comment