If You Are An Artist, The World Is In Your Hands

WARNING: In over 130 blog posts, I don’t believe I have ever resorted to vulgarity of any kind. However, I find it hard to avoid using a few vulgarisms on this occasion. Please forgive me if their use offends you and I will try to keep their use to a bare minimum in the future.

     I’ve been around the writing game long enough now to identify a certain attitude. It is one that is shared with critics of all art today, one that feels the need to heap scorn upon anyone who attempts a loftier style or desires to accomplish something more than amuse and distract their audience. To anyone who does not sufficiently amuse them, to anyone who makes them uncomfortable and makes them think a little, they use words such as pompous, pretentious, or arrogant.

     I have an answer to such criticism, one which I hope you won’t find too elitist or arty. Fuck you. You call me pretentious? I call you intellectual and moral cowards. You are too afraid to attempt what can and should be done and so you attack others for making the attempt. You masturbate because you are afraid to procreate. You play at life when you should be living it.

     To artists and audience alike I say to you: demand more! Be more! We ARE more than what some would make us. We have souls, we have purpose. Life has meaning!

     Artists today, especially when in pursuit of fame and cash, are unafraid to transgress any moral sensibility but they flee from any critical thought that might separate them from the safety of the herd or the cash of their potential customers. They are willing to dream up any sexual perversion, any sick violence in order to titillate their fans. Money has somehow wormed its way between artists and their audience when there should be no barriers between us. This is not a fucking business transaction, this is human communication at its most basic and honest level.

     Be men. Not men as we now describe them, crude, violent and stupid. Be men in daring to seek the truth and defend truth even when it is unpopular Be women. Do not indulge incessantly in adolescent fantasies but instead become the strong intelligent women the world needs. Be human beings and not pawns in a marketing game. Dare. Get out of the kiddy pool and think thoughts that make you uncomfortable. Brave putting down in you art your deepest darkest fears and hopes. Expose your most hidden selves to the light. Dream a dream that is worth sharing.

     The world needs changing but you are too timid to admit you have the power to make it better. It is up to you, no one else can do your job, share the perspective that only you have. You are important—nay, vital to this world, and it’s time you shook off your doubts and realized it.

It is up to you to show the world that ideas can accomplish what bullets cannot.

     Be bold, my friends, be bold. Not bold in expressing prejudice or hatred, but in expressing new ideas and optimism. Not bold to shock or offend but bold in order to enlighten and inspire.

     A culture whose artists are afraid to push further is a culture in decline. That is the power you possess as artists, to keep your culture afloat and moving ahead, to reach new shores and new heights previously unimagined.

     Do not be afraid to fail. Nor should you feel the need to accept society’s judgment of what success or failure is. Do not try to fit yourself into the cattle chutes called genres, but instead blaze your own trail, create what you see and feel, let what is inside of you be what it is meant to be.

     You owe it to yourself. You owe it to everyone who has influenced you, those who gave you a sense of wonder when in your childhood you picked up a book, gazed at a picture, or were enraptured by a song. And you owe it to a future that deserves the same as you received, art that speaks to the heart and the mind without further considerations of any baser motives. This is life. Art is life. Art is the communication that speaks to those whom you have never met nor will meet. It is the passing on of beauty and vitality. And it is in your hands.

The Eternal Now

Here's a short little bit of a book I'm slowly accumulating as I write other books. I have different names for it, including "The Laws Of Perception":

Patience

The journey shall no doubt test your patience from time to time. We have become accustomed to the ticking of the clock, the whistle that summons us to work and tells us when it is time to go. We are constantly reminded of the passing of time, of the value of time and the evils of spending it frivolously. But in the marking out of our lives in grids and blocks of months, days, hours, and minutes, we lose track of the actual flow. We atomize time until the actual living, the actual essence of the flow is chopped up. And as we chop up time into smaller and smaller pieces we begin to feel like none of these little instants are big enough to accomplish anything at all. In all of the pieces, the seconds and the minute and the hours and the days we lose track of the now, which is where everything happens. So take the opportunity to experience the now. Do you feel it? You are alive, and life is a miracle. Can you feel it? Allow yourself to do so, because that is why you are here. This is the now, you are experiencing the now. You are alive now. You feel good in the now.

And in the time you have taken to read that last paragraph, you experienced many nows. It is a different “now” as you read this than the “now” I first mentioned. At least that is the way it appears to one who is concerned with the clock or the calendar. In fact, the now is ever constant and never changing. The now that you experience is the same now as you have always experienced. It is a place outside of time, a destination to which you can always return. It is where the aged you can discover the youthful you. While all the world changes, the now does not. It is a place within you of peace, faith, security, truth. It is a oneness. It is a spring that never runs dry.

You have time, my friend, it does not have you. You have time for all of the things you want to do, despite all the things you feel you need to do. It is a matter of perception, it is the difference between pursuing what you desire and fleeing from what you fear. The energy required for both is the same but the motivation makes the world of difference.

So please come with me on this journey inward. Together we will find the things that truly matter to us, beauty and truth and joy and purpose and a sense of being where we are meant to be. The path will not always be straight, direct, but no journey is. Sometimes it will feel as if you were lost or going in the wrong direction. Sometimes it will feel that the destination is not worth the journey. But more often you will find yourself distracted from the course. You will occasionally waken to the reality that you have somehow veered far from the path and wondered how you had forgotten about it. And finding it again you will realize the feeling it gives you is no different than the feeling it gave you forty years ago. The now is no different now than it was then. And finding it, you will realize you have returned home. When you are in the now, you are where you are meant to be. And despite what it may sometimes seem, you are always in the now.

A Look Into The Past (The Mauretania)

I had the idea of writing a novel that takes place a century ago and spans pretty much the whole globe. A fun idea, sure, but I had no idea how much research it was going to involve. I guess I should have known. There are so many questions relating to New York City alone. Did some sections still have gas lights? What styles were in fashion for men and women of various stations in life? Were trolleys prominent, and what was the ratio of cars/buses/horses? And while people dressed and spoke and lived a certain way in New York, how would they be living in a small town in Louisiana? All these things to be researched and we haven’t even left The U.S.A yet.

It’s an enjoyable process, or at least it would be if I could afford a year off work to do it. Still, it’s fun to immerse oneself in a different era. I’m running into a lot of fascinating information. I was having a real hard time trying to come up with information on the ship Mauretania. We tend to take for granted that everything we want is a Google search away, but it is not. But take a look at this website I found: http://heritage-3d.com/M/1.html

Based on a few old black and white pictures of the 1^st Class Smoking room of the Mauretania:

This person painstakingly came up with a color recreation of what it must have looked like:

Truly impressive work by whoever runs the website, not to mention the craftsmanship that went into the actual ship.

Below is a short sample of writing I did based upon the color recreation. It needs a second or third coat of paint on it (i.e. a few rewrites), but hopefully it shows some of the inspiration I had from seeing a re-rendering of what must have been a tremendous work of art.

The next room was the first-class smoking lounge. Above them was a glass arch that ran the length of the room, giving it the best of both the indoors and outdoors. Cunningly placed mirrors amongst the wood-paneled walls gave the room a feeling of vastness as though the room had no real defined limits. Teal chairs and oak tables were placed in geometric patterns that were a mixture of lines and intersecting circles. Blue sky intruded through the ceiling and, combined with the greenery of the chairs and carpet and the various wood pillars, he suddenly felt as if he were entering into a forest of trees. The marvel of man’s abilities hit him, the heights that humans were able to reach. Here was floating architecture as astounding as any cathedral or palace. The Twentieth Century, barely a decade old, was already making its mark on history.

Oh, and the book will most likely be called Seven Stones. I'm about 30,000 words into the first draft. It involves magic, the supernatural, and a possible re-emergence of Pangea. It might even tie in to some of those books that are on the upper right of this blog page :)

Adulthood’s End Part 3 (The Illusion Of Choice)

     If there is one thing capitalism provides it’s choice. Go to your typical supermarket and you’ll find more options for frozen French Fries than is good for you. Seriously, you could waste the better part of an hour making sure you get the best value and the best option available. Same with the soda aisle: the variety screams out to us from the bright colors that decorate every box of cans. True too of bottled water. This is where it gets kinda weird: Why does anybody need 100 different varieties of bottled water? Can anyone tell me the difference? Nevertheless, this is America and you deserve 100 varieties of waters to choose from. Anything less would be socialism.

     But while 100 varieties of bottled water may seem like far more choices than we could possibly want, perhaps it is less than we actually need. Perhaps the mountain of plastic bottles blinds us to the option we’d actually prefer.

     Who having an option between clean, cheap tap water would prefer lugging home cases of the stuff from the supermarket? Who would prefer polluting the environment with plastic when we could totally eliminate the waste, again by providing drinking water through the tap? Who would prefer wasting our precious resources—in this case oil used in the production of plastic—when we could avoid all that? Especially when the Middle East is such a mess, it seems a shame to send our troops over there to fight and die for plastic bottles we really don’t need. Or for the fuel required for the trucks to unnecessarily ship bottles of water across the country.

     So who would come up with such a crazy system? Someone out to make a buck. Nobody’s going to get rich providing cheap tap water, especially when the government tends to stick its nose into such matters and make sure water will be available and affordable to even the poorest of us. So in the long run, those various different bottled water companies are not competing against each other, how can they? How can one of them make the claim that their water is better than the next guy’s? You can only do so much with a picture of a snow-capped mountain. There are only so many buzz words such as “pure”, “natural”, “life”, and “healthful” you can slap on the label and still keep them large enough to attract the eye.

     Of course, some try to argue they use less plastic than the typical bottled water, as if conservation of plastic were an argument they should bring up. Nestle’s Pure Life package proudly states it has an “eco-bottle”. Re-read that sentence just to drive home the idea of how screwed up we as a society are. If you wonder why people can’t think anymore it’s because vapid advertisement has broken our brains. Words don’t mean anything anymore, they’re just supposed to sound nice. And reassuring.

     So whose water you buy doesn’t matter, just so it comes in a bottle. Same with soda. Pepsi doesn’t mind if you buy Coke and Coke doesn’t care if you cheat on it with the occasional Pepsi. The important thing is you consume teeth-rotting diabetes juice because, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. And it works the same way with politics, only in reverse. In politics, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent not to entice you to buy but to turn you off from the entire process. They don’t care if you vote Democrat or Republican, their goal is to make you so disgusted with politics that you don’t vote at all.

     That’s the system we’ve worked out as a society. These are the choices you have. Well, not really, they are the choices that are laid out for you. These are the choices they want you to make, the world they try to fashion for you. But your choices are as vast as you can imagine them to be. You don’t have to buy their vision, you don’t have to fit your mind inside of the box they have prepared for you. It’s a small world offered and in the end we humans deserve better than the world they envision. Next time you are presented with a choice of a bottled of water or a can of soda, remember there’s always beer ;)

The End Of Adulthood Part 2

     It was the latter part of the 1970s and our president was discussing the fuel shortage. He gave a simple suggestion to turn our heat down a few degrees and wear a sweater if we were cold. It was the sort of advice our parents would have given us and that was the problem. You see, the first generation of children raised on television were now grown up and we did not want to listen to our parents anymore. We preferred to listen to our televisions because the television always told us what we wanted to hear. The television told us we deserved a break today, that sugary snacks were good for us, women were made to be ogled and there were no repercussions to casual sex. And so a new politician emerged to tell us of the new and improved classic homemade way of doing things. The television had a lovechild and he was called Ronald Reagan. He would explain our world the way we wanted to hear it, just like all those other neat guys on TV. We wanted a handsome and winning personality, not our stuffy old dad. We wanted Ronald Reagan, not Jimmy Carter. Hannity, not Colmes.

     We could have whatever we wanted. You go, girl, you deserve it. We could have whiter teeth AND fresher breath. We didn’t have to live with ring around the collar or waxy yellow build up anymore. And so when the voters went to the polls in November of 1980, the changes that had begun in the 1950s had finally come to fruition.

     The shift had taken place and the rift between generations, the one television had caused, was glossed over. Never again would we have to listen to adults. Nor would we ever be expected to become adults ourselves. We were all free now to leave the unpleasantness of making difficult decisions behind us. The only choosing we had to make was whether we would drink Miller Lite or Bud Light. We were the Pepsi generation and we were never going to grow old (or up).

     There was a new authority now, although we never chose to really think about it that way. We didn’t need parents anymore nor did we have to become them. We could be friends to our children rather than rule makers or—God forbid—role models. We could spend the time we weren’t making money to spend it. We could buy for a second time all the toys of our youth and never have to be responsible for anything. Because, after all, authority was not given to us, it belonged to the market place. By merely choosing between Pepsi or Coke, magic forces would make the world into a Heaven for us all. Authority was decreed through television waves that mystically travelled through the air and into the privacy of our houses. Complex decision making was uncool, we wanted our nation’s problems to be solved as easily and completely as Jack Tripper’s problems were every Tuesday night on ABC.

     As for getting older, well, that was something our parents did. We would have none of that, because growing older meant taking on responsibility, and television would take that burden from us. All we had to do was stay up on the latest trends, buy the products that were currently trendy. We just had to listen to the same music our kids did, pretend to find some value in it. Forget about finding meaning in our own lives, we had to find ways to relate to our children, even if in the end all we did was validate the line being sold to them by the advertisers.

     And when the lines and the droopiness and receding hairlines and e.d. showed up, well television was there with the answers. Our skin could look as smooth as Joan Rivers’, our boobs as perky as any saline-bag celebrity. And for guys, hey, it was just like the 60’s, only the drugs now were Rogaine and Viagra. Death was only an illusion, which meant we never had to worry too much about figuring what life was all about. All we had to do was hang onto our youth. All we had to do was keep flunking Maturity 101 so we never had to graduate.

The End of Adulthood

     If you look around you might find a few, there are still some left. But they are fading quickly, the older ones descending into a second childhood. They were the ones who told stories with morals to them, without the swear words. They were the ones who told you not to take anything you weren’t intending to eat and to eat whatever you took. They lived in the real world, learned their lessons the hard way. Tom Brokaw called them The Greatest Generation, but in truth they were merely the last of the adults.

     My dad was six years old when The Great Depression hit. The Great Depression ended for him when the Great War began. And after that, well maybe his generation just got tired of great troubles. They’d paid their dues and deserved a little peace and prosperity. Maybe they wanted to try great consumption instead. Maybe they just wanted to finally live life and get a little enjoyment out of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, after all. You can’t blame people for wanting to avoid suffering and sacrifice if they can get away with it. And we were a country on the rise, reaching peaks never experienced before.

     There’s the bitch of it, isn’t it? I think we can all relate: we struggle and suffer and finally get to a point where we feel we can relax a little, spend a little…and bam, just when we let loose a bit something smacks us when we least expect it. We can never afford to get too comfortable in this life.

     But we did get too comfortable. Not so much the greatest generation themselves, they had learned their lessons too severely to ever forget. But when it came to their children, well they did try to instill the values their parents had instilled into them. But times had changed and it was hard to relate such values to a time of never before seen prosperity. Besides, there was this thing called mass media, and it screamed from the center of the television, from billboards, and magazines that we were living in a new era where The American Way was a way of consumerism. Technology was the god that provided for us all, and we would hardly be grateful recipients of her blessings if we did not dutifully give homage. In the process, those gods The Greatest Generation worshipped didn’t seem so relevant anymore. We began to turn inwards. Well, not really, actually we turned towards television, which told us our individual needs were greater than any communal needs. We were the land of the free and freedom meant doing your own thing. Of course, deep down, no man is an island unto himself, so doing your own thing leaves one awfully lonely. And when we get lonely, we get scared. And when we get scared we cry out for our mommy. And since mommy was now at work in order to provide for all of those things television said we needed to own, the generations that followed the Greatest Generation found a surrogate parent: television. Television was always there to provide support, to tell us that we were okay, that we were deserving. In fact, it never told us otherwise. Television never disapproved of anything we did. Because television wanted to support our childish needs and desires. That was TV’s role, to keep us children in need of an authority figure. There were many institutions paying millions of dollars to ensure that they had receptive minds in front of them, minds that could shift smoothly from a talking puppet show host to a cartoon shill for sugary cereal.

     There’s a book called The Hidden Persuaders. In it is discussed the ways advertisers played to the aspects of our psyche that acted beneath our conscious mind, talked to our baser instincts. The book was written in 1957, so Heaven knows how much deeper the propaganda machine is able to burrow into our minds nowadays. But seeing how The Hidden Persuaders was a chilling read in its day, and that the trend has increased rapidly, it’s safe to say the reality of the situation would be jarring and frightening to the average person if the truth were to hit home to him or her. So much so that they would most likely be willing to climb back into their hole that they’ve been living in for their entire lives. The discrepancy between what the average person perceives to be their reality and what truly is is pretty vast. And while we would all like to think we would be Neo in The Matrix, AKA the chosen one, most of us would rather avert our gaze and continue upon the comfortable path we are walking. It’s the same psychological motivators that lead animals to the slaughterhouse. 

Does God Exist?

     Humans are funny, aren’t we? We tend to have an overinflated sense of self. Given a scrap of knowledge we believe ourselves omniscient. Only today while at work I thought I would come home and write out my feelings and thoughts on the existence or non-existence of God. I would look deep into my soul, peer into the deepest depths of me, and discover from that whether or not there was a deity.

     It’s hard to get much more arrogant than that, isn’t it? It seemed like a plausible thing at the time, after all I was only intending to be honest with myself and my reasons for wanting or not wanting to believe. But implicit in that thought was the idea that God, The Creator of all that was, is or shall ever be, would cease to exist if should I decide that I had insufficient reasons to believe in him. Or that if I chose belief that it would be the confirmation He needed to keep his job, as though He needed my reference on His resume.

     But people seem to have a bias towards knowing and understanding God. And those who do not believe in the existence of one seem to think since the position is left open that they have dibs on it. Humility, that’s what we need, believers and atheists alike.

     But humility is not a natural inclination. We are not born humble but as gods to ourselves. We are the center of our universe as children and it is only through hard lessons that we grow out of such an assumption. We learn by stages that we must take into account the feelings of others, not just our own. We get fairly decent at it after a while, accumulating friends along the way. What is harder for us to relinquish than the conviction that ours are the only feelings that matter, is the idea that ours are the only perceptions that matter. We, all of us, believe we are right. Sure, we give lip service to the idea that people can see things from a different perspective, but we know we’re right. The music we listen to really is the best, our favorite movie is really the best movie ever made. And lastly, our morals are really the right ones. Everybody else, no matter how good they are, are somewhat lacking morally because they lack our perfect understanding. If I believe in God, then I somehow get the notion God has granted me His sacred understanding. And if I don’t believe in God, hey, I’m even smarter than Him.

     That’s the weird thing, though. Humans have this tendency to want to stand tip-toe on a stack of old books in order to reach up and peer through God’s eyes. Atheist and believer, we all want to stare through that telescope and we all believe we can. And the attempt is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s wonderful that we try to see beyond our limited point of view. It’s only a bad thing when we start believing that we can do so to any great degree. It’s only bad when we forget that we are just mortal men, with senses and intellect so tiny compared to the universe that we are nothing. That’s where humility comes in, the realization of how tiny we are as well as the realization of the harm that we can do when we think ourselves as something larger.

     But to get back to my original question: does God exist? Well, I decided, but I don’t want to say. I want to keep Him guessing.