~ When I started calling myself an artist, as a child, I was sure about it, not a doubt entered my mind. That was age 12. I didn't know anything, except that my goal was to explain what we are, and why we are here... To know everything would be the same thing as being able to tell it to everybody.

Each time I ponder the question of being an artist, I hit the dilemma of social roles. Many times I have encountered a ripe incomprehension, and even a cynicism, among people who do not know what an artist is. Moral, amoral or immoral - no matter the background of your claim to espouse a personal enlightenment - or a freedom from beliefs - each of us is very much compelled to judge and assign a name and place for the people we meet along the way; and each of us needs to protect our faith in the imaginary models of social order we most cherish, a plan usually suggested to us by upbringing, and which we receive through the attitudes and ideas of our elders, and we further develop according to the good and bad things that happen to us, especially as we are obliged to respond to the opportunities we create and the failures we endure... Yet the fact remains that we seldom bother to question our prejudices even though education and reflection may tempt us to rise higher than the emotions and assumptions repeatedly instilled in us.

I want to return to this topic later - because the socialized evaluations about the roles we play connect to the feeling we have for security and esteem, especially in the sense that we expect a developed and open society to condone the freedom we need to do as we would, if only we could honor and trust ourselves and others enough... Ultimately, the artist and the quality of his or her work depends upon talent alone, and definitely not upon the approval of consumer economy, funding systems, individual mentors and schools...

First, let's look at the idea of being an artist, but from the point of view of the artist, not the society. I would like to define the artist's experience as a unique, perhaps incommunicable identity. If you are born an artist, you will know it with a certainty, a pure feeling of ease that frees you to create. Even if you are sexually inhibited, socially cruel and verbally frustrated - you may still be able to create freely. As you mature, it's to be hoped that your art will help relieve your other frustrations; and it will, given time, patience and some luck. To be born an artist is to know exactly what you are capable of making, and then you go out and do it. The artist is not a personality. We are creators first: our whole being aims at communicating our world to others through work.

But, in modern times, artists tend to be defined as social beings, entities who are supposed to be responsible simply because we can explain what's going on. Like folks from other walks of life, we are obliged to play out a public "role." But artists are not liable to enjoy thinking about themselves in the third person. We are always "I" first. We act, not because for others, but because we want to create for ourselves. If we do create for any reason besides satisfying our wish to understand - then it's only to give pleasure to others. The artist is not first motivated by objectives in the outside world, except with respect that we want to communicate an understanding of it. We must begin with an inner vision if we are to reflect the world. Because, to explain the world is really to show how we are made - as beings who see everything... Art must respond to the universe's identity in the larger world we make from nature. I'm not talking about "naturalism" here, which merely implies the observation of things through an inaccurate and limiting filter. Really, I only want to point out how important it is to realize that the composition of being conscious puts us into a particular notion of the universe. We must understand that our imagination is first governed by physical being. Embodied experience has lead us to a particular form of intelligence: our spiritual inspirations result from the agony suffered, and pleasure inspired, by physical experiences. If you are an artist, then you must always come to terms with what you believe about the universe first - simply to know yourself... One thing is certain: it's risky to assume superiority over nature since we always lose sight of the fact that everything we know is only possible because we are made of nature...

Artists are selfish because we have to be creative. We are selfless too, because we ask for nothing but attention, and give our work away for nothing more than understanding. Some artists are driven - compelled to create as if their life would cease if they were to stop. Some artists love to share their understanding of creativity with others who hope to learn. Others keep to themselves and never breathe so much as a whisper about how they create - as if they were superstitious about the inspiration of their imagination. One thing is certain: I think that artists are seldom motivated by the desire to win fame alone. Respect, sure - even if its unlikely. However, the artist acts quite autonomously and is free from the rigorous confinement of customary ethical mores and the dissembling complexity of social conventions. All the imagination is on top of the mental plane, visible and conscious: the artist acts freely to create something intelligible; therefore, the artist's work is free of ulterior objects and desires or anything except the most easy intentions. At least, this is the way most of us would like to conceive of creative objectives. Of course, talent comes through the spontaneous subtlety of creative consciousness, which envelopes - within limitless levels and layers of meaning woven into the lyrical whole of a poem - both conscious and subliminal knowledge: the artist may or may not become aware of the profound unity of a meaningful theme until long after the artwork was finished.

So, what I'm saying is obvious: I cannot fight myself too much "on the surface of my intentions" if I am going to create an uninhibited expression of all my knowledge. Naturally, the artist will deliberate about truth and its possibilities in the course of creativity. The compulsion to ask questions - reflecting a deep interest for life - only this compelling trait inspires us to address the impossible and fascinating dilemmas that make for great literature... One of our biggest problems today is the barrage of preconceptions aimed at our curiosity. Too often we tell each other to shut up should we dare become curious about the actual circumstances of our situation. Perhaps that is why everyone is so cynical, "wise" and naive today. To play the correct role for economy is very crucial to fulfil the fantasy of Keynes et al. But our conformance to social forces is inadvertent; just as my words sound naive, they aren't really - that's part of your training - to receive me as someone who doesn't know... But I'm not a bozo or a mere student. I'm an artist and my own man. I'm not the only one to observe that artists often suffer an unwitting displacement from the curiosity which ought to fuel our imaginations and compel us to create exciting new work instead of the stolid grey freight that "sells." The creative energy in all of us has been laid low. But by what, exactly? Onan? TV? Lack of concentration? The absence of art movements and compelling schools of thought? The dominance of clone-like market forces? The dependence upon technical prowess that displaces individual effort? The dominion of vain personality in place of creativity and spirit? I don't know! But we used to write long detailed letters to each other, we used to talk more deeply, too... The structure of our relationships has become less complicated and we are more readily available to each other; at first glance, this appears to be a good liberation from inhibitions... But a second look reveals that we depend on glib perceptions and don't need so many difficult complexes, perhaps... Perhaps we are satisfied with the brainless modes of familiar relations that demand no deep converse about anything - only that we behave exactly alike and found all our personal motives on economic goals - getting a house, a car, a wife... But do you know why you behave as you are brought up amid the "needs" that you accept without question?

For the sake of making you uneasy, let's throw out some more ideas about the situation of writers. Everyone says that an artist lives in a social milieu, especially because he or she must communicate knowledge. The evocative musical language of poetry has always meant personal wisdom. But nowadays we are far too worried about being misunderstood and failing popularity - and not having a "career." In fact, we seem to have lost and repressed our lyrical spontaneity, exchanging talent for stock forms. This trend, I want to suggest, is only happening because there are so very many writers writing today; it appears that certain commercial criteria are reduplicated. It goes without saying that people are not quite so deeply literate, or at least, not quite as literate in the same ways as the truly literate once were... Many of us respond more positively to easily processed mediums, like music and movies. Writing has to be simple for most of us, or we lose interest. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our curiosity is blunted and spoiled by forms of brevity and knowing-too-much. Look at the instantaneousness of modern communications; it takes too long for you to read Proust's mighty novel: so most of you will never even begin to realize what I'm driving at now... Success has become synonymous with applying and copying stylistic norms. Writers and artists of all kinds have been encouraged to make private, innate and deeply idiosyncratic aims into socially intelligible ones. Nowadays, talented rebels and innovators are not usually found among the ranks of successful artists, but instead, among the invisible, marginal fringes. Some of us produce original work, and some of it is very good, if not too cynical and typecast. But most of the people who are small and unnoticed actually produce a great deal of mediocre snot. It is despicably bad, fake, copycat, cynically-motivated - and they only go about doing it just so that they can call themselves artists and get funding, etc... Too many of today's "artists" would be better off as dental technicians, as advertising draughtsmen - or working in a shoe factory. Anyway, I'm one of the lucky exceptions to this rule and I happen to be very talented. Surprisingly enough, almost nobody knows very much about artists like me - despite all the wonders of easy diffusion available to us now! Most of us are content to watch games, drive a car - and get fat!

Among the contemporary painters, writers and poets who are supposed to be innovative - it's all too obviously pathetic: far too much non-mainstream work actually suffers from a low-level of imaginative cohesiveness... It's as if everyone who wished to say something new still hasn't figured out quite what to say; consequently, those who "would be" original usually do little better than to fall into a sort of glib-camp stratagem that qualifies them as being "officially involved." What they actually have to say comes second, like a lukewarm afterthought - not half so important as the motions they go through in pursuit of a viable career. The CV is more important than the fucking work! All too often that eager-beaver-wish to "appear" original and counter-cultural actually masks a lack of talent. For example, we see a good example of the glib-camp stratagem exhibited in the crude assault upon poetry known as the "in-your-face," or "slam-poetry" style. While punk music may be exciting, just because it's music, the horribly bland and prosaic language of slam poetry should qualify it simply as a misnomer: slam poetry isn't poetry, it's bad stories told to an obnoxious, deadbeat rhythm... It rarely gets above smelly low-brow name-calling - exactly the kind of crass snobbery I despise! Such thick-witted stuff builds an insularity and leaves out any idea that doesn't pretend to be one tough monkey. Slammers were all "No" to brainy balls, but "Yes" to a frothy rant. If angst were a reason for being, maybe... But if you hate the threat of nuclear war, economic insularity and harm to the environment - you might as well try to be clever rather than simply brutal in your expressions of dissent... I must add one qualification: some of the most clever rap music comes closer to poetry and uninhibited expression than slam ever will. The rap genre is a perfect illustration of that fine line between bluster, fun and freely expressive beauty...

Other "writers" have as dumbly followed other idiotic trends, too: certain popular uni-authors "crafted" a dopey, empty kind of minimalism made popular ten, twenty, even thirty years ago. Today, young writers are still trying to mimic this plodding, plot-based, idea-bereft form. The small magazines get grants over and over again, merely from sleeping on this same-same dross, diligently behind everybody's times. Outside the cramped little world of the lit-crowd-bubble, in the even more shallow (but "real") commercial world of trade fiction - perhaps the most hilarious example of mediocrity, with big audiences, are the romance, mystery, science fiction and fantasy genres. Precisely here we see lousy writers succeed by modelling their universes after some stupidly divine fascism. These kooks are chock to the brim with insipid ideas: they really can and really do make a good living from the gullibility inspired by flat massness of semi-literacy.

Today, most everything passed off as avant-garde does not meet the definition at all; instead it's fakery designed to open purses, to wed the high with the low and the popular with the snobby. Avante-garde art was supposed to be innovative. ("Innovative" is supposed to be synonymous with intelligent, original, idea-oriented and linguistically imaginative - not merely exploitative, imitative and gimmicky.) Writers and poets, unwittingly confined within the grant-camp university-government systems - limited in imaginative scope and distracted by innumerable causes for spoiled complaint - end up cultivating the inflated but "under-funded" ego of the hip, know-it-all crowd; and so we artists become ready prey for the most minute fixations, inadequate subjects of literature though they may be - but that's what gets the grants easily - safe, dim and trite topics! Collectively, we have involuntarily promoted simplistic and grossly limiting concepts of appropriate style. In this way, "Everyone Who Is A Somebody On The Make - and Needs To Be In Right Now, OR ELSE" can easily feel comfortable about being average and alike instead of having to be a brilliantly original individual. Today, the attitude of obligatory compliance with socioeconomic norms-and-forms translates into meek-minded conservatism; and so, hardly anything written and painted today comes close to bold inventiveness... Instead, it's often hurried and chimpy...

Mind you, literary writers understand that they have no audience outside their peers and students - so nobody will really know how good or bad they actually are; it doesn't matter much to anybody if their art work suffers from the refusal of originality and quality in the interest of levelling down the approval process, and in so doing, satisfying and perpetuating the collective nature of the bureaucratic mechanism; since, after all, the mass-mind is already quite pleased to consume low commercial fiction, American movies, sports and pop music only - so why not become a popular writer and get down into that dirty dirt, too?

But I still feel it's worthwhile to point out some painful ironies before giving up. Instead of growing up to express and create, we are told to win approval and find a way inside something: a technocratic process. Yet please note: the true poets and best authors never cared about pleasing anyone; Du Fu, Li Bo, Dante, Shelley, Joyce, Lorca, Thomas, Hardy and Lowry were consumed by their art and could have cared less about society's expectations. If we do own up, and confess our "sins" against attitude, and then allow ourselves to be put on trial for it: even as we sacrifice a professional's freedom and perks, all we win is laughter and nobody will know us. If we put on the dunce cap of the mass-mind, we win millions and their love. Writers who wish to "succeed" tend to imitate already successful artists. They do not write spontaneously, but with too much calculation. So, the immediate future of writers and the content of their "art" today follows a predictable scenario. The long-term fall-out from this cautious, greedy, illiberal and crowd-induced scene is a certain slowness of stylistic and formal development. Already we see far too much undue control over the imagination by means of economy, appropriately correct fakeness and the similarly caste-like class designs of saleable genre. This nightmare is topped off with the inevitably unwarranted and dangerous fear of pure artistic originality. True art is squelched. It has been squelched for decades - most especially by publishers! If we look for inventiveness in novels today, we will not find it at the core of the whole work: instead we see writers trying for clever plots and recognizable stylistic gimmicks; the want for linguistic audacity and thoughtful intelligence is awful right now... The language is barren and sketchy - as if writers have resigned themselves to making outlines for much more complex novels which they haven't the guts, artistry or brains to create! It's all bland and two-dimensional. Perhaps writers have glumly accepted the fact that their audiences are incapable of reading anything upwards of a 2000-word, "action-man-sex-kill" lexicon.

Yet, it feels as if we are stuck in some other century, or several centuries thrown together, call it the "ultra-modern affliction," an overbuilt awareness of everything we have already done - which should neither daunt nor confuse us - but does! Small wonder how so many of our "best" writers take conscious refuge in wholly archaic forms, poorly disguised though they may be as "original" works of "medieval historical fiction," etc...

Put it this way: twentieth century literature remains a cuckold to the nineteenth. We can only hope that the twenty-first, or perhaps, the twenty-third, shall finally sue for divorce.

While we have seen several great literary firsts in the twentieth century, there has been much more regression and floundering - wastrel art and a squalid mass reproduction of impoverished language. So many cowardly and ill-educated imaginations are bent on producing fake art! All vying for the support of a limited public purse, equally bent on selling their crappy pop big-time. Blame it on the displacement of imagination with forms imposed by new tools and techniques; or, just shrug and dump on the mass media. Blase pop musicians really need to sell their devouring egos to hungry hard-working people! Who would deny it's far easier to jack-off a jingle than to compose a good poem? Fuck you all to hell if you think I'm some sort of snob: poetry takes genius and pop only asks for a little "talent." I can compose my own tunes at home in the comfort of my living room - and I can sing them very well, too. It's easy...

As for novelists, I sincerely believe that there are too many people who want to write who are not born artists! Many of these mechanical authors have become successful commercial hacks even as original minds can find no place and no audience for their work. Many fine artists are ignored, flounder and give up. Some of us even die. We see the institutionalization of a few lucky names and the building of walls instead of the free transmission of open thought. (I don't care about somebody else having no choice but to subscribe to a parochial regionalism, nor do I care about "having to demonstrate" my social class: such stupid things have nothing to do with creative authorship.) Perhaps more disgusting than all the mimicry and low-brow writing is the insularity that locks in those few university dons, who pretend to be high-minded, but who are much more tightly tied up inside their privileges than they are concerned with thinking about artwork. Too many of us are loth to share our rights with the crowds of poor peons and unknown outsiders wanting to see their creative work paid-for and diffused, too.

So we see at last in the end that the only difference between a commercial hack's corporate publisher and a literary artist's government is about how you get what you want: the hack makes "art" and gets paid just like stealing candy from a baby; meanwhile, the impoverished idealist coward-poet begs and submits himself to the whims of a frumpy old grump of a father - the public art councils of the narrow world...

Now, why should I adopt this very critical stance towards the current milieu? You may imagine that I am terribly illiberal. Actually - I'm all for respecting everyone - if only everyone happened to respect original, free creativity! Obviously, each of us is who we happen to be, and we cannot force everyone to read stuff that bores them to death! Poetry and philosophy are interesting to those of us with like-minded sensibilities. Ultimately, I don't care about promoting, rejecting or approving anybody's work. But I would like to help make everybody more receptive to all kinds of original work - and not merely the work which gets approved officially by the government, corporation and university! And perhaps I excuse my creative solitude with an inspired sense of self-pity, a sort of long-standing soap bubble that results from being disconnected and rejected - unfairly. I'm a coward and cannot face abandonment. Oh yes, that old market is a wonderful thing - because - for most of us it really does appear to be free and open, even if I am absolutely certain that it's all too closed, stratified, over-controlled, safe, pre-programmed, and therefore, all too prole-ish/vulgar and snobby/insular for my free and imagination hungry taste; so, my labor is lost and divided by classes too split and predictable to suit my taste.

I suppose that I really want to persuade you that my frustration has roots in real problems that threaten art and free imagination everywhere. But then you would call me an alarmist! We always see some flowers trying to grow among the ruinous effects of technocracy; but then even the natural chems and weeds in our minds sometimes choke off the most brilliant of aspirations. As crippled as we are today, the gift of human talent still stands a small chance for receiving fresh inspiration - no matter how much we are forced to promote mediocrity in place of art.

Obviously, written language will not be lost. Consciousness revolves within us like the Earth about the sun, as our hearts, our minds. We cannot forget who we are, and ultimately we are destined to progress. This is almost the best time ever to be a living artist, because I think we are free to say exactly what we like...

More importantly, we have new tools and several avenues for communication available to us. Technology opens the pathways. Now we see that the prophets of science were correct: freedom can become a material necessity instead of merely a caste privilege, simply because nobody can stop you from learning everything that you need to achieve an independent mind.

So, why have I said that novels and stories are suffering? Despite being jealous of all those with publishers and audiences, I believe there are real threats to my free creativity, because I am wary of the limitations and censures that have been imposed on me in the past. If we transcend the various forms demanded by markets and fashion, and face ourselves, we will find imagination liberated from fear: ideas will grow naturally as we create art inspired by contemplation of meaningful questions. But if we prohibit original minds and allow no venue for independent work, then what is our society but hypocritical and lame?

I'm not afraid of imagination. True independence of mind is actually quite respectful and tolerant of unique expressions. An open imagination hungers for novel impressions and desires new forms of creativity to wake up ideas. Everyone thinks that we know more than we can learn, but do we ever stop to realize that we are completely ignorant of almost everything except whatever relates us to the dumb-fuck dollar? I don't care what you think about buying and selling. After all, isn't the finest art priceless? Like you, I suppose that I end up a hypocrite who prefers a sleepy pretence, an independent pose made of cynicism. But what am I in the end but uninformed and cut-off from the community? Why? Just because I don't want to waste my time trying to teach zippos how to write a literature for which they are ill-prepared to create? Today, everyone wallows in a sophomoric hubris - complaining and planning instead of going out to do what they want - and this disease afflicts too many of the young-yet-aged and all-too-wise among those who would claim to be creative... Everyone emulates the little bureaucrat entangled in the web of proper forms and connections. The free artist is swallowed whole by the corporate ban. She remains an unknown. He approaches extinction.

As you wish: accuse me of suspiciousness, an over-reaction bred of silly and unnecessary dreams, a hopeless mismating of impiety and misanthropy, perhaps inspired by a wanton and ruinously wrong sense of homelessness. I'm not really bewailing a "lost" language. Eventually, I suppose I'll write a neat moral fable set among a non-allegorical domain of free-form poetry resplendent with tomorrow's best metaphors. I may even have to reinvent the science fiction novel, then attempt an improbable treatise on aesthetics - all simply to translate my vast confusion into wishes fulfilled...

But before I do that, let's reiterate and broaden a few themes to help us understand the point and remember this discussion...