~ While many claim that knowledge didn't used to be equated with personal power, the respect for unadulterated "might" has been largely displaced by conventionally civilized goals. However, these good and humane ideals remain little more than hopeful rhetoric: the knowledge we have of the way things "ought to be" has not exactly found any means to relieve us of the more practically instituted disasters and civil wars plaguing our selfish world. Many of us do insist that the human condition has "awakened" in the modern era, especially to create exciting new forms of art. Witness, at the onset of the twentieth century, the very conscious rebellions of dadaist and surrealists against the prosaic, dated and dull "bourgeois realisms" and "art for art's sake" camp. Perhaps the real reason that artists have needed to rebel was inspired by the concern that forms and ideas are already used up; so, artists share a very natural compulsion to discover new ways to evoke experience. Rebellions allow us to transcend the limited feeling many artists suffer about having to repeat the same dull round... The point is that new art isn't necessarily closer to the truth as it ought to be, but only closer to the methods, ideas and moods with which we can deeply feel and spontaneously communicate the world happening around us.

If you are confused about what you want to do, or what you think I am trying to say, then remember only this: the true artist responds first to creativity - his or her urge to create - before conforming to the tastes of an audience. This need for creative and imaginative integrity often divides the pure artist from the commercial artist, not only because their motivations are set apart from one another, but also because the essential mediums, ends, ideas and final works, including their content and reception, must inevitably remain quite different. The creative, pure artist is concerned with truth and transcends fashion, opinion and illusory social space. On the other hand, the commercial artist is concerned with making a living, and his or her work leaves no chance for the truth to emerge, except that the work shows itself up as a platitude or cliche that, at best, rehashes the same old "marketable style."

While critics and art lovers may not appreciate the work of commercial artists - corporations and condo developers always do; so, the commercial artist also has every reason to ignore all criticism - because his or her main concern is no longer making art, but earning an income. The commercial artist has an interest in making a "successful career" from his labors, and therefore has very small say, and very little concern, about whatever he may happen to create. "Play it safe" is always the motto of the commercial artist; but this attitude is completely meaningless to the creative genius.

Artists, especially musicians and painters, were accorded a living because of their genius and innate creativity. They had the right to practice their vocation based solely on talent alone. Today, this traditional concept seems stilted in the eyes of the many individuals assiduously working to transform the artist's "role" into a rigorous career made of appropriate conventions, like popularity and the professional CV. We exchange our respect for gifts with a need to rationalize, and now that means to "socialize" all human activities. But the artist, if he or she is to create freely, ought to remain free of conventional social obligations and expectations because they might interfere with creativity. The artist qua person, as pure identity, can have no role, career or place: we artists live beside the world we wish to understand; and we don't need to fight, much less compete, to create what we love.

My main point is that everything a pure artist does is an effort of original creativity. An artist cannot remain true if too worried about critics, audiences and their demands for something that reduces or demeans the higher intentions of creative integrity.

The world wants and tolerates all kinds of art today. Good and bad, highbrow and low, we can all get along. Yet all artists do suffer from social coercion - whether they admit it or not. For one thing, the artist cannot be "called" an artist today, so we are told, without an audience. Having an audience is the same thing as having a career, and so, to be a respectable middle class burgher who earns his keep and fulfills the new role; this social advent corresponds with the need to win social approval and respect... We all need to do the same thing, after all. But nowadays, if you stay alone, and you need to go off by yourself to create a novel, then you're more likely to be called a "bum" than a writer. Incidentally, jealousy gets us nowhere. Only hard work and daring imagination frees us from the crude, sycophantic infantilism of fashion...

For the selfish careerist, brought up to be as deadly dull, big-headed and serious as can be - yet always waiting to escape a society he imagines is even duller than himself - to such individuals only the spirit of variety appears to supply the essence of boredom relief. We have only to change the channel, buy a new magazine - stare at another new image. The medium was the message, but today - you are the message. Have web-cam - will chat!

Yet look! We are told what to do and what to believe. Everything is going to be okay, but only so long as you marshal your finances and aren't afraid of contraception. Despite the soft cliches and easy social euphemisms with which we help each other get along, certain odd effects arise from the happy kingdom of self...

Nowadays, we don't need to pay any attention to each other because we already know what we believe and cannot be touched by the world about us. A self-protective mechanism organizes your defensive reasoning: then you can make it through a difficult world of individuals, each one with essentially inscrutable motives and thoughts. How sad, that we fall so short of our depth, as the capacity for compassion is quashed by the fear we force upon one another. We must merely survive, instead of thrive, because we don't know how to share. I'm guilty of ignoring others, too. Sometimes, I feel so alone and unable to connect with anyone that death seems more appealing than life. I'm not afraid of saying things that I honestly feel. Are you?

Fantasy life is so individually differentiated that people now need to externalize and share obvious motives in common, but only as a means of finding another point of security - the life goal - which, if several of us share it in common, must amount to a sign of sanity and harmony. In the past most life goals were prescribed by the society and we had no opportunity to choose what we would do or believe. Long ago, we did not have any chance to ascend into some other class, either. The fact remains that people only feel secure whenever we subsume the individual's will into the communal one. Nobody ever gets ahead by selling individuality. And please don't forget - doubts and insecurities are the exclusive and very profitable territory of insurance companies!

Even so, everyone in the West is big on the personal ethic that attributes supreme value to the crude belief that each one must be proud to fight for himself. The failure of socialism only serves to satisfy our suspicions that people, no matter the system they claim to work for, inevitably end up working for themselves. Socially integrated individualists, whether working alone or in the big corporation, still feel proud about their unique ability to "accept" and understand their "true" human nature - which is to compete - every man for himself! Those who do not automatically subscribe to this primitive jungle ethic are snookered away as being incredibly naive and destined to lose. (What do such staid, identical businessmen have to do with art? Nothing. They never read books and couldn't begin to second guess the poet's motives or a painter's dreams...)

Most of the attitudes that we use to win or to steal leave little room for compassion and balance. We focus on singularly narrow goals and ignore the whole situation, and we still remain quite proud of our "realism" and its wilful blindness. Dare to speak up for the oppressed. Then stand up for an idea that is selfless in any way. Everyone is quick and cynical: first we condemn and then we ignore. Nowadays the powers that be are more clever, broadcasting subtly tinted opinions, while carefully leaving out the whole picture. Even this style of writing is meant to show the limits of upended interpretation... She likes wearing gauzy sheer things, below the waist...

So, why are we so afraid to be unlike one another in our social goals? How come our great, rugged individualists have failed to see how monkeyish we all are?

Supposedly, correct behavior, not thought and reflection, wins the key to success. You have the right attitudes and beliefs, then you will be promoted. If you still want to do something creative for yourself, well then, you had better hope that you're "lucky" and "connected" - otherwise you'll become one of the millions of losers who, at best, thought they knew what they were doing, too.

The sad fact remains that we have too small a span, slight ability and sparse concern for anything except some superficial stanching of our communal guilt. We need to believe in a social philosophy, but none is to be found. Instead, we have incessantly stupid racial wars, cults and cults upon idiotic cults of technology and crude phantasms of hokey religion, and dumb followers wishing after costly corporate deities - narrow predicaments all - but believed in by millions and millions of gullible, ill-cultured and silly people like you and me. ...and we as they - for we are all they - we are all too eager to exclude the rest of the world from the fantastic dominions of our microscopically right religious, political and only-ways of seeing and understanding the universe! Why have we become - so susceptible? The sheer increase of knowledge overwhelms the discriminative capability; consequently, we latch onto some fixed idea that appeals to our particular weakness: the hungry psyche hatches a quest for security and comfort, if you will. Some of us choose hybrid marijuana, while others, the lastest UFO cult. Oh, I don't mind... Believe in your faith, meditate, demonstrate and go to jail for your beliefs if you want to - but never pretend that you actually know more than the next guy, unless you prefer the straight and narrow intolerance of righteousness to the open suggestion and fascinating ambiguities of the truly natural world...

I believe that nine out of ten people suffers from a great need to escape from improbable responsibilities and a profound sense of personal futility into a utopian dream of fulfilled ends. We all want to be loved, too. We are nothing new, of course. We long, alone and as nations, for the fulfillment of the mother's tongue, which includes establishing a recognizable identity: we all want our own ways and means. ...In life, I may be fraught with uncertainty, but do not show it to my friends. I am so over-confident that I really don't know what to do next! By projecting a masked image of conquest and self-assurance, I can retain some semblance of mystique, and pretend to some private identity. Only you know what you really believe! On Monday, maybe God is real, and on Wednesday, he's a headache. Don't tell your friends what you really believe - in case they decide to remind you next year. Ha, ha, ha...

Today we admire and pay the specialist to do his job and tell us what to do. If you attend the university - you have no choice. Knowledge that is considered deep is focused on a specialty. This is fine, unless you are liable to be bored with scholarship, and having repeatedly to study the same subject. Oh, I suppose that the intellectual generalist does survive somehow, but merely as a public pundit - a remnant of authority - and certainly not the keystone of new and ground-breaking work...

I want to understand all there is: that wish excites me now as it did when I was a boy. But we are told, again and again, that we cannot learn all there is to know. In fact, prevailing prejudice links the best chance for wisdom (and success) with specializing first; and only after we know everything about one thing, can we return to pronounce about the whole thing! You have no choice but to follow the rules, ha, ha. Well, I doubt that this fashion for the largesse of induction can outdo the pure intuition and genius that inspires original discovery...

The scientist begins with an idea, almost like a suspicion about the world. Besides the wondrous advances it has given us, there's one really terrifying thing about science: that is, how easily it can make mistakes. This problem remains serious; because there's no room for error when we are dealing with the destiny of humanity.

Human beings have proclivities and passions. We are subject to no law but our own beliefs: and many of us need to believe that the depth of our faith equals the degree to which we have achieved humanity.

We cannot manage without our ideas for each other. Our science, in this light, is a reflection of the wish to assert ourselves: identity is made of intentions proved. Science in the twentieth century has come to mean solution instead of discovery. Yet, for all our medical advances, we have also invented death for millions of innocent people through manufactured war, new poisons and waste products. The ground of creative imagination, which we believe hallowed, is not sacred at all. It's tainted with vice and crime. The scientist has done wrong and will not learn willingly from his mistakes. The scientist has been paid to kill at least as much to create, and nobody seems to care. It hardly matters that we all agree that scientists should only be paid to create: because mayhem, that dicey thoroughbred, is still a big profit maker.

We cannot forget that the scientist begins, like the artist, with an obsession for knowledge, an almost Faustian compulsion to arrive at perfect agreement with nature, at any cost. So we see the perfect model of amoral man is the scientist; ever since poor Mary Shelley, we still await another novelist who can arrive at an accurate portrayal of such characters, divine and evil, together on the same stage, living out the end of modernity, investing their lives into a faith in knowledge without end, irrespective of all questions about good and evil. Oh yes, a domain without rules is worth exploring, isn't it? To find a novelist capable and heroic enough for such a wondrous, terrifying work!

Maybe we will need more time to get the imagination we need, the perspective of another couple hundred years or so. At this stage, all our science fiction attempts to project into the future based on the present state of civilization; we have yet to attain that higher ground of wisdom, as from the point of view of a god studying twenty thousand advanced civilizations simultaneously. Put it this way, even the best writers of fiction have imagined nothing but one more idea of what we already are! To get beyond ourselves we must imagine whole new worlds, organisms, religions, art systems, cities and sexes... But we can we..?

Let's get back to today. Yes, we must live with specialization. The expert earns respect among his peers. It's the sheer joy of knowing what nobody else but your peers know! Many of our most brilliant snobs make a living from their "know-how" appeal: we enjoy a very modern desire for that mystique with which privileged knowledge imprints the quest for intellectual and social status. Witness the strange phenomenon of the literary critic - a most hard to understand species. He or she wants to know what writers and poets are writing, but instead of doing that, studies what other critics are writing instead! The literary critic is happy and very important, especially since he or she learns a special language that authors and poets seldom acquire themselves. I ask you to take a look at my way of writing analytical prose. See that I want to speak to you, not through the subtext, but here, on top of the sentence: my words lie on your lap, my queries and prickles invite you to think of your own ideas... I do not seek to mystify the English language with befuddling technical jargon so complex that its objective translation and comprehension is rendered nigh impossible by virtue of there being far too many neologisms and obtuse words in each sentence! Of course, Mr. Critic, the lexicon is infinite, no doubt: that's the true nature of human imagination, yet we ought to find our meanings directly, and if we find that linguistic reality is a series of layers, then you ought to explain how we arrive inside those layers first before throwing them at your reader as if you assume we already know what you are talking about as if we lived inside your brain! Your world is real for you, but when I read it in lexico-lesion-lingo, I am not in a real world at all. So it appears that a lot of today's criticism is a camp created out of wishful air, completely detached and unconcerned about the literature it never pretends to begin critiquing in the first place. But why!? Because, it seems the critics need to make their world appear legitimate enough to make a living, too. There, I've said it twice. But how many critics are actually smart enough to analyze literature and civilization simultaneously, as Frye does? Hardly any. Now, onward. Let the critics stay dim and in, praying to their selfish obscurity - bah!

But we can use this example of the critic to point out, simply, that our concern has arrived at a curious juncture of modern metamorphosis: the rise of the "specialist" whom nobody can understand at all... Why do these individuals attach so much importance to their activities? Because they have persuaded themselves that their knowledge is made of authority. Fine and dandy; but why does it seem as if authority arises out of exclusivity alone?

Wisdom, authority and knowledge are never the same thing unless you speak with the voice of a godhead... The human being does not need to inflate itself up with so much self-importance and pretence to absolute knowledge! All of our specialization amounts to only the tiniest little fragment of truth. It's fine with me if specialists believe that their work privileges a living, and I don't care if the expert should decide that my work is insignificant to his studies. I suppose that he'd better, if he wants any respect from his peers...

I am quite happy to remain anonymous and to content myself with absorbing, retaining and using most of the ideas I've absorbed over the years - from all spheres of knowledge. I'm also happy to experience other cultures and to combat my congenital xenophobia and self-serving resignation... The results I offer may be mixed, but nobody can hold trying to express myself against me...

Artists always have been left alone to beg their betters for approval and handouts... But true art needs nobody's approbation! That's why so many great artists killed themselves!

So what do we have? A ripe and ludicrous end to our age, the age to cap all ages: the scientist, a bitter king who cannot trust his motives; the artist, either a crabby pauper nobody knows and who must beg for respect, or a flimsy egomaniac selling the same crap over and over again.

Face it - so many bums call themselves "artists" today. We want to be bums, and respected for it, instead of admitting that we hate to work at some dull job... Is it ironic that nobody will call you a bum if your technique of artistic production mimics those of dentists or auto mechanics? Stylistically, I suspect that people have begun to fear every object that doesn't look as if a machine stamped it out! But believe me,: I don't want to be a robot, much less a slave...

So, I lose, too. But at least I know what art really is, and what constitutes a viable subject for literature, and I know how to write it, too...