For the sake of annoying you, let me suggest that I think there's something lacking about the current mentality: the only way we can be admired and appear tolerable to one another, and so - get publicly promoted - depends upon whether or not we act within forms of behavior and create art possessed of the least stimulating level of idea content. You think I'm wrong, maybe I am, but this shit isn't exactly going to be a bestseller, and it's all ideas... (I don't think sentiment without supporting ideas count much towards writing a deeply thematic novel - whether satiric, serious or comic. A great novel always portrays character and events in a story that simultaneously evoke precise and deeply moving responses in readers. Emotions reveal a particular social reality; note that fine authors work hard to balance the emotive and intellectual contents, placing their fictional characters amid conflicts inspired by nature and other people, weaving an artful plot. And so, the emotions of the characters become caught up with the deeper thematic aim that each author has in mind, and which guides the whole creative effort... It is important to observe that a somewhat more condensed and amorphous unity occurs within poetry, which always depends directly upon evoking emotions in the reader.) However, without much idea substance, you are the perfectly leadable, readable, silenced and shoutable. Who needs to contemplate a profound concept or a deep theme? Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky. But I happen to know that you are likely to remain pretty stupid unless you do! Today, the biggest selling novels appeal to the most basic emotive reactions: lust, fighting, wishful fantasy, sentimentality, puppy love and fear of the killer. Action description needs to leave out themes and ideas. You think I exaggerate? Of course, you're a rich publisher who prides himself on being able to make business decisions; and, without having to know a thing about literature, you do make them! Or, you're a big-selling hack author with plenty of hard-earned time to write just what the proles want; you've won just enough freedom to look down on the likes of snotty little me. Shit, all you need do is to point out that human beings have always been this way to justify writing trash. Go ahead, give your seminars on "how-to-write-the-perfect-pot-boiler..." You already know so well that aggressive competition is humanity's answer to the universal craving for self-security. Hits and blockbusters only! Everybody else - die!

Professionally tame and predictably managed, we are certainly most intellectually sinister, and we profoundly lack interesting and intelligent opinions. Those who have already sold-out to productivity and mass audience become cynically rich: some bastards become so garish and rosy under that pride, squeezed out of some stupid dickhead shit called "business savvy." But you tell me, after all, what does making a deal have to do with creativity and imagination? Nothing! Maybe just a little bit, but mostly nothing and nothing again... Show business is just money you donkeys! And how do all self-convinced "performers" measure everything that threatens their selling-identity? They say: "I don't buy that..." They don't read it, either. (What do I know!? The dry rigidity of feeble minds like mine is built upon how much really fine work I can ignore!) The few creative paupers left, those few who can still actually write well, they only become bitter, quizzical, benignly enlightened and eventually - indifferent and careless - and left alone like me, very much alone, not at the party, but kept in the dark. At least we don't have to pretend that we're important enough to deserve a prize... I don't really have to admire clever people who contrive to get big hand-outs, just so they can satisfy their desperately grave right for attaining to a tiny class high above us, the mere workers of the world! They are correct to look down on me for not having enough time to write my thirty novels and 150 short stories! They are all sitting there, waiting to be written - but I am not allowed to get any time at all - not even a little bit. Not even a little bit of admiration or respect. Where I live, the illiterates haven't even the slightest clue about what I have already created. Not even a trace of an inkling! We who would be "artists" are actually attaining to a merely synthetic and imaginary idea of what an artist is supposed to be. That's all... You're a tv-moviestar-rewriter. Wow! That's it - little biddy starlet! Hey starlet: do you know that they plan everything out for you, and you don't know it! They decide exactly who you are gonna fuck next week and next year, too! Yes they do! It's all charted out for ya baby: you may not know it, but your agent and the studios spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how to maximize the profit they intend to make off you! So they hire shrinks to figure out just exactly the right kind of guy to lay cross your path - only those ones who have the highest likelihood of making you "happy enough" to guarantee the studio big money over the next five years! You don't think those boys are set up to bed you baby? Don't kid yourself, you cute little slut! But don't forget, after you're through with your little Grecian holiday, what are you expected to ask him, bitch? But of course: "Who you got lined up for next week?" Then you both fly back to America in time to sleep with the next one. Shit, I'd do it, too. I get pretty bored with the same doll after a couple of years, months - days... Go ahead! Live in your predictable dreamland, kiddies... Why not, we should all have as much fun as we can! An artist is unclassifiable and certainly nothing but a fake if forced to adhere to a synthetic image of middling-high class behavior and success... If you get bored of fucking the next brave, you can always enjoy a breakdown, darling... We'll pay for that, too! Those poor guys have a right to win, dear God! Me too? I don't know. I don't think so. Those guys in Boston and Toronto don't really want me to read their magazines... They can ignore me more easily that way! Oh, but I can still pretend to laugh along with the dim parrots of professionalism! I'm not a complete bore - yet!

Artists - especially at a moment when civilization should be growing up into a broad tolerance and respect for pluralistic social, ethnic and faithful currents - are being degraded for having ideas: we remain invisible and insulted, maybe because our work isn't easily digested and challenges the limitations of corporate money-making forms and all similar structures of social control and "growth." No publisher wants to hear about the unpleasant effects of unjust economic dominance. Oh yes, I forget about all the good things that happen mr. president - after all - don't we got some food on the table? But so what! Artists like me are forced into positions of ignominious sycophancy in order to buy even a little bit of time to create. So, what do you expect? Sometimes I'm obliged to hate society - and everyone in it, for forcing me to waste my life - (especially when I know that I've done a better job than the ones they already let win.) I'm exaggerating? I'm so free but I can't see it, right? Right. I have it good. Yes, I see that. But I have no time! I'm working when I should be writing. You can pretend to hate me, too - I don't care. Ego-edifying spleen: the soap-bubble is inflated because I don't dare ask anyone for respect. Nobody wants to understand anything. So, I will have to resign and accept the fact that literature, even the best, is never deeply assimilated by any society. The silent peace of the safe grave is all I can hope to earn... I feel good about being anonymous and could care less what you think about my work, my behavior, my attitude - especially since you've never read anything I wrote... I suppose all that I want is to wake up and write everyday, and forget about paying rent. So what? The world seems laughably backwards to me.

Try on this one - then just throw it away. The saddest thing about today's big men of power and business is that they really really believe that selling is the be-all, end-all of existence. That may be okay - but only for them! For the artist like myself, such beliefs are anathema. We have no wish for selling-power: we only want to understand the world. Yet, how strange the world is today! Serious artists who agree to play the roles laid out for them are automatically shunted into the pipes of vast bureaucracies and they get properly locked up in libraries, universities and galleries: and all participants have to assume the appropriate stuffiness, carefully balancing the snob appeal with that of their peers - in order to give every appearance of having that special freedom of the ingroup, that especially informed and carefree life - all because nobody wants to worry over that pure, useless artistic creativity even as it fails to trigger the mainsprings of economy behind all successful, high society... Nor does my thoughtful art work stand a chance for reaching very many, not up against the instantaneous reception of movies and pop-songs, which require little processing or reflection. We can pack a lot of CDs into relatively small boxes, friends. Benjamin was right about how we are quite accustomed to a distracted life, having replaced concentrated effort with slack habits...

All artists - crude and profound both - all of us begin with similar aims: it's always something that we desire to create, to achieve and then to give. Writers want more truth. Painters want more beauty. Both want emotion... Actors want more emotional truth than abstract possibility. Sculptors want to make their insights into a gut-wrenching knowledge. Each artist, acting from the natural affinity he or she may have for a particular kind of creativity, is able to intuit a direct connection with the receiver's sensitivity. A great painter knows what will move his viewer most deeply. A truly great painter will be able to convey the same moods and thoughts he was feeling about the scene or personality he saw and imagined as he created the artwork. Realistic impressions and insightful abstractions can lend us that warm sensation of affirmation: we live in the same place together, so we know and feel the same things... With respect to painting, I've always felt a quiet elation, an ecstasy and sorrow each time I view fine works inspired from pure ideas about human essences: with ease we read their symbols of emotional truth and so absorb unified themes and meaningful metaphors. (Example: you can see and feel the emotions upon the expression of the face of that anguished old man holding the skull of his dead son. His visage exactly matches the title of the painting: "Remorse." It reminds me of Herodotus, and one of his many clever lines summing up the motto of a military campaign: spare the sons - but kill the fathers...) The insights of literature and painting convey how shared sensitivity gives us depth and offers a chance for a progress that the simple animal under each of us would never begin to feel and imagine - were we not also human beings!

You do aspire to wisdom and a good life... Writers always make much about the belief that only language (poetic or musical) can effectively communicate complex experience. We need to excuse our late compulsion to "explain" behavior; it's only because we need some outlet to tell others about the wisdom we have realized.

The author dares to discriminate in favor of truth; however, our imaginations sometimes take us further than we can understand at all. Instincts drive us into crudely wrought or wildly sensational evocations. We have no excuses here. The poet's thoughts appear on paper in the same instant that we realize them. Intellectual poets are especially prone to feel that all human consciousness is writing the poetry for them - not one's own self, which is much too obsessed and cloudy. In this instinct, then, the pen feels like an instrument for a larger cosmos enveloping all life.

But of course, the creative writer is always the first one to define truth as a sensitivity for articulating it! So often, the language of poetry is all about life knowing us better than we can see and articulate in our conversations. We communicate life in many ways: by invoking thoughts, describing fates, by showing the cause of emotions among the amorphous yet shared plexus of familiar sensibilities - and a hundred other ways. Poetic insight isn't a purely subjective sensation, either. Familiarity is made of moods and common ground; shared ideas and kindred dispositions are inspired by the world we have made together. It's all as very real as our own wives and fathers. So, poetry is very attractive because we share it spontaneously. Ideas and metaphors connect heart to situation, sensation and soulful hope.

(One more aside: personally, I feel that one of the worst things that can happen to any artist is the nationalization or gross politicization of his or her creative work. When people feel oppressed by their minority, or by the presence of others possessed of their own special xenophobia, then we become vulnerable to false idealisms. In particular, fascism preys upon the emotions of desperation, insecurity and persecution - real and imaginary... Result: the same social disasters are always repeated... Intolerance is a disease bred of misunderstanding and fear. We may need to believe in a "home" and it's good to love our language, but it is wrong to use them to control other people... False ideals replace the cool, rational facility for fair judgement. We cannot descry the solutions to our differences: barricaded behind a mere chance of birth, we are unable to rise up and embrace forgiveness and so release ourselves from that fear of others who also hate us for no reason... How many situations in the world can you count which involve people who hate without having to hate each other - because of religion, or worse - gross nationalism, the old mistakes of history and military posing? Irish Catholics and Protestants. Serbs and Croats... Hutus and Tutsis. Koreans, north and south. Taiwanese and Chinese: I've seen the white-washed attitudes - the irrational, dumb-hearted preconceptions and judgements that come without knowledge or contact. They have prevailed for years and many people are still infatuated with their local brainwashing. People around the globe are bound by prejudices, all of us unable to change - young and old - the same... We've got angry Fijians and Indians. Do you buy your booze at a white or at a black folk's shop when you visit Georgia? The problem of blind bigotry is gravely serious... Does the dean of your philosophy department permit the study of Nietzsche or Sankara? Why not? When so-called poets adopt a hard line against other peoples who speak different languages, or whose ruffians have oppressed them, the compulsion to build impossible walls by means of unjust and oppressive ideas offers no issue. So, be wary of politicizing your work. Sing freedom songs, yes! But forget the songs of cruel superiority and leave hate and malice behind. If you're jealous, you're not balanced. The tragedy of freedom fighters is that we are always liable to be murdered by fascists from the other side. Poetry and art can help to analyze a political situation. But to propagandize isn't the same thing as to fight for freedom. Lies must never be told to excuse the ways and means of a power struggle... Freedom must reach for justice and individuals must not sacrifice their integrity to an imaginary social symbol, for we will lose the freedom we sought to gain as quickly as we believed that we had achieved it. To fight for freedom is to love your brothers and sisters.)

The real world is very strange now. It isn't real enough. It's too real, too far away, too close... Too! We are certain of very little, except that we live in an artificial organism, the city habitat. Self-sustaining ideals for the good life are built upon accretions of scientific and technological wonder. Turn your head the other way and both the inanimate and living sides of the natural world - water, mountains, trees, birds - shock us with a peculiar contrast to civilization. Perplexity arises because of the difference between the man-made and the natural worlds; each of these worlds, while being completely alien to one another, becomes infused with a human wish - to seek for a reflection of each within the other. But what is that instinct really looking for? It's the ageless wish for peace of mind - to make the head come home to the heart! Comfort and reassurance - and elevation beyond fear of solitude and soft embodiment. So we see the whole world as depending upon our intellectual judgement, the passions of belief, the wishfulness of being... The complex world we have created makes it more difficult to know ourselves - and that only makes us want to learn more! Eventually, we conclude that the desire to see masterful identity reflected in the creative power of nature, as the intent of deity, is merely a consequence of the wish to remain created, spontaneous and completely "natural" entities - so as not to become artificial and automatic. Although we are not the only higher order being with an innate propensity to development, we humans presume uniqueness in ourselves first: the human self-concept identifies its personal reality with a certainty for faith in god... See how long we have struggled up to the light, without knowing how we learned to believe! Being is imbued with intelligence, and ultimately we haven't a clue what we can achieve. Poetic prophets can't find fit words for the future. Scientists write in the impenetrable epigrams of microbiology and physics.

~ We do live in our machines. The wonderful magic of technological solutions swallows our appetite for knowledge... We must try to be even more humble than before - because the line between success and failure is now reckoned according to how many solutions we have for the problems we have already made... We are much too responsible for the success and failure of civilization: this fact makes us very uneasy - so much so that the men with the most power ignore the most obvious evidence - like the assault upon the environment by man-made pollution. Santyana spoke of the whole of life and universe as being one vast combustion. But today that notion might scare us, and tough men do not want to be scared.

Technology is subconsciously assimilated because we use it easily. But with emphasis upon "using" tools, we have little knowledge about how our new tools are put together. Instead, we exult in the extension of human facility and enjoy the simplicity of effort that represents new-found creative sophistication. Instead of cultivating the old standby, faith in pure understanding of "what is," the contemporary ideal tends to focus upon concepts of process and modes of efficiency.

Technicians are heroic for giving us wondrous innovations that unwittingly liberate our culture - like this amazing CD ROM that saves so many trees and shows a hundred lovely pictures instantaneously! So, if you can read this, chances are you dream at night about solving problems instead of having to scrounge up some food for the next day. Of course, we need more solutions to the problems we are afraid to face... Like starvation: so many have next to nothing, and very small hope to relieve their poverty.

We are proud but really deserve nothing more than we can make ourselves! Creative success is a personal effort. Artists have a purpose! We must work to understand. But what becomes of artists when technology is too full of solutions? Technology does leads us into new concepts that help to mollify some imaginative goals. But technology can relieve us of creativity, too...

Some of us ask: is the artist being outmoded by the technician? If we can see so much dependence upon stylistic forms, tools and fashionable guidelines like, "plot, plot, plot..," then isn't the interior action, the creativity, being swept aside in favor of something entirely thoughtless? I hope not. But hope isn't enough to make wonderful art...

No artist can be persuaded that his or her creative world is about to be replaced by automatic systems of production, socialization, distribution, etc... However, such systems, as advocated by technology, economy and governments, do tend to offset the original schemas of aesthetic appreciation. Imagination is reprogrammed to do a new job. Today, getting connected is very important and processing that acceptance may tend to displace an artist's quest for integrity. Buying into the "appropriate" motives is the same thing as mimicking the favored styles. Having to "fit-in" sometimes causes the imagination to lose touch. But since we all believe that, "art cannot die," we obviously assume that making art, and consuming it, must continue to fulfill our need for conceptual play. Without imagination, we would be duller than ever. We are liable to become worse off if we were no longer able to decide what constitutes good and bad art.

All musicians know technical proficiency augments talent. But technique is nothing without talent. The development of musical skill, and technique, comes with practice. Talent comes from nothing but nature: it's a gift that needs a chance to flower. Great musicianship, more than all the other arts, except perhaps the art of the novelist, depends on time: we devote ourselves for prolonged periods to reach our goals. The musician depends on technique while learning, but without talent, cannot reach mastery. All artists apply a creative technique, and today, the notion of this technique is often confused with one's "artistic style," which is actually another thing. For the writer, a technique may comprise writing some notes and then outlining a plot, a theme and some characters. Technique for writers may be preparation - a way of thinking during the creative act. Some writers insist that their favorite technique is to write as fast as they can, then rework from start to finish by cutting out the bad parts to make the whole thing more "readable." But the fact remains that most writers and poets cannot explain how their creative and "talented" consciousness functions during the act of composition.

What about the difference between the artist and the technician? Let's say that the artist is first responsible for the content of the artwork. The technician is responsible, potentially, for the form of the artwork, usually equivalent to its reproduction. If the form of the artwork and its techniques of production become more important than its content - (as so often is the case with the non-paintings in our offices, hotels and condominiums) - then the artist is outmoded by the technician's work; that is, by someone who never needed to know how to draw, paint or sculpt in the first place... More than one artist has been superceded by someone else's better connections.

We see a strange metamorphosis of active roles today. The artist has always been responsible for the content of artwork, but our growing dependence on the technical methods of artistic production may be pushing aside our fascination with ideas in favor of creating "appropriate" and recognizable forms of expression. I would go so far as to suggest that some of us are afraid of things that appear as if they were actually produced by the human hand instead of a machine. Many of us shy away from works that do not reflect some kind of mimicry or a recognizable school. I don't much care about how you do things: let the familiar genre and unimaginative mannerism rule your work if you like. But I'll keep singing with my voice, thanks...

If the artist can still manage to exert some imaginative effort over the content of a piece, then we will see the form sublimated to its rightful place, and so effectively combine with the content's meaning to fulfill the artwork's expression; consequently, the art work properly communicates deeper sensations and hopefully - new ideas - maybe even the artist's original feeling.

We need technicians. But artists must not become technicians! Technicians can help with the excellent reproduction of art. However, all the work that goes by the name of "art" must begin with the human mind, heart and hand. By the way, this discussion isn't intended to be taken for an absolute stance, but really as a series of analytical propositions, as a way to help you think about what art is... About all that I know for sure is that lust reflects the deep beauty of physical sensitivity. But that isn't enough to make you say, "Yes," either.

~ Beautifully, laughing in our faces, culture is a sly whore. She is too expensive for me. I chase her and she wants someone else. She taunts and tantalizes my supposed morality and mocks all my inhibitions: she would understand everything I might choose to confess... Exchanging your dreams for onan is easier than ever before, ha, ha. What am I talking about? Nothing. I really want to point out that we've built a great snob appeal from past and dead cultural icons; they are still strutting about hundreds of years after they've died... Which is great! I am happy we respect the best art. We read great novelist's books, reproduce their paintings and try to imagine, "what the artist was like as a man..." We never bother to recall if they were loved or hated by their contemporaries, or that hypocrisy drove them to live anonymously in sunnier climes, where perhaps it didn't matter so much that they had little money, and nobody would judge them for growing older, or for giving up (or for not giving up) their work. Why do we romanticize our dead lights only after they died? It's the imaginary aura of a name. But what about understanding? Nowadays, everyone likes to say that we don't need anymore dead artists; you are a viable entity only if you can drop as many currently popular living names as possible! Does it really matter that I haven't a clue who you and your friends are? Even if I write the world's best novel next year - I wouldn't be permitted to publish it... So how the fuck ought I feel?