twenty-five degrees
I’m coming to realise that, these days, I enjoy what I speak about, but I hate how I speak, the language I’ve come to use in speech. And while I enjoy how I write, I hate what I sit and write about, words in a vaccuum, talking to myself.
I work (that is to say, ‘the function of me is’) so much better when engaged. I need someone there to laugh, or question me, or react. It’s a humbling realization and an infuriating relationship. I can only be me, when I’m me-in-context. I’m sure I’ve written about that idea before, the self-in-context, the countenance-as-reflection.
The disappointed man speaks; ‘I listened for an echo and I heard only praise.’
Nietzsche.
When I read that idea, I initally thought the man was trying to teach, and just failed to get through to his students. Now I’ve come to believe that he simply came to be disappointed with his reflection. He got his echo, but hated how he appeared in their mirror. He didn’t fail so much as his failure defined him; in what tinny, hollow echo he did receive he learned how he was received, and thus who he had become to those he loved enough to speak to. The epitome of disappointment; the very depths.
I think people like me live and die by the echo. When so much of the world is askew and a-slanted away from us, our necks become sore while living life at an angle.
I would trade my eyes for a conversation that matters, for a curious person who keeps me curious. But when you have it all, all or any offering would seem miserly.
‘… I have gone about as a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune…’
Dante.
Us blessed are cursed to be blessed alone. I could not stand to be ordinary, but for all my bluster and word, I’m simply lonely and handling it in a rather poor way.
And a silly idea that is, no? Handling loneliness? As if it’s a pain to be managed, a sickness to treat. It’s worse; it is a fact. If, I am; then, I am lonely.
What a choice! To submit that I exist as I am is to suffer that I am no better off for it whatsoever. Damned if I do, and damn the other half of the saying; for me to be me, is to do, and (it would so dreadfully seem) do alone.
It is terrible to live in such a world, where one designed to live is one designed to lonesomeness.
Sadly,
~ Driz
My take on the echo – or the expectation of it – differs.
Consider: when one spends a quantifiable amount of anything (hours, brain-cells, words, brushstrokes, it-matters-not-what) on creating; the result is the echo. The intent of the creator was, primarily and ultimately, to see what his brain could create. To move something from imagination to reality.
But, once created, it is subject to criticism (of himself and others).
Praise is synonymous with apathy. Every ‘I like it’ feels like a lie or an act of sycophantic guest-book-signing.
(To immediately see this in action, read almost any blog with 25+ comments per post…all but maybe 2 or 3 of those comments are pap; saying less than nothing; muttering their I-like-what-you-said’s because they think if they don’t, nobody will know they were there.)
An artist receives praise with a skeptical smile, but welcomes derision, comparative-criticism, and advice (no matter how unhelpful) with a warm embrace.
Or……were you just wanting a *golf clap*?
Art always exist for art’s sake, or at least for the sake of the artist. To share it at all is usually to be mistook, misread, misunderstood, or simply: missed.
But for those others who do seem to find satisfaction in our art, we do meet it with skepticism, you’re correct, of course. To the artist, in declaring a thing complete, he has essentially resigned himself to failure, abandoned the process once convinced he will not succeed at his task, and the aftermath, the showing about and gentle raps on hollow walls in search of this echo; is our wallowing in the facts.
We ‘art’, (if I may use it as a verb) to express, to emote.
The liars will tell you their art exists to ‘move’ others. Ex movere.
The bashful and shamed will confess their art is only their hope that their work might help others ‘be moved’ as the artist initially was; to breed in others that flailing sense of alone that drove them mad and drove them to madly emote. We seek an echo that we cannot receive, a reflection that cannot be rewarded to us. Our experiences, our souls are our own and only ours. We should be humble before such implications.
We are, by design, alone in our selves. This truth so often salted tastes bitter when confronted, and that was what this writing was about.
Thank you for commenting.
Never, *ever* clap for me.
~ Driz
What? You don’t want me to say I like this, not without value, not without intense thought? Easy, huh, even for a bit.
(thumbs up) Dach likes this.