For so long as this place in nature is given us it is right that art should do no violence to the gift. – James Joyce, somewhere between 1904-1906
So wrat the master in a manuscript he apocryphally threw into a fire. Let the violence of nature be a gift to the art, then. (It is especially delightful that, in addition, these words were scribbled out in red or blue crayon; though impossible to ascertain the meaning for certain, one can assume it was a mark of disapproval. Ironically, it was the marks used to indicate Joyce’s crayon that highlighted them to the present author in the first place. So we present for the approval of no one, hosted on an unknown server, words rejected from a manuscript nearly destroyed by an author now dead for some 77 years.)
Premise: loss is the great wellspring of art. Admittedly my taste runs to the mournful and macabre, but legions of traumatized artists seem to back this theory. It is beyond the scope of this moment to prove that loss drives both consumption and creation of art, but suffice it to say that there is some self-evidence in the premise. Just as strongly as one develops a psychosomatic scotoma for what is taken for granted, it is when something is gone (or when one has removed oneself) that perception returns with a renewed clarity. Perhaps art is a self-medicating attempt to replace what is missing, perhaps it is a complicated evolution of a baby’s cry for food.
Don’t mistake this thought as being more melodramatic than it is meant to be. Life contains a great deal of loss, little of which is life-defining, but all of which contributes to perception of the world and its relative value.
(Very) minor poets the world over—which is to say, I—have suggested that they can not create true art because their lives are rather too satisfactory. I have come to revise that theory, comforting an excuse as it may be, and would suggest that it is the discipline to seek the value in everyday loss that distinguishes a truly competent artist. Pure inspiration, unreliable as it is, may and often does produce great art; furthermore, the disciplined artist may never create anything of such magnitude. Nevertheless, it is a distinct and admirable willpower that is required to mourn the constant loss of the banal. To stop and shout the half-sentences overheard in the mouths of strangers, to record the day’s weather every day for fifty years—what better way to proclaim your thanks and to worship the unuttered and ineffable beauty of creation?
And that’s where we stand—that’s where we want to stand, anyway, those of us committed explicitly or implicitly to a life defined by the essentially antiutilitarian. What illness could possess an animal to pervert its survival instinct sufficiently that it finds itself awake by willpower alone, half-drunk in the pre-dawn half-light, scratching out repetitive symbols and staring, staring at them for hours? What kind of self-absorbed obsession prompts a rank beast to use its highly adaptive traits of focus and discipline on manipulating lights on a box? The risk is great (we all lose ourselves in the dancing shadows sometimes) but the rewards are greater; create is God as a verb. Lazy creation is to do violence to the gift.
All well and good, but life in America is a life where magazines about English royalty need constant refreshment and Jim White plays to crowds of a dozen. It’s hard not to get cynical about the violence being done by others to the gift, but this is the tricky part. It takes discipline to look past the easy excitement in life. It takes discipline to cultivate an appreciation for those who do, those who make quiet distillations of the very essence of perfection and receive little fanfare in return… and it takes the same discipline to not only acknowledge one’s own weaknesses for the low-hanging fruit, but also acknowledge that the low-hanging fruit is fruit as well (not to mention the fact that “low” is a relative term). Venerating perceived essential truths painstakingly mined from the depths below the mountains of the mundane, is it fair to blame those on the surface for not seeing things from your perspective?
You may watch a drama and see repetitive stories with repulsively pat conclusions, or you may watch a drama and exploit the repetition to learn a new language. You may twist a radio dial and hear meaningless interference of electromagnetic waves, or you may ride a drone-wave into a higher state of consciousness. Can art do violence to the gift the artist is given? Undoubtedly. Perhaps, however, this sentence was stricken because the world is rarely as bad as we, the world-weary artists of superior perception, want it to be. Dig, and dig, and dig, and dig, but keep a picture of the hole from up top in your wallet.