On Being a Late Bloomer

In April, 1988, standing in our kitchen in NE Philadelphia, it came to me that for the rest of my life I would follow whatever course best served my desire to write. And by that, I meant–to make art, to be an artist, though I wasn’t yet ready to accept that name for myself

I was 47, two months short of my 48th birthday. It wasn’t that I hadn’t done these things before, I had taken courses in art from childhood, at the Chicago Art Institute, Nelson-Aitkins Gallery of Art and Kansas City Art Institute. Later, majored for for time at Wichita State University. I had written stories and poetry from the time I could write, but this was new. This was something else. Like a conversion experience. A sense of accepting a calling, making a commitment. If I could live to work another 20 or 30 years, I told myself, I would have as much time as many who had begun in their youth–to leave a body of work.

Maybe it was the feeling that time was running out. Or was it that to my mind, being an artist was something too grand, that I wasn’t worthy? I thought of what Cezanne had written: ” Why so late and with such difficulty? Is art a priesthood that demands the pure in heart who must belong to it entirely?”

Yes. I thought. It does.

Though not so sure about the “pure in heart” stuff. A bit too 19th Century.

But with humor, yes. And this new sense of freedom from any judgment not my own–this was what I was going to do.

It will be 27 years come April. Some of them–pretty rough going. But I can call myself an artist now–a novelist, a poet–and not cower in shame lest I be found out as a fake. And I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

I kinda like this, being a Late Bloomer–of just warming up when most people are winding down, of not having to hang it up, rest on the laurels of what I accomplished in my youth. Life is just beginning. Every day. Every day, a new beginning!

The Imposibility of Art

A blog post is as ethereal as the trace of dancing particles though a cloud chamber, and yet in the universe of the web, seemingly always there, as though cyrogenically frozen beyond time, perhaps sprung to life at the mistyping of a search word, or preserved on old UBS drives at the bottom of a landfill, like mineralized imprints of the first self-replicating cells that drifted in Precambrian seas.

I don’t trust the impulse to preserve. nursing as it does, a delusional wish for immortality, and yet, like: Shakespeare’s 64th Sonnet, the wish to have that which we fear to lose, nudges aside good sense, and I go back into the old blog, searching for scraps–what, had I not written them, would have been likely nothing more than trains of thought, passing time on the el waiting for my stop, forgotten as soon as my foot touched the station platform. Here, then… from my birthday, June 22, 2008.

Ulrich went on: “Every great book breaths this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was.”
From chapter 84 of The Man Without Qualities.

Continue reading “The Imposibility of Art” →

Mother Earth, Life Boat Adrift in the Entropic Universe

We are not immortal. “We” absolute.
No universal multiplication of “I”
All of us, here now and to come. Not one by one our extinction, but in the end, all, all. Even–should we evolve to something that survives past the death of the sun, our solar system, past the the universe recalled to its origin or dissipated to the logical version of entropic “forever;” we will have become something else–as radically other as we are from the replicating chains of RNA before they made room for the generations of the double helix, of which we, in our expanded consciousness, are the descendants and heirs.
No longer: “I am going to die,” but we… Ivan’s question demythologized.
This comes to mind when I hear fantasies of lifeboats to other galaxies… the need to populate the stars lest “we” (a version of “we” that has not overcome the most primitive version of imagined survival at the expense of everyone “other”… nevermind all those left behind… that is, there is no “we” there…
If there is to be any survival worth imagining, this would be its antithesis.
To conjure values suited for a new age, the starting point is imagining… as it always has… our mortality… our common mortality, and our solidarity in the face of it–human solidarity against the idea of the sacrifice of the many for the sake of the few.
How little has changed.

from December, 2008, Barking Dog

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this: