It is not necessary for someone to have to know all of the world to despise it. All the entirety of the world can never be fully known by a single individual; it is with academics, travel, empirical research, all fiber-optically connected and thus the world seems to come into focus. The focus is but a caricature; one has to see every space of the world in time space to fully and truly know it- anything less, distaste or love for the world is all distortion predicated on a fragile strand of knowledge.
The world I know is the one inside of me and the one I wish to embrace. Along every shore of Madison lives the fossil of my footsteps, where Otis Redding once plunged to his death, swept away only by immense pressure of carbon. Only from a crisp and deep breeze that seems to dissect my bare skin is my presence reassured; I too am here.
The origin of the world is the origin of the individual, and lost upon the world which is split wide by the individual, is individuation. Becoming, I make of the world a smaller place, by shrinking it, it will someday be fully in my hands, as clay to mold, "the thinker" of Rodin. The ghost is given to uncertainty and an uncertain world, the haunt to the dream that never comes when I am asleep but only when I am awake, my eyes open, rational. Love is temporary derangement; I am always in love.
Of this love, of this infatuation, that is not of bodily form, is the only, for the love in human form has come long ago and gone long before and art, that decay that will dissect the cerebral formation of logic, bares itself down in haven to never again be removed.
Art is a constant; it lives when all else dies, it remains when everyone has left, it reciprocates when it knows it has complete devotion as a jealous god. Prayer is knowledge, prayer is lyrical formation, linguistic variation, self-expression, artistic absorption, and when all is said and one, art gives you a legacy of a thousand years and a death of a thousand occurrences.
Locking oneself up away from the world doesn't mean its cruelties have subsided, just that it has created another guise to hurt you. By forcing one into silence, into seclusion, it builds the walls that one believes they have chosen to hide in, it beats on the walls in the nights as a demonic presence and soon, it creates the doppelganger outside of the mirror and the omen that is insanity cradles you until that final sleep is about. Emily Dickinson accomplished nothing from seclusion, only the lost days that Walden found. His seclusion was bliss, Dickinson's despair, Chagall's prayer, St. Vincent Millay's seduction. One can only delay their deterioration by refusing to "go quietly into that good night," with seclusion comes defeat, with the artist, seclusion brings one to be twice defeated inasmuch art, there lives no triumph of the individual over art, for the individual is a byproduct of art as sulfites from fermentation.
If there is anything of self that is lost, it is only lost because it has been given up freely, without the battle to possess. The celebrity who hires the ghost writer to produce art in silence cheapens art, the ghost writer, by becoming and accepting the fate of the "ghost," cheapens themselves, the plagiaristic possess no genius nor is possessed by it and therefore must heist art, the singer whose songs are written in their stead is only a marionette on strings being pulled, toggled and turned to a virtue to be forgotten upon their fading. Art is only obtainable by suffering, not by pure fantasy or ideal, not by networking or collaboration, but by the broken body in the dungeon with only a spec of light invading the darkness. That single being of light causes the mock-artist to scream for others to aid them up; the artist writes of its being in poetry, in prose, in essay, in pamplistic novellas, paint its caricature on the walls. That light is what the artist has to hold on to, more would only expose wounds long before they are ready to be exposed to the thin air, to the awaiting pathogens.
Something awaits to be released in the aura of creativity, a story held from humanity far too long. A story is told behind "Saturn" devouring his child, Eiffel's rise over Paris and the Seine, the Golden Gate and its tomb of fallen steelmasters, the improvisation that iconolized Isadora Duncan and Miles Davis, the longings in the songs of Edith Piaf, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Saisons of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The story is the appalling spectre, the allure of this spectre where one takes upon themselves at the tomb of the fallen before them. The decadence of the artist is the likeness of the decay of their person; the two can only coexists so long before one is led to the plunge of death. Because art is timeless, limitless, finite, its immortalization is predominant as opposed to the human body that eventually, even at the lifelong absence of putrefaction, meets the Hayflick Limit.
I submit that for every Picasso that has lived, so has there been a Fante, for every Hemingway, a Kerouac, for every Fontaine, a Segarre, for every Frost, a Celan, for every Portman there is a Huppert, every Formiga, a Sedgewick. Art advertised only brings more fame, more fortune but art in itself is, it is dispassionate, one study no more suffered than another. The art thief is the only one seems to be getting out of his obsession what he has put it, by stealing art and laundering it through the black market, he makes it accessible to anyone with the currency or inclination to purchase it. By doing so, and only by this, art truly gains value, recognition, mysterious allure. By leaving its mainstream, visual accessibility from the curators aegis, it becomes bygone and in art, more often then not, posthumous recognition follows.
In the pertinence of the absentee father and the derelict mother, the artist is then an artist, for discordancy may hold importance but it must, in the face of the embrace of new ideal, be relinquished without caution. The only descendants of the artist is art itself, the dominant gene that imbues the self-destructive mechanism. This self-destruction is measured only by the activity of the artist. Publish or perish, produce or be reduced; the moment the unknown artist sits idle, they are forgotten, the moment they naively choose to separate themselves from art, they descend into madness and narcissism.
Take the 1904 Opera version of [Madama Butterfly] by Giacomo Puccini that saw the tragic suicide of the heroine "butterfly" at her own hands for the love of a man, Pinkerton. From the beginning, butterfly, a 15 year old Japanese bride married by a lonely American Naval officer newly arrived in Japan, was a convenience until a proper American wife was found. In Japan at that time, a woman could be divorced if she was left-handed so it is not beyond any man's deceit to concoct reasoning for separation. Upon converting to Christianity and marrying Pinkerton, she is disowned by her family. After their wedding, Pinkerton departs for a length of three years. Everyone close to butterfly attempts to convince her that Pinkerton was never again to return, but because of her love, her devotion to him, she continues to wait, still sure of his eventual arrival. His return means more to her than just a wife awaiting a husband but of a mother awaiting the father of her child. Butterfly had become pregnant after their first night together and gave birth to a son while Pinkerton had been away. Butterfly awakes in an impossible position; Pinkerton has returned with his new American wife, Kate, who has agreed to raise the child. Butterfly agrees to give up her child if Pinkerton is to come and see her himself. Recognizing her ancestral gods in prayer, she puts the American flag into the hands of her son, blindfolds him and commits suicide. When Pinkerton runs in, he knows that he is much too late.
[Madama Butterfly] ends tragically, but only in the tragic predisposition. To me, the act of self-murder was the act of beauty, as Juliet for Romeo, as Abelard sacrifice for Heloise. Puccini's contribution was a magnanimous contribution to human glee. By recreating the tale of the greatest sacrifice for love, one's own life, there is a greatness engirdled in the marvel, and at time, tragic coexistence when love is a weak bond creating a carbon copy. Art by the production of Puccini is the sacrifice for love, in the harmonious chord of life, ended by the sword of that same volition to exist but not live.
Art creates the individual, decays the individual, else art decays.
Dontrell Lovet't
from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]
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