The thing which affects artists more acutely than regular people is how greatly they feel the weight of loneliness. This weight is so tyrannical that they seek out many ways to shed it, mainly through their creative impulse. But it is a process which never succeeds, for, apart from the momentary orgiastic feeling in the moment that art is expressed and in which the artist jumps out of himself, the loneliness returns. Art and artistic expression deepen the feeling of loneliness through time, but it is not a loneliness which severs and isolates the artist from his or her surrounding, on the contrary, it enables a greater and more intense and attentive form of relationship with nature and life. Loneliness is a weight that constructs painfully through many many years, but it strips to the bones and makes the artist shine in the light of their truth. Blessed are the lonely who turn their loneliness into art.
Tag: wandering thought
Wandering Thought # 113
I write because the words open my heart to something greater than I am. I write because, being open, I am transformed through the grace of the other. I write as a form of communion, with the world, with the sacred, with love. I write as a poet; I write as a lover.
Love is a form of communion, that would not be possible without this stepping outside of our social roles, this intimate knowing and being known, this raw offering to the other, bare to the bones, this being seen in one’s soul, which fills us with harmony and light, giving us a deep sense of belonging, and giving us back to the world — as what? — as a divine fragment, as something transformed.
Wandering Thought # 112
Scientism takes off after communism and traditional religions in that it would like to construct a perfect and ideal world, comprehensible down to its last detail, which light would shine with the new, atheistic religion, albeit still clad in age old morality.
Wandering Thought # 111
The person who is spiritually inclined will find himself drifting away from every day practical matters and the concerns and aspirations of normal society. Thus, in time, the language he uses will no long be sufficient to form a common understanding. He will drift on, as though in a cloud of solitude, but he will be connected to something else, something more inward and less tangible, and also something that cannot be shown to others who would demand a justification for his way of existence. This basic rift has since eternal times marked the existence of the artist, poet, philosopher, shaman and saint separating them from the practical and society oriented folks. This is still at work today in such kind of people, but not without a feeling of guilt more acute than before. When in previous ages this spiritual bent and way of life may have been justified, or even seen as a privilege, today, and under the guise of psychology and capitalism, it is looked upon with a wary eye, and the person labeled as psychologically and economically unsound.
Wandering Thought # 110
The moments and experiences that turn into memories and persist within us are always the ones that carry an emotional weight. The rest of the things we go through we do not remember or recall. So our memory and recollection of the world is always subjective, reflecting ourselves and set of emotions and being in that particular moment, the person we were at the time. But, also, the memory which persists within us is not a finished memory or a static image; it changes within us as we change, for the memory itself is always grasped and viewed through the prism of emotions and thought, our growth and maturity, which are ever shifting.
It is not always the experience we go through which creates the memory within us, the opposite can also be true. Some emotions can be so intense that they generate a set of images and feelings that acquire the hue and shape of reality and thus persist within us, becoming more real than reality itself. That is how artists, in particular, grasp the world. But what is true for the artist is also true for the “normal” person. Memory and image making are no passive activity but a creative process that goes down to the very roots of our being and idea of the world. The person is both generator and creator, grasping reality not as a fait-accompli, but always creating it out if the prime material the world and our situation within it provides. In the truest sense, “we are the poets of our lives.”
Wandering Thought # 100
The years move on, and the things which seemed so important become trivial; time and loss have a way of distilling life to its essence. The years move on, what remains now are the simple things that were there all along, waiting in the quiet. The years move on, and we start making friends with our own disappearance; how well can we dance the dance before saying goodbye?
Wandering Thought #98
All poets are fools; they love the world more than it deserves to be loved, and when it hurts them they bless it. All poets are fools; they inscribe their holy verse in a woman’s body, and turn her into mist and light. All poets are fools; they are meant to suffer, and enter a place of light. All poets are fools, they bless what hurts them, and love with a passion that rivals the sun. All poets are fools; blessed are the poets.
Wandering Thought# 91
What is a poet?—a poem that plays hide and seek with itself; a poem that needs long walks in the sun and rain for it to find itself; a poem that takes a great deal of time to decipher the light in its darkness; a poem that is wasteful with much of its life for it to experience a few precious moments; a poem akin to an open wound, aching and pouring. A poet is a man without a face, standing in the crowd, in his heart feeling and recording everything. A poet is a sky buried in a man, filled with endless distances. A poet is a failed attempt. A poet is an unreachable man. A poet is not ink but life made invisible. A poet is no one. A poet is.
Wandering Thought # 50
The invention of aviation was not a utilitarian invention. Reading through its history one realizes that its root and outgrowth came the human imagination, from an irrational fixation on the reveries where man saw himself flying, felt himself in flight, and so ached to achieve flying that from the profundity of a love that persisted through millennia he was finally able to materialize his dream.
In the end, much of our modern inventions with which we pride ourselves owe themselves to this — poetry and witchcraft, the ability to imagine new things, impossible things. For all his rationality, man, more than he knows, will always be close to the poet’s heart — his passions, which are inescapable, will make sure of this.
