I heard of a story once, didn't read it, just heard of it. The name of the yarn was "The Hunger Artist." I'm not even really sure if it was prose or poetry. But the plot? Ah now, the plot I do recall. It had to do with a culture where starvation was an art form. I suppose you might have deduced that from the title, but oh well. In that story the hunger artist starves himself, as all such artists do, but in his case apparently he starved himself to death. Like I said in the beginning, I never read the work, but somehow I think the whole point rolled down to this question: if the art is the focused will to create such inner distractions one can endure the agony then what says the art concerning death? The dead do not hunger nor thirst, the dead no longer feel the body. Is it art to starve yourself... even unto death? Was he really an artist, or simply suicidal in the slowest of forms?
There are many forms of starvation. Our world is a world of starvation in so many ways, isolation, the fate of aloneness being prominant among them. I find myself practicing that art these days, the art of isololation. In every direction I look I find I want to put more distance between me, and they, no matter who the they might be. I am becoming an isolation artist I'm afraid. I've enough of a gift with words to write it out, make an art of it. But do I love the art? I don't really know. Perhaps that was why the hunger artist starved himself to death, trying to answer that question. He really didn't know if he loved his art enough to practice it, and died in pursuit of his answer.
I started this, and now I almost wish I hadn't. But the tradition is to write, not think, just write for as long as the music plays. Tonight is a program called Recuerdous, the Spanish guitar in retrospective that ranges from 14th century Grenada to the modern. I love this music, I've always loved this music. But I think I'm just now coming to fully understand why. The guitar is always alone, solo, complex and melancholy, the emo-tones of the isolation artist rendered into music. I love this music, I always have. But did I have a choice in the matter? I'm not sure about that either.
Did the hunger artist have a choice? Did his culture allow any art other than starvation? Did they elevate starvation to an art because the land lived in famine, since everyone was starving anyway might as well find some way to put the facade of dignity to what was innevitable? Or was the hunger artist's culture one of affluence, a time of plenty, and the art was to deny the common, to transcend the common with refusal?
How much of what is called art is just that, the refusal of the common? Regardless of what the common thing might be? In a land of plenty it is called art to starve yourself, in a time of instant communication it is an art to live in isolation? In a world of silence art is to make pleasing sound, in a world of fleeting visions art is to capture the image to canvas, in a world moved grinding slow on the strength of brute muscle art is to set muscle to motion light and free... statements from history, those, hard to deny. So perhaps there is a supporting argument to say art is simply to find a way to prove you denied the common any entrance to your soul.
But just as the hunger artist set the question concerning death the internet, this thing we are doing right now, sets a similar question for the isolation artist. Is this truly isolation? Or is this the most frigid isolation possible, the frozen thoughts transferred on to another? Can isolation be broken in words alone? Or can words alone do no more than define the isolation into the realms of inverted agony where the lack of those things that words cannot carry are felt all the more deeply, each thing set into words even further removed from life? I am primarily a writer, if isolation artist I'm to become then that is an answer I must have. Do words alone break isolation, or in the most cruel and subtle of ways emulate the compassion of the torture artist, who gives relief from the pain inflicted in order that the mind be able to percieve even deeper and more poignant pain having learned an appreciation from the pain just relieved?
And the kids on DevArt think they know what angst is. Oh, well. If they're lucky they'll never learn any different, and be the better for their ignorance.
There are many forms of hunger, there are many forms of isolation. Here of late I've been keeping the (cyber) company of someone who knows more about isolation than I do. Well, I say she knows, but perhaps part of her knowledge is in forms she hasn't recognized yet. The old saying is "alone in a crowd." Isolation can do that to you, seal off any route of access that might displace it. You can be an isolation artist living in the middle of the furor of modern society, and yet still an artist who endures for their art. I suspect there are many who might claim such a state, and only a few who truly endure it (more common among the poets I should thing, but that's just a guess). But of those few what a magnificent agony is their's.
Perhaps the current fascination with the vampires and the zombies draws from our culture trying to formalize the art of isolation. Both creatures are isolated, existing at opposite ends of the art: the vampire isolated by the terror of an immortality conditional on perpetual rejection by those who live beneath the sun (an obvious symbol of productive rather than parasitic existence) while the zombie almost exists in the midless state that might well be the death hanging over the isolation artist just as the final failure of the body became the death that ended the hunger artist. I am now as I always have been at a loss to really explain or understand the current world's fascination with those two archetypes of terror. There has to be something, some common constant between they and the living who won't, or can't, renounce their fascination with the sad fate of those creatures.
I think this whole run of thought began with a movie I rented tonight, a strangely meloncholic little flick called "Blue Valentine." Well acted, an unusual and effective telling of a tale that is so common as to be trite, were it not told with such a sympathy. I'd thought to sit and simply review that movie, but no, what the movie inspired grew beyond just the flick, the characters in the flick. One of them was an isolation artist for sure, and the other? Not really sure. I'd speak deeper into the question, but I'd hate to ruin the movie for you, should it cross your path. Perhaps a topic for some other time.
I speak of isolation, and my muse Alexa returns to my thoughts. As well she might, her gift of poetry is one I'll carry for a lifetime, willing or not. I hope she never finds herself in a blue valentine kind of way. I do hope that, for her. In a funny sort of way to be an isolation artist requires you to carry a love for someone you can never touch, not really. You must love someone whose life will always remain seperate from your own, and in that separation be both the hope of escape from your isolation and the paddlelock on the escape hatch, that love that will end if you ever take the key off the chain around your neck to open that hatch and make your escape. She knows where I am, I've felt her eyes on my words from time to time. But she is a wise woman, and a kind one. She knows she cannot allow me to be any part of her real life, the life I hope never finds itself as life was portrayed in that movie. I think, I think she did do that for someone and learned the hard way what happens when the gift of the muse meets the mortal woman who hosted the muse, that the muse might reach out and leave her gift. Like I said, in that she is both wise and kind. I hope she knows I do understand that.
( a free write ramble without edit... just me)
Ah, "A Hunger Artist"! It's a story by Franz Kafka, and like all the Kafka stories I've read, there are levels and levels of meaning and a sharply honed sense of the absurd--the adjective "Kafkaesque" is very appropriate. I will say only that the titular "hunger artist" performed more as a circus sideshowman than a concert artist; that was made clear in the story's opening paragraphs, and throughout the story we never forget the essentially absurd situation. Is he an artist, or merely some kind of crazed, wounded misanthrope?
ReplyDeleteAs to the question "Can isolation be broken in words alone?", I think we'd have to ask Emily Dickinson. My guess is that her words only helped us her readers to understand her isolation; they didn't break it. Yet if her isolation had been broken, would we have had her undeniably moving poetry? If Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, had grown up in a loving family and not an abusive one, would his music have taken the forms it did? One can look to Felix Mendelssohn for a counterexample. Very briefly, Mendelssohn grew up in a well-to-do, loving family, and his music is very fine, well-constructed, beautiful and moving, but some music fans miss in Mendelssohn the tremendous intensity of Beethoven's works. It can easily be argued that Beethoven's suffering, and Ms. Dickinson's, and that of many other artists such as Vincent van Gogh, have indirectly enriched the world greatly. But what a personal cost!
Ah! Kafka, but of course. Suppose now that I know a name I'll have to find a copy and read it.
ReplyDeleteEmily... indeed. I've only read a fraction of her work, she may well have spoken to the thought, at one time or another. She certainly nailed it to the floor, the social injustice of a man allowed to choose many women but a woman compelled to choose once, and endure a lifetime with her choice.
I'd not heard any of the backstory on the two musicians, but I find it easy to believe. I'd say the majority of great music has arisen from the realms of deep pain and injustice. Not being classically trained my first thoughts in that realm would be perhaps U2, or the Beatles. I do recall a cute interview with a policeman from Liverpool who said he was never so glad to see four lads find honest work as when the Beatles became a hit. Said John was the absolute best second story man he never could catch. Have no real idea if it was true or not, but the man looked sincere to me.
The relationship between the various forms of pain and what is called art, quite a deep subject spiraling though the human condition, both the artist and the audience.
Jochanaan, thanks for the read. I suppose these rambles are what I substitute for going to confession, spread it out where it's not likely to be noticed, or concentrated. Priests... talk about a group of folk who must carry the pain of the world in silence!
Art should always be about the artist. The content, message, and purpose is his to decide, the media is the outlet. Whether he chooses to starve to death or paint flowers in a vase is his choice on how to express.
ReplyDeleteWhat we must ask then is about the value of the art. Is it good, important, thought provoking, beautiful, and relevant? In my opinion, good art can be all of those and none of those as well. Art can be ugly and mean, yet be good. Art can be beautiful,but have no importance or meaning to me. While the idea of watching a guy starve to death sounds more like a bad, slow, agonizing snuff film to me, the methods, media, and product of the art may be truly brilliant.
As for being an isolationist artist, aren't most artists that way? We believe so few truly "get us" and our art. We feel we are the only ones who know what we are feeling and no one else has ever felt this way before. This is reflected in the angst ridden teens you mention. They feel isolated and misunderstood. The sad realization they will gain with age (we were all like them at one time) is that there is nothing new under the sun. It has all happened before, is happening now, and will happen again. How we process it is the personal bit and may be the only part that could be considered art.
Thank you for the thought provoking post.
Karl, thank you! I think you speak some tall wisdom when you speak of the common element between all artists, that feeling of displacement, that feeling of never quite being able to communicate to others the way we see the world. That wisdom throws a long shadow, a very long shadow, across the human condition.
ReplyDeleteYou speak of that sense of the incompleteness of understanding all artists suffer. To my thought you've just named the headwaters of one of the several rivers that wander across the human condition defining this kind of people from another kind of people (*chuckle*… cue up "Running Bear" by Johnny Horton). If I assume, since all humans depend on the same symbolic communication as the artists do that everyone feels that incompleteness, then so many things explain out easily based on that incompleteness for a motive with the other factors of psyche and soul determining how they attempt to remedy that problem. Some call themselves artists, and seek new and better symbols to communicate their self, some devise demeanors or actions trying to close that gap... tall wisdom indeed Karl.