CHECKPOINT CHARLIE: THE FORBIDDEN ZONE: MEDITATIONS 32

[ click on images ] on the creative p

"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon."

Jorge Luis Borges , The Wall and the Books

"He who does his own work well will find that his first lesson is to know what he is and that which is proper to himself. And he who understands himself will never mistake another man's work for his own, but will recognize the value of his own work as being the appropriate outcome of his temperament and his needs."

Bushido

"When an artist, for the purpose of embellishing nature, adds green to the springtime, rose to the dawn, red to young lips, he creates ugliness because he lies. When he softens the grimace of pain, the flabbiness of old age, the hideousness of the perverse; when he arranges nature, when he veils her, disguises her; when he softens her in order to please an ignorant public, he creates ugliness because he is afraid of the truth."

Francois Auguste Rene Rodin

"I found the answer [to how and what to paint] when I joined a school of painters in Paris after the war who called themselves neomeditationists... They believed an artist had to wait for inspiration, very quietly, and did most of their waiting at the Cafe du Dome or the Rotonde with brandy. It was then that I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa."

Grant Wood

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth In something that all others understand or share; But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth A company of friends, a conscience set at ease, It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy, The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, Suffice the aging man as once the growing boy.

W.B. Yeats, from Meditations In a Time of Civil War

"...imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords."

Mary Wollstonecraft

In his book The White Goddess Robert Graves argues that the ancient Indo-European Goddess, in her many guises, was in fact The Muse. Call her Diana, Artemis, Brigit, The Triple Goddess, The Three Fates, Rhiannon, Inky or whatever, but it was She who bestowed the magical gift of poetic inspiration. It was She who was (or is) the spirit of imagination. Graves goes on to suggest that The Muse's "magical" inspiration was what distinguished the true poet [artist] from the gleeman (that is, someone merely entertaining or technically proficient).

"The imagination without reason brings forth impossible monsters, but joined to it, it is the mother of the arts, and the source of marvels."

Goya ?

"The wise artist puts The Divine into things."

Old Nahuatl saying

"Everything on earth is beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity."

Anton Chekhov

"The experiences with the Creative Energy and its impact in our lives can be expressed through painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, writing, story-telling, dance, cooking or whatever we are good at. This is the foundation of the Sacred Arts in all cultures of the world.
The ability to communicate experiences in the path toward higher consciousness is another way that we generate benefit through teaching. Often all that remains of a great civilization of the past are just a few temple walls and a few sculptures testament to the spiritual attainment of that culture. Notice that the Sacred Arts are the most abundant remains from ancient cultures we have in our museums.
Through the Sacred Arts we give expression to our finest experiences in order to transmit the essence of such experience directly into the unconscious of the receptive. It is a way of nourishing the tradition that has brought us thus far and inspiring others to develop their excellence. It is also a way of expressing Creative Energy and its centering power. When the energy of spirit is strong everything said or done is a form of Sacred Art."

Juan Li

"...creation hinges on being well-fucked-up."

Joe Strummer

"It doesn't matter how a thing starts off, what matters is paying attention to where the ideas are leading you. Because when you think you're leading them, that's when you get into trouble.

"If I knew everything, I'd start getting bored. When you live with a solution for too long-- well, it's a mess.

"You have to solve the mystery and still leave room to dream."

"Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow. "

David Lynch

"I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak. I am looking forward to its consummation, certain that I shall never share in it, but death would matter little to me could I but taste the joy it will yield ultimately."

André Breton, What is Surrealism?

"Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody will say like 'plate' or 'shrimp' or 'plate of shrimp', out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one either; it's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness."

Miller (Alex Cox) , Repoman

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its one sure defense."

"The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible. "

Mark Twain

"A real artist does not talk about his self-expression, he is expressing that which he intensely feels; but there are so many spurious artists, like the spurious spiritual people, who are all the time seeking self-expression as a means of getting something, some satisfaction which they cannot find in the conditions in which they live. Whereas for the true artist, who is also truly spiritual, there is spontaneous expression, which in itself is sufficient, complete, whole."

Jiddu Krishnamurti, What Are You Seeking? (Total Freedom)

"As creatures of the natural order humans cannot escape the palette of subjective resources they have been endowed with: ultimately we think as we have habituated ourselves to live. Kafka's Amerika offered the notion that anyone could be an artist as the apparent singular lunacy of the New World; for in order to be an artist, poet, author or musician, one first has to live a life ordained to the end of creativity. Most cannot stand such discipline or self-sacrifice, and cannot comprehend how deeper than ordinary verbiage and opinion are the principles on which spiritual creation draws. In the modern culture of licentiousness, no shame accrues to the shallowpate who wants to paint or write in ways that only rearrange the surface detritus of the cultural world: such is the "art" of the mechanical mentality. The universalist or egalitarian perspective on talent is as archetypically modern as the nouveau-academic contempt for genius. A culture whose gospel is slavish mediocritism is conducting psychological class-warfare against depth, spirit, philosophy, genius, aristocratic ethos and authentic values– just as Nietzche realized. Reputation, image, is all; art is swallowed whole by a culture that values nothing but extrinsics."

Ken Smith, End Times (The Comics Journal , #215-221

“Bladerunner got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, but it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid money-grubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized elite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.”

Adam Gopnik

“My roots are in a genre. That is the funny thing. Novels are called novels because, ideally, they provide a novel experience. But in genre, you're sort of buying a guarantee that you are going to have essentially the same experience again and again. It's a novel. It won't be too novel. Don't worry."

William Gibson

"We have entered a new Middle Ages, a time of plague, famine, violence, extreme class disparity, and religious fanaticism,... a time when it is terribly important, and often dangerous, to preserve values and knowledge– to stand up for visions that most of this crazed world can't comprehend or tolerate. The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as it's broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time– preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build again when this chaos exhausts itself. People who assume the burdens of their own integrity are free– because integrity is freedom, and its force can't be quelled even when a person of integrity is jailed. The future lives in our individual, often lonely, an certainly unprofitable acts of integrity, or it doesn't live at all."

Michael Ventura

"When we come to the cultural and artistic parallels the scene proves far more complex. On one hand we find the fairly perfect correspondence between the two ages that, in different ways but with identical educational utopias and with equal ideological camouflage of their paternalistic aim to control minds, try to bridge the gap between learned culture and popular culture through visual communication. In both periods the select elite debates written texts with alphabetic mentality, but then translates into images the essential data or knowledge and the fundamental structure of the ruling ideology. The Middle Ages are the civilization of vision, where the cathedral is the great book in stone, and is indeed the advertisement, the TV screen, the mystic comic strip that must narrate and explain everything, the nations of the earth, the arts and crafts, the seasons of sowing and reaping, the mysteries of faith, the episodes of sacred and profane history, and the lives of the saints (great models of behavior, as superstars and pop singers are today, an elite without political power, but with great charismatic power)."

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality

"Beliefs can be powerful servants, but they make terrifying masters."

Mai Tzu , Unidentified Proverbs

"The Wasteland is a place where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing what they're told, with no courage for their own lives. In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing. The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that carries itself between pairs of opposites (good and evil, light and dark and etc.)."

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (referring to T.S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland )

"When art is not the product of genuine inspiration, but merely comes from an egocentric, formulaic or theoretical approach, it lacks grace (in the deepest sense of the word). This is also true of a person who devotes himself to creating form for its own sake, with out regard to its function. Another abuse of creativity's inherent grace occurs when cultural authorities use beautiful form to make falsehoods more attractive to people through the use of art (as in advertising, mythology and propaganda; commerce, religion and governance). Emphasizing form over content makes it a destructive thing. The artist who engages in this kind of creative work not only degrades himself, but he also perpetuates the degradation of others."

"The Book of Transformation" ( I Ching ) as restored by Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog [paraphrased]

"The Artist's function is the mythologization of the environment & the world."

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

There is a "tradition" artists (and audiences) can follow, but it's rather subtle and seems to defy easy formulation. It can't easily be packaged as a commodity. It's rarely fashionable. It's a subtle business of intuiting artworks for their authenticity– for their integrity. This is not just a question of whether or not the artist actually created the work and did so without directly plagiarizing anyone else (originality is relative). It's a very tricky matter of discerning an authentic voice or vision. And this sort of authenticity is often quite hard to know or sense, either in one's own work or in others'. We humans are such good fakers; often even faking ourselves out. The point is: art (of any kind or any message) that doesn't arise as a sincere expression of its creator is more properly called artifice. Can any would-be artist believe otherwise without engaging in self-deceptive rationalizations?

"When did you grow up and get like this? You throw your ideals out the window. And one by one the years made me see, what I thought was hard work was nothing but a mockery."

The Brothers Kendall, The Unbelievable Truth

"We should remember that it is easy and foolish to sneer at the mistakes or barbarities of remote ages."

Hermann Hesse

"It's perhaps predictable that younger artists and writers stake out their plots on over-farmed ground, working only the smallest variations on what has proven to sell with the least effort. Lacking a driving personal vision, lacking a critical tradition, they would naturally follow the winds of the market."

"The effect of centralization has been to drive out innovation and personal vision. The people working for the mainstream companies today are mostly what I would call, without derogation, hacks: people who do more or less good work in the prevailing style of their times. It is not their fault that their times have failed them by providing no strong tradition in their craft, no clear set of goals or standards. Hacks working well can provide enjoyable diversion. But they are not artists, and their work will not last out their times."

Carter Scholz, preface to Love & Rockets: Music For Mechanics*(compilation #1, Fantagraphics)