My
own young life as it was, was interrupted, when I picked a book from
the stand in a little store attached to a bus station in Niagara Falls.
I was 11. The book was Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.
Bradbury’s stories of Martian colonists, in his poetic prose, were, for me, a rocket ship into Art.
Six
years later, when I was about to go off to college, I decided I would
be a writer. Here I am, 68 years later, still doing it.
There is no practical argument that can be made for Art. No talk about money, or survival.
Art makes other dimensions. None of them would exist, if it weren’t for artists. None of them are “already there.”
This fact apparently troubles people. They want what is already there.
They see no value in creating other spaces and times.
I
see the capacity to create those other spaces as stunning. More
stunning than winning in the stock market and buying a big house with
the proceeds.
For
instance, Herman Melville can take me on a rousing sea voyage that
never happened. And on that voyage, he can weave a tragic vision of
existence I don’t happen to agree with—and yet that doesn’t matter at
all. In part, because I know he’s inventing everything on the page. And
he could have invented something else.
This
is another fact about art. The artist could have invented something
else. In what other realm of life do you find that feeling: what is
happening now could be completely different.
This is a unique and unprecedented sense of freedom.
It’s not an organized church where the Art is presented as doctrine.
Think
of the will and courage of the novelist. He is willing to spend years
writing a story he knows is not-real in the sense of reality to which
people are inextricably attached.
He is doing Something Else.
Nothing in this world stops him.
The reality addicts don’t stop him.
You’ve
heard all the claims indicating that if you imagine/visualize
something, it’ll happen. Well, the artist knows that because he actually
imagines and creates that something. He doesn’t just form a brief
picture in his mind. He isn’t waiting. He’s working.
Art
tells you that this reality we live in every day is just one version of
Possibility. That, of course, is too much for most people. They can’t
handle it. They don’t want to.
When
Orson Welles was 24, he managed to extract enough money from a studio
to make Citizen Kane. He was unleashed. He took the opportunity to
invent a kind of film nobody had ever seen. He had zero interest in
giving people what they wanted.
Which
is another fact people have trouble with. “He’s not catering to my
needs? He’s not calculating according to my point of view? He’s not
showing me what I already know? Then what good is he?”
Yet,
the same people will accept the most fabulous stories about UFOs, if
they believe the stories are grounded in fact. “I’m willing to be
astonished if you really have those crashed ships in hangars.”...
No comments:
Post a Comment