I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
To be an artist, and to let the power of the universe flow through you, sometimes you need to go into hiding. You need to ignore the rest of the world and what it might think. You need to create art that is not for sharing, art that is only for you, or only what wants to be channeled through you.
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde shares thoughts from poet Allen Ginsberg on writing only for yourself:
The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal … That was something I learned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing … The cure for that is to write things down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. To write secretly … so you can actually be free to say anything you want …
It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless—abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind … You really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself …, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.
I’ve started painting only for myself, without thought of what show I might apply to or how I might make my art marketable. I am “settling down in the muck of [my] own mind.”
I’ve been painting only what my self wants to see painted. But it’s not really my self. It’s something beyond my self, something that transcends my self.
Hyde writes:
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting by creating within ourselves that “begging bowl” to which the gift is drawn.
I feel suddenly freed to create art again now that I gave up on art as achievement and decided I am only making art for myself, and secondarily those close to me. I’m not applying for shows or writing newsletter articles featuring my latest artwork or thinking about how to present my art online in a way that it might sell.
My writing, for a long time, has only been for myself. I am not exactly writing secretly, as Ginsberg recommends, but I am writing privately and if people should come across this blog and enjoy it or people who know me know about it and want to read it, that’s fine, but that’s not its purpose. Its purpose is to channel ideas and thinking and reflecting. Its purpose is to allow me to not just play around in the muck of my mind but to grow flowers in that muddy water.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to share my writing or my paintings or other things I create. I do. But starting with sharing or selling in mind compromises the ability to create what is true and what wants creating vs what I think the world might be interested in.