Lest We Forget;

My need to get better is unrelenting, and rightfully so. This world is unforgiving to those who are inept. I struggle to be myself in a world that prides itself in making me someone else. I want to be brilliant; I want to be great. To be great in a world full of greats is to be different, and to be different in a world full of fluid likeness is to be difficult— to be impossible to control, to be so far away from rein and order that the mere thought of keeping your feet on the ground scares you into tears.

My words are no longer an extension of myself. What I say is no longer what my brain wants me to. The thoughts that form in my head no longer belong to me, and all the dreams I have of greater lives and wasted pasts are not real. My words exist for themselves on a page, and my thoughts listen only to my other thoughts.

I am difficult— so fucking difficult. I am insecure and neurotic. I need not courage, and fear even less. What I want is to be difficult beyond reason, to be impossible to rein, to be chaotic to the point of destruction.

The words that are jumping on this page are mere patterns of alphabets and punctuations and spaces. There is no wisdom, no creativity, no train of thought. There is only a pattern of alphabets and punctuations and spaces. Patterns that have yet to be understood. Patterns that will one day form an algorithm that defines all of creative art.

I want to be difficult, so that I may forever avoid the grinding strength of the world.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And I knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
            Open to me!
I will show you the places Nobody knows,
            And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

— e e cummings, You Are Tired (I Think).

Agony; noun.

1. Extreme and generally prolonged pain; intense physical or mental suffering.

2. A display or outburst of intense mental or emotional excitement.

3. The struggle preceding natural death. 

4. A violent struggle.

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

— Sylvia Plath, Sheep in Fog.

   ”He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waiting for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.”

— James Joyce, A Painful Case. 

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest achievement.”  
— Ralph Waldo Emerson.  

All art is fundamentally narcissistic— and necessarily so. I’ve been thinking about spoken word poetry, and about how it needs an audience to exist. Of course, there’s always the penning down of poetry written for the oral tradition, or audio recordings of the said works, but nevertheless one cannot help but agree that, ultimately, spoken word poetry is written to, well, be spoken. 

The narcissism in spoken word poetry is blatant— something about baring part of one’s soul to the ever judgmental, ever scrutinizing eye of the world. Something about poetry being a form of catharsis for the soul, a form of release from one’s inner world, and how that seems to contradict the public nature of art. Other art forms aren’t spared from such labels, too— music, novels, paintings and media installations— all art is a baring of oneself for the world, and ironically so, keeping in mind art’s personal function as a form of catharsis for the soul. 

It begets the next question, then— is art created for the artist, or for the audience? Do we write for ourselves, or for others? Do we write music that only we can relate to, or do keep our listeners in mind, and write for them instead? Does it negate the purpose of art, then, to write for others? 

Art for the sake of commercial success seems contradictory to me. Yet, it is conventionally labeled as a true indicator of one’s ability as an artist, how you can only truly be great if your art captures the attention of the masses and impacts the lives around you. 

That’s understandable, though— it’s easy to dilute the worth of art, the same way it’s easy to create art, as long as you blur the lines of what good art is (or negate the need to label art as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the first place).

It can also be suggested that art’s purpose is in transcendentalism, but that just opens a whole other can of worms that might (will) take a whole lifetime of introspection to come to terms with. I’d suggest the same thing, that true art transgresses the world around us, if it didn’t mean that I’d wind up eating board nails and chewing on wood for the rest of my life in a tin shack somewhere. If transcendentalism in it’s purest form is art, then I don’t think I’d be wrong in saying that not many ‘artists’, then, are true creators of art. 

Ultimately, it’s a cyclical argument that has no end. I’d be happy creating art for myself, but it’s nice to know that people like what they see/hear. I’d be comforted with the catharsis of my soul in the form of words or music, but somehow discomforted with judgement and scrutiny. I’d be glad, maybe, to see the world feasting on everything I have bared, their leering eyes consuming every part of my being that no longer is. It’s not wrong then, maybe, to call art an extension of ‘narcissistic me’. 

“I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness— blackness
     and silence.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Moon and the Yew Tree.