Youth
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion. Poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality. But only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things - T.S. Eliot
On a more cheerful note, I finished J. M. Coetzee's Youth. It's very easy to project onto that and be as horrified by the discovery, because one does, does so, realise how absolutely indulgent the narrative is. Axioms (or truisms, if you preferred) believed by artists (including yours truly) become laughable (instantly and insanely so) when they pour softly and earnestly from the book.
For he will be an artist, that has long been settled. If the time being he must be obscure and ridiculous, that is because it is the lot of the artist to suffer obscurity and ridicule until the day he is revealed in his true powers and the scoffers and mockers fall silent.
Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he believes.
And of course - The Plan, before baptism, manifested in only one of its variants:
While perfecting his poetric skills abroad he will earn a living doing something obscure and respectable. Since great artists are fated to go unrecognised for a while, he imagines he will serve out his probationary years as a clerk humbly adding up columns of figures in a back room.
But The Plan, upon implementation, doesn't quite work out as expected. Protagonist has a programming job at IBM, decent, mind you, but he is exhausted all the time. His dedication to his craft is still admirably there but art is abandoning him:
He no longer seems to have it in him to produce poetry of the kind he wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, pieces sometimes pages long, rambling, clumsy in parts, but daring nevertheless, full of novelties. Those poems, or most of them, came out of a state of anguished being-in-love, as well as out of the torrents he was reading. Now four years later, he is still anguished, but his anguish has become habitual, even chronic, like a headache that will not go aways. Whatever their nominal subject, it is he himself - trapped, lonely, miserable - who is at their centre; yet - he cannot fail to see it - these new poems lack the energy or even the desire to explore his impasse of spirit.
And viola, deja vu:
He has lists of words and phrases he has stored up, mundane or recondite, waiting to find homes for them. Perfervid, for instance: one day he will lodge perfervid in an epigram whose occult history will be that it will have been created as a setting for a single word, as a brooch can be a setting for a single jewel. The poem will seem to be about love or despair, yet it will all have blossomed out of one lovely-sounding word of whose meaning he is as yet not entirely sure.
Not a very elegant ending, and a most dissatisfactory one. But it will do for now, for me. Familiar story but we all have different endings, is that not so.
On a more cheerful note, I finished J. M. Coetzee's Youth. It's very easy to project onto that and be as horrified by the discovery, because one does, does so, realise how absolutely indulgent the narrative is. Axioms (or truisms, if you preferred) believed by artists (including yours truly) become laughable (instantly and insanely so) when they pour softly and earnestly from the book.
For he will be an artist, that has long been settled. If the time being he must be obscure and ridiculous, that is because it is the lot of the artist to suffer obscurity and ridicule until the day he is revealed in his true powers and the scoffers and mockers fall silent.
Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he believes.
And of course - The Plan, before baptism, manifested in only one of its variants:
While perfecting his poetric skills abroad he will earn a living doing something obscure and respectable. Since great artists are fated to go unrecognised for a while, he imagines he will serve out his probationary years as a clerk humbly adding up columns of figures in a back room.
But The Plan, upon implementation, doesn't quite work out as expected. Protagonist has a programming job at IBM, decent, mind you, but he is exhausted all the time. His dedication to his craft is still admirably there but art is abandoning him:
He no longer seems to have it in him to produce poetry of the kind he wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, pieces sometimes pages long, rambling, clumsy in parts, but daring nevertheless, full of novelties. Those poems, or most of them, came out of a state of anguished being-in-love, as well as out of the torrents he was reading. Now four years later, he is still anguished, but his anguish has become habitual, even chronic, like a headache that will not go aways. Whatever their nominal subject, it is he himself - trapped, lonely, miserable - who is at their centre; yet - he cannot fail to see it - these new poems lack the energy or even the desire to explore his impasse of spirit.
And viola, deja vu:
He has lists of words and phrases he has stored up, mundane or recondite, waiting to find homes for them. Perfervid, for instance: one day he will lodge perfervid in an epigram whose occult history will be that it will have been created as a setting for a single word, as a brooch can be a setting for a single jewel. The poem will seem to be about love or despair, yet it will all have blossomed out of one lovely-sounding word of whose meaning he is as yet not entirely sure.
Not a very elegant ending, and a most dissatisfactory one. But it will do for now, for me. Familiar story but we all have different endings, is that not so.
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