On Beginnings

Yesterday was book-ended with two experiences which mirrored one another, in a way. As I was making tea and toast in the kitchen in Bonita Hollow, Wendi walked in to begin her own morning routine. She and I often meet up like this and take the opportunity to compare notes on our respective lives, mainly centered around our creative and professional endeavors. We are regularly equally flabbergasted at the pressures and challenges that come with trying to incorporate our imaginations into any sort of gainful employment. Happily, we've both had some success at it, but this seems only to highlight a corresponding poverty, materially, and our conversation about it is often punctuated by sufficiently dark humor. (Perhaps this is the recourse of those with Germanic blood.)

This morning as she walked in I must have been looking particularly "creative," as her response to our exchange of greetings and my pointing out of the fresh-from-the-dentist Tilly (No cavities!) and a mention of the bill for her and Cheese's vet checkups -- $589.05 + $606.15 = $1195.20, or two weeks of pay, pretax -- was to point at me with a look of amused recognition and exclaim, "You're crazy!" We just laughed and laughed. I haven't had a good, freeing laugh like that in a long time.

So that was the opener. That evening around 8:30 or so, when I was finally prying myself away from my desk at Castle in the Air, I was also watching a bit of Alan Moore on the You Tube, as I am occasionally wont to do. I was trying to find his interview, an old one, from when he was just first enjoying some fame and fortune, in which he concluded with an insightful, incisive comment about his unkempt hair. I want to find the quote for use in an upcoming book project, as it has to do with Ego and artistry. I couldn't find it, but I did find his Mindscapes series and was clicking through the first twenty minutes or so when he began talking about his career shift from working with literal filth to deciding and following through on making writing his full-time career:

I was expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the mess room, which really wasn't improving my career curve any. The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.

[Closeup on Moore's hand placing The Fool card from Aleister Crowley's Tarot deck on the table.]

Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk. It was a fool's leap, a shot in the dark. But anything of any value in our lives, whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap. And in order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely purely without fear, without desire. Because things we do without lust of result are the purest actions that we shall ever take.

Hearing this lit a spark of recognition in my mind, one which flashed its momentary brilliance on the bugbear of both doubt and desire lurking in my semi-consciousness. Yes, obviously I am crazy, yes obviously I am a complete fool for embarking on this journey. And therein lies both the reason for going and the means of making it. "Without fear, without desire." I'm reminded not so much of the initial move to California, which was one filled incredibly full with hope, desire, and a sense of possibility, but of my entering into the teacher training, which was a handing over of absolutely every part of myself for remodeling -- my time, my health, my worldview, my fortune. I did it with a feeling of assisted flight, really. It felt like flying and being held by a flying being at the same time. An angel, one could say. In the grasp of an angel one might feel fear or expectation, but my memory of it at the time was one of relief, of curiosity, of as much openness as I'd ever mustered in my life. Overwhelmingly it was a feeling of trust. Trust in all that was outside me to guide and carry me onward. In the end I believe that trust was rewarded, not in any recompense for the time and money, but in a better understanding of myself. I'm better off in so many ways than I was before, and although I sometimes wonder what life would have been like had I never undergone my reduction to ash and my resulting reconfiguration, I don't ever wish that none of the journey happened. Speaking from a place of Ego, I like what's become of me and I like where I am. This next step is a fool's leap into dangerous territory emotionally, financially, spiritually, artistically, physically, and in other ways too, I'm sure. Taking this step, this leap is the only way to find out what happens next. It is curiosity which guides us, and our sense of humor which protects us, which cushions the fall and, during our moments of greater levity, shields us from the light and heat of the sun.

All of this resonates with me quite strongly these days not only for its relevance to my particular situation but to the thoughts and readings I've been processing as regards The Artistic Life. Before I began writing this morning I found William Kiesel's notes on the Frankfurt Book Fair in which he wrote:

...another discovery I made was that there just is not that much going on at the Frankfurt Book Fair which fits into our approach to Esoteric Publishing. As a consequence of this the number of catalogues I passed out was shamefully lower than I had hoped, though many of the folks who did receive them were impressed by them. By day's end I was exhausted and made my way back to the home where I was staying, where I fell down on the bed fast asleep.

William has, in writing this, described a moderate initiation experience into the realm between Art and Commerce so many of us find ourselves inhabiting, especially as we gain recognition for our work. There won't be much for the book artist at Frankfurt's major commercial fair, no, because it is a conference for the book salesman. How the artist responds to this realization makes absolutely all the difference. They can throw up their hands and decry all of Western civilization. "If this is the absolute best that the book world can offer, then I want no part of it!" And maybe they don't. If the artist is secure enough in himself and his own work he will continue on with it, compelled by the same forces which brought him to where he is today. If he isn't, he might quit books altogether, or shift his art to a new vantage point, one which will "sell more books, move more units." The work of the artist is not to "move units." The artist is indeed attempting to instigate motion with his work, but "units" are not what he is attempting to move. That is the work of the salesman, the merchant. An artist who desires to make a living off something akin, remotely, to his own individualistic self-expression is in a better position than the lifelong merchant, for whom learning to be an artist is a more difficult prospect than the journey from artist to businessman. To do either has to do with shifting something inside ourselves.

With a great enough sense of self, though, none of it matters. Even an artist with "a career" defined more or less by his art is someone driven by assignment, by contract. This is how the money moves from those who have it to those who don't, each party providing something in exchange. Whether the exchange is thought of as equitable is for them to decide. Honestly, though, art is unquantifiable, incalculable by definition. People and their imaginations are not numbers. The Fool's card is not numbered one. It is numbered zero. We are all of us fools. We are fools to think we can be anything but fools. We are fools for trying, fools for failing to try, fools for choosing art, choosing money, choosing love. But we are all of us fools. In Pamela Colman's famous deck, there is a reason his head is thrown back in revelation and gobsmacked ecstasy.