An Artist is Never Poor, January 1994
In the French film Babette’s Feast, Babette is asked how she will manage after revealing she has spent all her winnings from the lottery. “An artist is never poor,” she says. I am always deeply moved by that, as I am by the spirituality of the entire film which argues that spiritual impoverishment is worse than hunger.As the New year begins, I am resolute that this coming year I will be less spiritually impoverished than 1993. I choose to be more awake, more aware, much more alive and less asleep than I have ever been. I do not measure my life in years, although Western culture pesters me into doing so. The cycles I choose to hang my kite-tail to are the oceanic, billowing clouds that wave throughout the universe, for I am but part of the spume they have cosmically deposited on this beach — Earth. It is time we need to grasp vast canyons of it, grand canyons of motion moving to all coordinates. To devote the New Year to mere materials things is to nod off in 1994
As I age I see less, but what I see is clearer. The past is more settled now — I can find my way back home. The future is still a crap shoot; I’ll stick with my 401K. it is, however, in the present that I dig in my heels and try, although I fail so often, to stay awake, to taste ravishingly of the moment. And it is a difficult task to taste ravishingly of the moment. And it is a difficult task not to doze off as all the new years turn into decades and they, in turn, into generations. It is not a rehearsal we have on Earth; it is a neuralgia of being. Some of us experience a sciatica of the self — and, at least, we can say “An artist is never poor.” Some of us are asleep in life. And why not? How much of life is wasted and discarded before we have a Moses or a Michelango?
I reserve the right this New Year to continue my lifelong efforts to remain open and not closed, to feel, although I catch myself turning my edges inward as the general decay about us makes each one of us grab for a leaf to cover our nakedness, much like Adam and Eve in their expulsion from Eden. The world impinges upon us. It conditions us. It is a struggle to be fresh, new. And it is so unremittingly difficult to stay the course, to struggle, to find an opening through which each one of us can break into a run, unclotted by society and its seductive softening agents.
In this New Year I seek peace within. It is our indivdual natures that we must change, and not others. If governments and societies are corrupt, the salvation of the human spirit is in the anonymous soul. Fame is fleeting. Material things are the detritus of a decaying civilization. It is within the carnage and wreckage of a culture, in its homelessness, in its insensitivity, that the individual artist in all of us lurks. One need never architect a building, paint a pastorial, sculpt a vase, direct a movie to discover that elan vital within, for an artist is spiritually rich. In this coming New Year I wish each one of us rediscovers that first and original richness, that treasure house of creativity and joy that is often so early shut down by the cruel vicissitudes of life — mother and father, signicant others, culture and temporocentrisms.
This year will see me again trying to persevere. And at what? When a hiker moves through terrain, he kicks up pebbles and stones — scree. As I turn more and more to what makes me who I am, I observe that my presence kicks up scree, as if my being express and true to whatever inner measures I calibrate for myself, angers, aggravates or annoys some other scree-less person. Analysis is not necessary here: I affirm that while I may pale at the thought of being hurt or misunderstood, part of me, is wounded by it, part of me revels in it — ah, the machinations of the self, and parts of me are fed up, vexed and saddened by it. Like a lemming drive to the sea (a fair description of the species if a sour one), I will persist in who I am — I cannot be irresolute about that.
It is my ornariness, my contrariness, my arrogance, my vulnerability, my stubbornness and self-righteousness, my goodness, my narrowness, my fairness, my fear of trusting that makes me an artist. And I bulldoze forward, kicking up huge amounts of scree in the knowledge, in the escalating joy that I am simply not barren nor bereft. I am filled to the rafters.
After thirty years as a teacher and fiften years as a therapist, after twenty-five years as a writer, I have a secret to share. In all the worlds above, it has not been method or methodology, artifice or arcana, it has not been knowledge, it has not been content or even concepts or philosophies or the gravitational pull of profound theories or the cultural might of maxims that changed the lives of others. Whatever impact I have made upon others, for good or bad, indifferently, with or without intent, it all rests mightily in who I am as a human being. It has taken me half a lifetime not to learn this — but to realize it. It is the gale force and the zephyr breeze that is within me that has touched other people, perhaps moved or motivated them.
As i write i associate at this very moment to myself in harness, without mule or horse. Sisyphean, if you will, slugging through a field, a living human imprint, cutting deeply into the earth, cutting a wide Thoreauvian swath. In 1994 I intend to plough even deeper, for I will have all of eternity to life fallow.
Have a healthy and spiritual New Year!
