Sunday, September 07, 2003
Yesterday, I wrote 1,541 words and finished Chapter Eight of Murder of Angels. I believe that I now have only two chapters to go. This means I should be able to have the book finished by the beginning of October, as planned.
There's an e-mail, which I received a couple of days ago, from gH0StLy_sEr1oUs@webtribe.net, that I wanted to include in this entry:
"Just to thank you for your diary entry for Thursday, September 04, 2003, which I found very thought provoking. It reminded me of a quote by Lisa Gerrard that I've got stuck above my computer concerning art -
'We can encourage other people, no matter how small what they do, that it's probably more worthwhile than what Madonna's doing. You might not be earning any money, but you're telling the truth. You're creating a place where the truth can be told. And that's important for our kids, that they have somewhere to go where the truth is being told and people are allowed to express themselves and come into contact with something that exists outside the bullshit. People can so easily build a crystal palace out of other people's work, other people's magic, other peoples vocabulary — by doing that, we're cheating the very thing that's integral to our ability to communicate something that's from the heart. I don't really understand. I don't think we'll ever understand, not in this lifetime anyway.' -- Lisa Gerrard, March 1997"
Outside the bullshit. I probably could not have found a better way of saying that. I think I've been trying to find any way of saying that for some time, and there it is in a Lisa Gerrard quote, so thank you, gH0StLy_sEr1oUs@webtribe.net.
I spent my teens and twenties lost inside the bullshit, and now I try to keep myself clear of it, that deafening, numbing cultureshock, the shock of so much "culture" existing only to perpetuate itself, the culture of viruses and bacteria. So much of what we take for the truth is only part of a cycle of consumption, and it's all too easy never to see beyond that. I know that I almost didn't. I thought I had, time and again, but I hadn't. Even now, on the bad days, I lose my way again. I forget that this writing thing is about telling the truth, as I see it, my version of the truth. Which is not to say that I know the truth, in any finalized, abolute sense. I find it for moments at a time, or I at least suspect it, and then I bury it in the stories that I write.
I bury it that I might find it again later, when I have forgotten that there is truth.
This all goes back to my post of September 4th. Mistaking one thing for another. Mistaking — no, failing to see — my own success as an artist, because I'm too busy longing for "crystal palaces," as Lisa Gerrard so aptly put it. Too busy envying those who have written the "Break Out" novel, the one that launches them into the mass consciousness. Was Envy one of the nine of my Seven Deady Sins of Writing? If not, I'll have to revise. Or it may be that envy is only a very pernicious specie of Distraction.
So much of this follows, I'm sorry to say, from three days at Dragon*Con, which is a dizzying, seductive Bacchanal of consumerism, the consumption of the shards of a thousand "crystal palaces." Art becomes only Product. Concern for truth disintegrates into a desire, or even need, to possess. A quest for ownership. I don't want to be unfair to Dragon*Con, because I really do love it. If I didn't love it, I wouldn't have attended ten years straight. But there is this side of it, and it Distracts me.
It needs to be enough to tell the story from the heart and mind, and to listen to the story and carry it away with you in your heart and mind. Words like "merchandise," "franchise," and "collectible" have less than nothing to do with the art itself. They may be a necessary evil that ultimately allows the artist the luxury to create, and even allows the society the luxury to endure the artist, but that's the best they can ever be.
It's Sunday morning and I have a headache. And today I will begin Chapter Nine.
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