Michael Muhammad Knight, writer extraordinaire by day, gives advice to young artists via facebook messages by night. He says:
There’s a story that you’re meant to tell, and you’re the only one on the planet qualified to tell it. Keep living and building.
The best advice I can give to a young artist is that you are what you eat. Everything that you digest becomes an ingredient in what you put out. Every book, song, movie, friendship, adventure, life experience that you digest is going to manifest in what you write, so just find all the good food that you can, and it’ll mix up into something amazing.
The wrong food will make you other than your own self.
“ Shit happens, but art must be created. ”
So then, let’s get this show a rumblin’ and a tumblr’in. Ken Rockwell (a Very Good Photographer) said this in a column about artistic synthesis, referring to the distinction between landscapes and landscape photography. Yes, sunsets are beautiful and all that, but it is up to you to make art out of it through the medium of your choosing. Look up the article if you like, although I suspect that the quote is more poignant out of context since it seems very enigmatic and Warholesque when your mind believes it to be some message from On High lolling through the aether on a flowing blue silk scarf. But that aside.
The crux of this quote for me is this: that beauty is an act of being to be endeavored for, not a passive experience that can be accomplished without some form of sacrifice or net energy expenditure. Whether it’s an oil painting, a violin caprice, a high-end toaster oven, a Ferrari, or finishing touches on a garden gnome with a pointy red cap, something was sacrificed to create it.
Most often when we think of sacrifice we think of time and money (and women, amirite?!?), but the truth is that there are things even more precious to us than our time and our money. We guard them more jealously, we regard them more highly, and we cling to them more tightly than our material things, which is what time and money both are when it comes down to it. These things include our preconceptions about people and places, our sense of self, our sense of agency, our confirmation biases and errors of fundamental attribution. Yet it is these conceits which must fall for the beauty in the world to become apparent, it is these walls which must come down for the everyday to become extraordinary and for the extraordinary to become commonplace.
And I believe that such a world - one full of wonder and beautiful things - can exist, and can do so side by side with the harder facts of widespread suffering and systemic injustice that good people the world over are fighting daily. Must exist in fact, because as Camus said: “in the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie.”
Shit happens. Create.
