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| QUOTATIONS 906-929 |
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| 906. One of the unforeseen and largely unexpected consequences of the recent democratization of arts, which has opened the enormous wells of previously untapped creativity, can be observed at first hand, for-instance, by going to the poetry readings. It is enough to attend only a few of them to realize that the overwhelming majority (with sprinkling of friends and relatives here and there) of the audience are poets and writers themselves, who come not only to listen ( counting on reciprocity) to a "designated" performer, but also to be heard, i.e. to have the opportunity to read their own poems at the so called "open set". For many of them such readings serve, to coin a phrase, as an "oral publishing", the only kind they probably will ever have. To explain the growth of this phenomenon one has to accept the regrettable fact of life, that the number of people genuinely interested in arts had always been and still is limited. So, as the more of them become artists themselves, the number of simply listeners and viewers diminish proportionately. What the democratization of arts has done is to have upset the traditional balance, in numerical terms, between the producers and consumers of art. Now, instead of an audience looking for an artist, an artist has to look for an audience. In the world of poetry it has almost reached the point when it begins to resemble a barter exchange, or mutual back scratching, as in "you listen to my poetry and I'll listen to yours". This trend is less pronounced in the visual arts, still less in music and almost invisible in TV and movie making. But it is only because in these fields besides creativity one needs the increasing amount of money to produce art, which the democratization of art as powerful as it is couldn't do anything about. On the contrary, it seems that the more artists there are the less each one of them get from the public - the famous "zero-sum" game. 907. Perhaps the most appreciated benefit of a friendship is having someone to listen sympathetically to complaints about ill luck undeservedly befallen us. Because of this, it is wise to choose friends whose life style, financial and personal situation closely resemble ours. Otherwise, how, for example, the one who has made only $90000 last year instead of the usual $100000 can complain about such a terrible misfortune to and expect to elicit empathy from a friend whose only source of income during the same year were unemployment insurance checks? 908. "You will always have poor people with you" (Matthew 26:11) This statement, unfortunately, is as true today as 2000 years ago when it was first made. For it is apparently impossible to create a society of real material equality. There will always be people who have more and, consequently, those who have less, and not just less, but very little indeed. Now, taking the inequality as a given, the practical question is how much inequality can any particular society have without endangering its very existence, or in other words, how many poor and how poor they must be to cause the edifice of civic order to crumble? It is hard to give the precise answer to that, since at different times and in different places it would be different. Some countries can have more than half of population living in abject poverty and still function, others would probably collapse well before reaching this stage. Then again, poverty comes in different sizes and shapes. There is absolute poverty, when the very biological existence of human beings can't be sustained. And there is a relative poverty, when some groups of society consume many times less than the others. But no matter how varied poverty is, there is always such a critical, though hard to define, point when the quantity of poverty triggers sudden qualitative change, and the state explodes in violence and anarchy. Because of this, the more important and certainly, without belittling the struggle for more equality, the more immediate task any government has is to prevent reaching such a point of no return. In the recent history, after 1929, all socio-economic policies in the West had been influenced by this threat. Of course, there are those who think that under such catastrophic scenario the poor, to paraphrase Marx, have nothing to loose but their poverty. Which, as catchy as in may sound, had been proven by history not to be always true. For death and destruction are what most of the people, most of the times find worse than poverty. That's why the revolutions are so rare, for the first and certain result of a revolution is just that - death and destruction, while the hoped for better life may never be obtained. The all-pervasive fear of such a tragic outcome is so deeply ingrained in the minds of ordinary people that the shrewd rulers should always play on it. And here is another Machiavellian advice to powers that be - one thing no state should do, if it wants to maintain its stability, law and order, is to allow its soldiers and policemen to fall into poverty. It is absolutely imperative that they be paid well enough to see themselves as a part of the class whose prosperity and security they defend. Though, ultimately, it can't prevent the collapse of the state when the objective conditions are ripe for this, but only prolong and make it bloodier. 909. For a desert dweller, the disappearance of a single tree is as noticeable as that of a thousand for the one who lives in a forest. For a poor man, losing a dollar is as significant as that of a hundred for one who is well off. For a parent the death of an only child is as devastating as that of all for one who has several. It isn't the absolute amount of the loss, but how great a portion it was of what we had, that determines how great the pain caused by it. And for the one who has next to nothing, losing even that little means losing everything. 910. Because of the unprecedented number of people moving around the world nowadays, leaving their own and settling in somebody else's countries, the Nostalgia has become so rampant that there seems to be a need to form a new self-help organization "Nostalgic Anonymous" for the Italian, Greek, Russian, Jamaican, etc. immigrants get together and help each other to overcome this debilitatingly seductive addiction. 911. In a popular science fiction TV series Star Trek people are transported from one space ship to another by first being analysed into sub-atomic particles, then "beamed up" through space and finally synthesized at the point of arrival back into a whole person. But sometimes the transporting device malfunctions, and people get stuck in the outer space as a bunch of separate particles, and can neither return to their own ship, nor get to the new one. The experience of some immigrants is very similar to that. They leave their own countries, but "can't get" to the new ones, and seem to be forever stuck in between. 912. The question to which I think I've got the answer or, better still, nobody else but me has, I consider to be of paramount importance. Otherwise, it's irrelevant. 913. Nowadays, when I walk down the street and see something exiting happening I don't even stop to gape at it anymore. It's going to be later on TV anyway, and in better colours at that. So, why to waste my time twice. 914. The majority of car accidents on the big city's streets are caused not by the drivers' incompetence but by the appalling lack of the elementary courtesy. 915. Quite often the translations , especially of some philosophical writings, are more intelligible than the originals. For a translator feels an obligation to turn the occasional rambling of the philosopher (which are, unfortunately, too common in this type of writing) into a coherent discourse, if for nothing else then to spare the reader the difficulties and bewilderment he had experienced himself. 916. Anyone who tries to write honestly about his experience, thoughts and feelings, as most poets do (or are expected to do) is bound to find his writings and himself under the inquisitive microscope of relatives, friends and acquaintances, who will undoubtedly recognize themselves as some of the sources and causes of poet's opinions and sentiments. Hence, such a candid writing has a strong potential to create a lot of misunderstanding or, even worse, too much of understanding, leading inevitably to tension and discomfort (and not necessarily of the creative kind) in a writer's personal life. But what else a poet should write about, if not about what he knows best? And one unquestionably knows best the people closest to him, i.e. his relatives, friends and acquaintances. And how one can completely avoid to reveal what must be literally seeping through the pores of his emotional and intellectual being, no matter how much of obfuscation, equivocation, metaphorizing, allegorizing, etc. - all such and many more wonderful verbal devices invented to conceal and disguise the simple truth - are employed for a sake of poet's social self- preservation. Perhaps the slipping into the fictional world of fantasy and unreality is one of the answers. Or, as some famous writers have done, to record one's genuine thoughts and feelings into a secret diary or memoirs with the strict instructions to deposit them after his death into a bank safe, to be opened 50 years later. But what a terrible fate -to permit oneself to have the true spiritual life only 50 years after one's own physical death! And what an unbearable constrain the poet has to live under - to be able to see more and yet to be permitted to say less than the rest of us. For it seems to be as immutable as a law of Nature - one cannot write honestly without endangering the relationships with those around him, and thus cannot escape the necessity of making a choice between truth and peace - what a cruel dilemma to be faced with, when one sits down to write. 917. Being an eccentric is the only form of social protest the polite society allows to an individual. 918. The arrogant ones are actually more socially acceptable than those who don't take themselves seriously, and, as a result, tend not to take seriously anybody else. And who likes that? 919. First, one has to decide what kind of life one would like to have. And only after that, to choose (provided, of course, that the choice is possible) the place where the probability of having it seems to be the greatest. And though it may sound like one of those tiresome, common sense platitudes, many have ruined their lives by turning this self-evident proposition upside-down. 920. If simply being alive is a sufficient cause for happiness as some people claim when they say something like - "I just feel happy being alive" - then there is no such thing as unhappiness. For the dead presumably feel nothing, and everybody else who is alive must be happy according to the above proposition, which equates life with happiness. 921. When I was young my mother and I had an un spoken agreement, that as long as I do whatever she told me to do, as a compensation I could freely express my opinions on any subject, including her directives, without fear of punishment. Of course, in reality, I had no idea that there was any agreement of this sort, for not knowing any differently I perceived such an arrangement as natural. This childhood habit stayed with me for the rest of my life. At any place I've ever worked, I was probably the most obedient and, at the same time, the most outspoken employee. Needless to say, my successive superiors didn't view this type of behaviour with the same pragmatic benevolence as my mother did. As I had numerous opportunities to discover, people in a position of power, given a choice, would prefer disobedience on the part of their subordinates, as much less undesirable, to the outspokenness. For they see the outspokenness as a greater threat to their authority than disobedience, and perhaps rightly so, since a man can be forced to act against his will but not to think or, especially, to feel differently. Of course, the ideal employee should be both obedient and silent. But then the world, even for those at the top, is not perfect. 922. In the normal course of life, no matter how uneventful it is, one has to stop occasionally to make an inventory of what had happened to him up till that moment, before proceeding any further. It isn't easy and often not very pleasant, but it has to be done, if one is to make sense out of his life. Different people in different times have done it differently. Recently, the Freudian psychoanalysis was the preferred choice for those who could afford it. But before psychoanalysis had been invented, or rather had the name attached to it, telling one own story to those willing to listen, or writing it down as autobiography (Confessions in the case of St. Augustine and Rousseau) when no listener was available, achieved the same goal of gaining understanding who one is, whence one came , and where one is going. 923.One, who is brought up, like an average American child, on a steady diet of cartoons, in which everybody escapes unscathed from the endless chain of lethal accidents, and where the general reaction expected and produced in the young viewers is laughter and merriment, instead of (and what would have been more natural to the species) fear, horror and revulsion with what's happening to the cartoon's characters, and compassion toward them (since the harm is never real, and everything seems to be done for laughs), tends to grow up into an adult with underdeveloped automatic impulse to forewarn the other of the immediate disaster or try to prevent it. For such an adult is conditioned by his previous viewing experience to expect something funny, instead of tragic to unfold before his eyes all the time. Thus, the indifference to the sufferings of the others, which Americans of TV generation are so often accused of, is not perhaps so much the result of some innate callousness, but rather of the subconsciously learned disbelief into the reality of tragic, and the expectation of the perpetual "fun". To be fair, it didn't start with TV. For the physical misfortunes of the other had been the staple of American comedy since the earliest days of Hollywood and, if one is willing to look even farther back, the notoriously cruel nature of the British "practical jokes" could be considered as one of the possible precursors of this unfortunate modern trend. 924. Go and figure this out - while the sick are desperately trying to regain health, the healthy are seemingly expending as much efforts to lose it. 925. To all those who want to preserve traditions, cultures, languages, etc. I would say - stop treating the world as a museum. For it is a living body, in which everything is changing constantly, while nothing disappears without a trace. So, stop worrying and get on with the real life. 926. The human propensity to equate a personal misfortune with the generally deplorable state the world is in is as common among the ordinary men, as among the great philosophers. And in a certain sense both are right. 927. It is no wonder that the current public obsession with computers, Internet, information high way, etc., is beginning to resemble a religious cult, for it fulfills the basic promise of any successful religion - to turn nobodies into somebodies and with the minimum effort to change on their part. 928. In the world, in which most of our wishes and dreams remain frustrated and unrealized, the buying of "things" is the easiest substitute for fulfilling our desires. The psychological satisfaction of obtaining, for a change, something one wants, no matter how insignificant is it, for most of the people, most of the times, is strong enough to obscure the brutal fact of life, that what we want the most is unobtainable. 929. Poetry has a tremendous power either to miraculously restore or completely destroy its practitioners. The certainty of this rather categorical statement is the product of my self-reflection and observation of other poets. Perhaps mistakenly, I count myself among those who have been restored by writing poetry and the explanation, in my case, is very simple. By the time I started to write, I was so sick, both physically and spiritually, that I literally "hit the bottom" of my existence. Consequently, I had nowhere to go but "up", and the writing was the"rope" I used to pull myself from the abyss of despair. On the other hand, I've seen too many people to use the same "rope" "to hang" themselves. They usually start as the young and healthy, full of energy, optimism and even talent, budding poets but, as the song goes - it isn't where you start but where you finish. For slowly but surely the rot sets in and the disturbing signs of writing fatigue and weariness, such as self-doubt, creative impotence, "writer's block", feeling of inadequacy, frustration of being unrecognized, bitterness of being rejected, etc., etc. begin to show up with the ever increasing frequency and severity. Also, as a side-effect, the young poets often discover in the process of writing the things about themselves, those close to them and life in general they wish they didn't, for it makes them profoundly unhappy and disillusioned. All in all, eventually they "hit the bottom" too, though not because of the life's hardship, as the ordinary folks do, but as the casualties of "the writing disease", often aggravated by the use of alcohol and drugs. But no matter how one gets there, the bottom is the bottom and very few, if they can help it, are willing to stay there forever. Yet, what has helped me, people destroyed by poetry cannot use. Because in my experience the writing has been the life-giving beam of hope, lifting me up, in theirs - the death- breathing, devouring monster, dragging them down. So in their case, the return to a "normal", ordinary life, with all its banality of hardship, is the only way to go. For in a sense, the cure must always be opposite to the disease, and as those who are sick of life sometimes find a cure in writing, those who are damaged by writing can find a cure in the act of simple living. Though due to the inescapable chronological limitations, the later could be much harder to do than the former. For while one can, at least in theory, write almost till the moment of death, there is a great difference between what one can do being 20, and being 40 or 50. To those who would accuse me of painting too bleak a picture and point to some well-known instances when a novice developed into a mature and satisfied poet more or less unscathed, I would reply - not too many, not too many. For the casualty rate, in my opinion, is too high. So, if I'm asked to summarize in one sentence what I've been saying so far it would be something like this - first try living then writing, and not the vice versa. Of course, I'm fully aware that I'm not completely out of the woods either. But as long as I can manage to steer clear of Scylla and Charybdis of being rejected and being unrecognized, I hope to survive this terrifyingly beautiful addiction to writing. |
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