The artist as dirtbag

How high does Tolkien rate in your pantheon of creative people, Rod? I've read the biographies (Carpenter, Garth), his letters, etc., and he seems to have been stable, a good family man (four children), kindly, etc., with no weird secrets, and a good teacher.

I love the anecdote about him that George Sayer passed on, by the way. Tolkien says to Sayer, after Lord of the Rings took off: "I've been a poor man all my life but now I have a lot of money... do you want some?">

In fact, the impression I got from the film was of the tragic circumstances that the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate found themselves in: both of them truly thought they were doing the right thing.

Yeah, bingo. This was the point I emphasized when I wrote about the movie back when it came out. Let me see if I can find it...yeah: "The high priest Caiphas is portrayed not as a sinister conspirator but as a man of dignity and integrity making a catastrophic mistake. He is not eager to shed blood and is willing to believe that Jesus is being maligned and to give him a chance to prove the charges wrong. But he is unable, upon hearing the blasphemy for himself, to do other than call for the offender s death."

Here's the whole thing if you're interested.>

I cannot comment on the movie. I have not even a morbid interest in seeing it. There are other reknowned movies for which I have a similar disinterest, so please don't read anything into that.

I am aware of Gibson's acting career much more than his directing. It is the former area in which I feel at least a little qualified, having had my brother live with me until his graduation with a BA in radio, TV and film from Temple U. I have a bit more sympatico with acting having been directly involved with small, independent theater as a producer, as well, having had the privilege to observe in person the work of professionals.

I will not "forgive" Gibson, but I will offer some understanding, because the whole crux of the matter is honesty and trust. Is he being honest about his internal processes, and can we trust him at any given point concerning his expressions of the process?

Gibson has shown a very close affinity for the dark side of sanity, with his work as "Mad Max" and in the Lethal Weapon movies, and some others. Acting is all about honesty, not about deception, in that a good actor knows what s/he must express, and a great actor convinces the audience that the expression started from inside him/her, and not on the page of the script.

His latest statement is one I'm willing to take at face value. I am unwilling to take it on trust, but that is not a critical thing since Gibson's mundane honesty is not something I live or die by. ;)

On the other hand, with my personal affiliation with the Jewish culture (I am not a religious Jew, never have been), I await the concrete results of his promise to work with the Jewish community in the manner he sets out. The proof will be in the pudding.>

I don't think there's any direct connection between artistic talent and insanity or depravity.

What I do believe is that artists with "normal" temperaments and psyches are less likely to stick to their craft than the ones who have a screw loose.

What I mean is this: making a living as an artist or performer is very, very difficult. Even if you're extremely talented, the chances of your achieving real success are slim. An aspiring actor, dancer, musician or artist may have to spend years working at menial jobs and living in squalor, in hopes of getting that one Big Break.

After a year or two of that, a normal, healthy, well-adjusted person is going to say, "Enough! This was my dream, and I gave it my best shot, but I'm tired of living like this! I want a decent apartment, and enough money to buy groceries. It's time to get a real job."

The people who persist are the people who NEED show biz or acclaim desperately, who can't possibly imagine an ordinary, middle-class life. And the ones who succeed and achieve some kind of stardom are likeliest to be the ones who persist.>

Philip, thanks for the comments on Tolkien; but I don't know that the fact of his having had difficulties in his life is germane.

One could continue to adduce examples of outstandingly creative people who don't seem to have been marked by madness or amorality, such as Bach or Ralph Vaughan Williams. I think, though, that Romanticism and its heritage disposes us to look for madness or amorality, and perhaps to value more the works of poets who showed such traits. As someone who has read almost nothing by Sylvia Plath, I wonder if her life-legend has a lot to do with ten thousand people having heard of her for every person who has read poetry by Ruth Pitter.>

Tolkien is a fine example to use here, IMO. While I wouldn't claim to be a Tolkien scholar, I've read everything he's written except his philological stuff. His fiction and essays are dry and scholarly enough for me. :)

The point I wish to make is that the measurement is not, or should not be, the life experiences of a person. The measurement should be how the person deals with life. "Madness" does not necessarily imply trauma and/or hardship. There are plenty of mad artists whose upbringing was boringly peaceful and mundane. That their lives were interesting is a result of their madness, not a cause of it.

Tolkien abhorred allegory. He made free use of metaphor and symbolism, but he also firmly believed in the straighforward and the accessible. His character Gandalf is, if anything, a gentle parody of his preference.

"...I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying." Gandalf responding to Aragorn's gentle chiding for speaking in riddles as of usual, as wizards are wont to do.

There also was really no madness in his Middle Earth. There was the observed insanity of evil, but as a reactionary sort of thing, exemplified by Sam's "handsome is as handsome does" upon meeting Strider. Or there was simple xenophobia, but then Tolkien was a very keen observor of the human condition anyway.

The final point is this: the best authors stick to writing about what they know best, and that is usually well grounded in their personal experiences. One should not be surprised to find connections between their lives and their works.>

excellent thoughts, all.

Philip: to do italics, replace the left brace in the example below with the left carat (shift comma) and the right brace with the right carat (shift period)

{i}words you want italicized{/i}

it ends up looking like this:

words you want italicized


Very thoughtful analyses, y'all - and a good read :)>

It occurs to me at the heart of this discussion, there may be two or three competing views of the artist, though perhaps they can be combined with some tension:

1) The artist as a person of craft, constructing the well-made work that impacts and moves an audience.

2) The artist as expressivist hero, art being an outpouring of the artist's talent/genius/madness.

3)(Maybe)The "artist" as social construction--celebrity persona fashioned for the public's interest in artist as #2.

Any others I'm missing?>

Among the hydra-headed derangements issuing from our modern age of scientistic reductionism, few are as prevalent as the quasi-Romantic, post-Renaissance image of the Artist - that member of a special class or clerisy hermetically sealed by talent and insight from the rest of us mere mortals, lonely, doomed, tormented world without end before burning out at the end of a bottle, the edge of a razor, or a bed in, er, Bedlam, his works lodged behind glass or in amber for the well-heeled to view through the eyes of those anointed professionals whose curatorial pointers are alone steady enough to unlock the canon before an audience of passive consumers, whether "unwashed" then or gentrified now.

As so often elsewhere, the neo-Platonic and Traditionalist threads within Western (and allied Eastern) traditions come as the proverbial breaths of fresh air, fortifying Harry Truman's quip asserting that "the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know". The great, charismatic and prolific Ceylonese-English philosopher of art Ananda K. Coomaraswamy did yeoman's work in this line early in the C20 (start with CHRISTIAN AND ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF ART), articulating the traditional vision of art, craft, utility and devotion as a seamless web arising within a communal matrix, transmitting through the works produced profound philosophic/religious content in ways accessible to all raised within the tradition - not just specialists (see also the collection EVERY MAN AN ARTIST edited by Brian Keeble for World Wisdom Publishers). There was nothing dumbed-down/egalitarian about it, though - the old apprentice-journeyman-master progression (think of such *Bildungsromans* as the *Wilhelm Meister* novels of Goethe) was a template across exacting practical discipline allied to mastery as well by the growing youth of the tasks within the household economy. That much of this practice was dissolved by the acids of the hyperspecialist, industrialist accelerando and the misnamed "leisure society" (i.e., harnessing oneself to our long-hours treadmills of junk work in order to afford junk products), is proverbial.

Traditionalists will in this sphere have to encounter, sooner rather than later, the life and work of William Blake, whose wholesome vision and lifework, verbal and visual, are virtually centrally-cast to explode the complacent delusions of latter-day left-bohemian/feminist and "conservative" right alike (siblings under the sap within the same tree of reductionist
scientism as they are). That Wendell Berry points to Blake in, say, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" (online and in SEX, ECONOMY, FREEDOM AND COMMUNITY), is, as the old-school Marxian faithful would say, no accident: Blake and his wife Catherine Boucher were inseparable collaborators (he taught her to read, write and draw) over almost the whole of Blake's work (as with Wendell and Tanya Berry, e.g., Berry's "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer", and "Feminism, the Body and the Machine", online and in WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?),
and the deep draughts from the wells of neo-Platonic and Christian-mystic (Boehme, Swedenborg) traditions which his work embodied have found live echo in two centuries of practice, in the work of, e.g., William Butler Yeats, the late English poet (and scholar of Blake, Coleridge, Yeats, and founder of the Temenos Academy) Kathleen Raine, the late Czeslaw Milosz, and the latter-day English composer John Tavener, to scratch the merest surface.

From the same period, Goethe's artistic classicism and attempt to overcome the mechanistic scientism gaining speed in his day via a wholistic approach to the natural world provide another wholesome escape from the neo-Romantic/technocratic delusions of our deification of Art and the Artist...but "the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp", to sample Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist"...>