In creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary.
Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook—a different set of priorities.
Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always—these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life.
Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come—for his adventures are all unknown.
In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
Neither is it possible to control, or regulate, the machinery of creativity. One must work with the creative powers—for not to work with is to work against; in art as in spiritual life there is no neutral place.
Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge. Of this there can be no question—creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity.
A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this—who does not swallow this—is lost.
He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home.
Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only.
There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor. Neither is the purity of art the innocence of childhood, if there is such a thing.
One’s life as a child, with all its emotional rages and ranges, is but grass for the winged horse—it must be chewed well in those savage teeth.
There are irreconcilable differences between acknowledging and examining the fabulations of one’s past and dressing them up as though they were adult figures, fit for art, which they never will be.
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work—who is thus responsible to the work.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
You can find this passage in Mary Oliver’s wonderful book — Upstream.
Without discounting the excitement of discovering her writings, Oliver highlights the incredible self-centered selfishness of the “artist”. Which I won’t discount, having witnessed it. Transcendance however is not their sole purview. you find greater truth seated next to a nurse in a children’s ward, with a soldier who realizes he’s killed innocents, in an exhausted but hopeful immigrant. With anyone in a war zone. Individuality delights us and shines, but life humbles us and informs us more deeply.
I loved the line: "working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward".
I read the comments below and feel moved to say that we can be both working artists and people who give to the world through other work.