“…if he is an artist, he will be compelled to make sacrifices which worldly people find absurd and unnecessary. In following the inner light he will inevitably choose… poverty. And, if he has in him the makings of a great artist, he may renounce everything, even his art.”
~ Henry Miller
Disillusioned but alive, he saunters slowly through the haze of hysteria in an age of a pretentious outrage. He’s a man these days who communes more with the dead than the living, a man who finds more beauty in the shadows than the light, a man with empty pockets and a heated soul — an offbeat dreamer, an artist a malcontent condemned to the eternal fire of his poetic defiance. In the petty hours of the light, he holds his cards close to his chest and does his best to compromise with what’s been given. His hat sits low to disguise the eyes of an exile, forever roving the forlorn streets of a hijacked future alone the tide of his ancient blood ebbing beneath disintegrating flesh. Most nights, you’ll find him in his old shack on the outskirts of the civilized world sitting in the mushroom glow of a midnight candle with a vintage hardpack in his hands. When he reads he no longer agrees or disagrees with the sentiments of the dead. He’s at ease among words, a curious spectator stirred by the lyrical upchuck of the collective unconscious. The priests and pundits and academics are no longer served by his attention. He’d rather meditate on the paintings of Van Gogh, Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth than to castrate his senses with the senseless sermons of the day. The bloodless lust of the over-civilized eye had always sickened him — their idolatry of appearances, their exaggerations of purity, their incessant need for glittering illusions to go on living. Never re-examining the underlying deceptions that sustain their lives, they live in the clutches of cliches, their voices dull and tremulous, their minds easily susceptible to the assault of the most ludicrous demagoguery. He owns very little and holds no delusions of duty and status and causes. Out of his deliberate austerity he’s bestowed the ultimate silence needed to create perilously from the deepest crevices of his ancient soul, transforming dream to flesh, triumphing over the manufactured illusions of a frantic era. Possessed by some daemonic being higher than himself, there he is, alone, as the world burns, working in the dark, forging in the shadows, stretching his sensibilities to the brink of madness, divulging his whole soul to the destructive force of reality, beautifying the lies that lead to the ultimate truth. He’s the awakener, the emancipator, a defector of the human race. He’s an artist.
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Wow, did you ever think of turning this into a novel? European literature had characters like this, not America literature so much. It doesn’t contain people who think deeply about life as far as I know.
But this guy! I could imagine him getting into some kind of situations living the way he does, writing eternal truths from the depths of his musty soul.
The part starting from “he no longer agrees or disagrees with the sentiments of the dead….” made me think of both a gatekeeper and a priest protecting the dead and their eternal sleep. As for the rest, loneliness and poverty might very well be his blessing and his curse… thank you for the honesty of writing and for sharing such a sensitive and profound poem with us 🙏