judy prince wrote:
> "obedience to the force that drives you forward" "you are pledged
> to this Thing become your life"
>
> The conventional view that artists are nuts makes sense bcuz fighting
> to bring out in the open a thing that no one wants to think about
> makes folks nuts. We will forgive a practicing psychopath, a robber
> or a rapist, we will try to rehabilitate them. But we will not
> forgive those who refuse the social system, we will make them pay for
> our discomfort, for what they insist upon seeing and saying.
>
> Top quotes remind me of Automatic Pilot, a neutral term, a moving
> forward without will. Yet no thing nor person nor self of me I've
> ever known was or is neutral. There's a separate victory and glory in
> that.
Aha, it got through after all. Before the storm hits....
I don't agree that society as a whole (whatever that is) will
necessarily forgive an extreme criminal. Robbery, yes; even a
participant in a murder. I know of a guy who is in prison in California
who was just ordained an Episcopal priest. Example of rehabilitation?
For sure. But Schwarzennegger is playing politics with his parole. A
rapist? Not sure about that.
As far as artists judged mad...some artists can go mad or are mad
periodically. Clare, Blake if you hold him up to the right light,
Ruskin late in life. The great We may not like to see the visions.
When I was an undergraduate, Blake was read, but with condescension and
a lot of snickers. What a gooney-bird.... But Coleridge and DeQuincy
as junkies bothered no one at all. More recently, all those
"confessional" poets spent time in and out of the wackhouse.
My effort...and I will describe it as an INTENTION (ooooo, mea
culpa)...was to take a mental state, a crackup, my annual meltdown if
you must know, and metaphorize it as a state of war where as Judy
discerns, you have lost your will and can only go over the top at
whatever the enemy is when the whistle blows. A lot of poets have gone
through the automatic/automaton state: consider again the Confessionals
when they were having biographical horrors. As far as the choice: the
most physically disgusting war I can think of was WW1. So I tried it.
Succeed? I wrote it. That's success enough.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman http://kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
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"Only silence is shame."--Bartolomeo Vanzetti
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