Why bother with the artist?

I was talking to a friend today about words, how we put them together, how it seems easier for some people to knit words together into something beautiful and how it’s a burden for others to struggle with the rigors of composition. Actually, this is what she said:

“My mind seems to move quicker than the words. It’s rather like a log jam. I begin to think and then my mind starts to whir and then all the words tumble into each other kind of like a 12 car pile up! I have to make a conscious effort to slow my thoughts down so the words don’t become “jibber jabber.” Does that make any sense?”

You have to love that! For a soul who is confessing a struggle with words I was impressed with the way she expressed how it feels to be crowded with words “… like a 12 car pile up!” I thought that was a superb way to put it.

Today what is on my mind is how artistic people push us to the limits and beyond. As much as we loathe the ability of artistic types to as it were jettison common sense and normalcy for their own particular brand of sometimes quirky and seemingly random self expression, the world would indeed be a dark hole without the artist.

I could fund a trip to the Bahamas if I had dollar for every criticism of William Faulkner that I have heard, from young and old. I was recently in a used bookstore, found a pile of Faulkner novels and was like a kid discovering an escalator for the first time.

While paying for my trove, the raised eyebrow girl at the register was aghast that I would purchase so many of his novels.

She confesses that she would read Faulkner “if he knew how to write a simple sentence.”

I just smiled, paid, said something like, “Oh really, right! Okay” and walked out. It was sunny outside. If gold were easily mined in a running stream, would it be worth the effort to pan for it and spend hours staring at sand, pebbles, and the like in search of that fine gold dust? Most things that are worth having are sought after precisely because of the effort involved in the securing. Ironically, the very reason readers enjoy the likes of Faulkner is because his sentences are not simple. The reader is on a constant search for understanding and somewhere in the hunt he discovered things about himself. The ancients called it lexio divinia (sacred reading).

It is the artist who pushes us to see what we would typically pass up due to our unspoken pursuit to be like others. Let’s face it, most of us hate to stand out. No where is this seen more than in those dreaded elevator rides were without saying a word we all stand there in silence for a moment and try to be so composed, so together, so not what we really are. Don’t bump anyone, don’t make eye contact, stare straight ahead, act like you are alone, freeze dry everyone around you. Funny thing, a lot of people live in an elevator 24-7.

Artistic types are always moving, never static, ever-learning, tentacles and feelers always out, reaching, stretching, touching, discovering, and feeling anew. They experience in ways that others do not. It’s what makes them seem frustrated I guess. I think too that it’s also why we often go to the artist to learn how to understand ourselves better, to grasp with the words of another what we cannot formulate easily on our own but can discern as “right” in their conclusion. Does this resonate with you, reader?

But it is the artistic soul that prods, pushes, forces us to see things in ways that we normally would never see because in our sun bleached myopia all we see is what is right before us. The artist in all his/her zany avant-garde oddity pushes us beyond the edge to enjoy a freefall once we look past the normative, the simple.