I Scare Myself

There are certain levels of creativity that transcend technique.

I don’t like nearly all modern painters. But have you ever stood in front of a Van Gogh? It’s terrifying stuff. There is technique in it. He did his thing, over and over, always pushing forward, getting faster, further out, until he was simply expressing himself directly. He was deranged. If art is a look into another man’s mind, he gave us a peek into a maniac’s thought process. For example, you don’t critique his painting of the postman. You deal with it.

I think it’s twice as ghastly because he liked the guy. This is my friend. his fingers are turning into snakes. 

Just when you’re reeling from that sort of thing, he announces he can take it up a notch, or ten if you’re interested. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds got nothin’ on him:

Moving on, what, exactly, made titanic egoists like Hemingway, Joyce, and Eliot flop on the floor in front of Ezra Pound, and declare him “il miglior fabbro“? It’s from Dante, and means “the better craftsman,” or something close to that.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—  Poetry (April 1913)

There’s audacity figured into all this. Some people are good at eliciting gasps. Pound sure did. But audacity alone is just shamelessness. Madonna and a million other talentless people show you what 100 % audacity and a certain moral flexibility, bordering on contortion, can yield. It ain’t art.

The video is Dan Hicks, along with some agglomeration of his Hot Licks. I’m not sure what it takes to put  yourself out there like that. He had the chops to be normal, but not the desire. He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever. At least he had time to break off rock music’s femur and beat it over the head with it while he was sailing along.

I got up at 3:30 this morning because I had to write something, or die trying. It was about the 1970s. In the dark, alone, sweltering in the silence, I scared myself, just thinking about it. I stopped for a moment to salute il miglior fabbro.