Quotation from:
You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe, Chapter 11, Page 170-171:
"Character may feel when he pauses for a moment from the brilliant exercise of a talent that has crowned his life with triumphant ease and success almost every step of the way, and notes suddenly and with surprise, that most of the other people in the world are fumbling blindly and wretchedly about, eking out from day to day the flabby substance of grey lives. She realized with regret that such people are so utterly lacking in any individual distinction that each seems t e a small particle of some immense and vicious life-stuff rather than a living creature who is able to feel and to inspire love, beauty, joy, passion, pain, and death."
These paragraphs struck in me today a chord that they might have left unsounded last month; strike out some of the superlatives and they describe my mood very well. Not in memory have I felt more alive and creative than I o now as my music, painting and drawing come together (indeed, my painting has languished a bit in this 2 weeks of unaccustomed diversity). The thought that Sharon, my mother, my brother, my friends may not personally realize such satisfaction is a real pain to me (I do not say they are unfulfilled - just the thought of possible unfulfillment hurts, because fulfilment itself feels like popular descriptions I have read of religious conversion, albeit a rather quiet and peaceful conversion).
The question constantly recurs to me: what do people do?, who have not the joy of creation. Is one's life lived in order to raise one's replacements in the human regiment, so that they may do the same?
I progress in writing music, although it does not improve my reading; I find it easier to write a dotted rhythm than play it. I even experience trouble reproducing my own music. I have been playing my bass more. My drawing of "Gerle Cafe" for the program of Bob Rayel's recital is one of my best drawings ever, and a very successful illustration. My newest stripe painting, Roots: Broken House progresses smoothly.
How well that triumphant catalogue points up the truth that being an artist is almost wholly a state of mind. I can recast the whole panoply of my activities in a way equally accurate: Brooke Stauffer is an electrical draftsman who does drawings that please the small circle of his friends who see them, who paints 6-8 hours a week and sells a few here and there, who has never shown at any gallery, who has written 15 songs that few people will ever hear ( at the rate he's going), and who is an under-employed commercial artist of unknown potential.
Such dismaying appraisals probably have applied to most of the artists and musicians I admire, at one time in their lives (and a long, long time it may have been for some of them). Like me, they knew they were artists, and that simple fact was more important than "real life) itself, for one is an artist because of self-knowledge more than because of any amount of popular acclaim. One is not an artist because people call him (or her) an artist, but because one is an artist.
I am an artist.
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