Seeking immorality

 

Thursday, July 02, 2009

 

Art is not accidental, one of my old English professors used to tell me.

In college, we all thought ourselves geniuses, and that somehow, deep inside ourselves we have a well full of creative waters we need to tap into to produce art.

Time has proven this assumption wrong, and the more I look over what I wrote even a few years ago, the more I understand this.

Art is mostly the conscious manipulation of image and idea.

While genius certainly exists, I know I certainly lack it. So I have to work harder at trying to manipulate image and idea.

But I’ve always been a person willing to make a fool of myself in the process, creating inferior works in order to learn craft. (I’m still learning especially about writing).

This is why I keep producing videos, believing that sooner or later I’ll get the gist of it and be able to consciously manipulate images in a way that may produce art.

Over the years, I’ve always used models for my writing, authors that seemed to touch me in a particular way such as George Orwell and E.B. White for their nonfiction, and people like Graham Green and William Faulkner for their fiction.

While the world has many people in it, sometimes you have to choose a model just so that you have a pathway to follow.

I guess maybe that’s why I pick on Spielberg in this regard. Like Faulkner, he has a large body of work that I can use as models. But he is also subtly flawed so that I don’t feel overpowered by his craft.

Spielberg is pure craft. Even when his works don’t work on a story level (he tends to get sentimental especially when working with George Lucas), they always present images that are powerful and artistic. As innovative as he is, Spielberg also tends to be conservative at heart, consciously using film tool to achieve his ends.

Until recently, I kept trying to draw from a well inside myself that didn’t exist, and now need to get back to the idea perhaps I have no well of inspiration and must rely on developing talents as a craftsman, the way I have done with my writing.

 

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I’m headed back to Scranton tomorrow to see my daughter.

She is morning her cat, Snow, who she was forced to put down last month because of cancer.

I keep thinking of Michael Jackson and the host of other famous people who have perished over that time, and come to realize just how wise Shakespeare was in comparing life to a stage – how we each have our time to strut, and then retire from it.

Some people like Jackson leave a significant impression on the world, leave a legacy that the world recognizes, while other beings such as this poor cat Snow (or the silly infant bird I found in a parking lot I named Oscar Tweety) move on leaving a bare wisp of smoke.

My uncles, my mother, my friends all seem part of a huge mosaic I call my life, and yet may vanish from this mortal coil without a trace. I looked up my friend, Frank Quackenbush’s name on the internet the other day. His one time mention as an actor is now lost in a flood of other people so that even limited fame seems fleeting at best.

Even film and literature can’t guarantee immortality. What is a good book one year becomes tomorrow’s trash. This is true of film or stage, too.

Spielberg once said he hadn’t yet done his “Lawrence of Arabia,” which isn’t exactly true, but I understand his point.

What single work out of large body of anyone’s work will survive the test of time the way Shakespeare’s has?