the philistines and the artists

phil·is·tine

noun

a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them.

"I am a complete philistine when it comes to paintings"

    A v-e-r-y l-o-n-g polemic open letter (diatribe) to starving, discouraged, disillusioned and wannabe artists floated into my email account the other day from Erik Rittenberry/Poetic Outlaws. I read the diatribe, and I read it again this morning and started writing a reply, which took a while. I took a break and thought about my reply and rearranged and tucked and trimmed it a bit, and let it fly. 

   Because of the diatribe’s l-e-n-g-t-h,  I only include here what might be viewed as the first of many stanzas, followed by my reply. You can read the entire diatribe by clicking on its link. 

The Candle In The Rib Cage: An Open Letter to Artists in 2024

(and some words for the philistines, too) 

POETIC OUTLAWS

JUN 22, 2024

https://poeticoutlaws.substack.com/p/the-candle-in-the-rib-cage-an-open

The Candle In the Bib Cate: An Open Letter to Artists in 2024 

Lately, I have come across opining’s from the philistine types more than ever. I am sick of it, but what is there to do? I thought to write them—I was thinking an open letter, but this came with its own problems. No one identifies as a philistine, and even if someone did, why on earth would they read a letter by a so-called artist, knowing that in its contents is likely a bomb of words, whose sole purpose is to blow them to smithereens?

Much better to write simply to the artists themselves, and add some words for the philistines, too. 

To start, I should address who I am mainly speaking to; the artist as craftsman, and the artist that is within us all. That is not to say we are all artists. But to speak to that inkling of artistic spirit inside every human. That we all dream, occasionally, of the impossible and are open to new worlds. That even in the most cadaverous human, there may exist the remnants of a still burning candle, somewhere hidden, a candle inside the rib cage.

I mean to address the amateur. The Sunday painter, the hobbyist. Those that know very little of academic art history, only what they have been able to gather in free libraries, museums, etc. Too, I am speaking to the bedroom musician, the self-published poets. The tinkerers, as well as anyone who has suffered a good bit of starving for their art. Starving—limited not to malnourishment, but also the spiritual starvation that often comes with the absence of an audience. 

The starvation of the voice. 

Also, the very young and young at heart, alike. I want to speak to the artist that has no clan, no concrete future. I want to speak to those who I may call “my people”, if I believed in the phrase. The people that have no people—those who are alone in this world, in their vision and spirit. First to congratulate you, second to say I am with you—so far as I can be.

It matters little whether your art is good or bad or you feel like an artist one day and a fraud the next. Whether you play the piano or the kazoo, whether you write with a long, felt tip pen or scrawl with bricks of charcoal. Whether your art is technological or is executed from the damp wall of a cave. 

I am also talking to myself. 

The opposite of all this is the modern-day art students, who fancies themselves as humanitarian activists—the problem here is the collective versus the individual, but I will get to that later.

Also, the gallery “mascot”, as Jean Michel Basquiat put it. This letter may not be directed towards them, though they may find a glimmer of truth in it. However, they need little encouragement. Full of themselves and their puny roles as they often are, bound to their exhibition schedules of handshakes, pow-wows, secret dinners, group showings among close friends and such as they seem, and so enmeshed in cash grants, awards, museum acquisitions as they can be, I find they need no encouragement. 

A small dose of discouragement, more like it. 

I don’t know what would set them straight. I cannot say forcefully, there are too many of them. It is the “business” of art that they tend to, often forgetting their own lives in the process. This is likely not related to art at all, nor, in my opinion, a life at all.

If you would indulge me in a quick story, I will give you a small sense of what I mean:

In Los Angeles I had received a call from a friend, who knew of my desperate situation. Living in my car, I had little room to maneuver. I had a few hundred dollars left. It was decreasing by the minute, by the meal, by the gas tank! Anyway, he offered me a short stint of work. I could not have said no! I would have—if only I were in the position to turn down work. 

The work was chauffeuring an important artist. In fact, she is goddess-like! Her paintings, as well as her name, are known worldwide! Whenever she has an exhibition or makes a big sale, or stumps her toe, apparently, she is interviewed by the likes of the national art papers as well as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, etc. During her exhibition, she will be guaranteed a positive review, and will close the showing a few million dollars richer.

I was her driver and she was intolerable. She let me know my place by introducing me as “my driver.” She never once called me by name, only as “driver.” She was a miserable woman. The details I would hear of her life, from her extraneous phone conversations from the back seat while I drove, were further dehumanizing. It was as though I was not there. No shame as she went from one phone call to the next, dialing up acquaintances, repeating the same stories, word for word, one after the next. 

I never saw her smile. Never did she laugh. I could only think—is this what success looks like? Is this what success does? She went on about a building she would buy, and about her sales. It is a wonder she ever got around to painting. A wonder that she still considers herself emblematic of good humanity. 

Anyway, could make for an interesting story in more detail some other time. But this is what I mean about the business of success and what it can do to some. I was living in my car, broke as ever, but I could muster a smile, a joke! If I had a driver myself, we would be best of friends! I was a ghost inside a machine, chauffeuring an entrepre-corpse body, a soul destroyed, blasted away by the business end of the shitty art world stick. 

What a shame! 

I was rich living in my car. She was enmeshed in poverty, the ghetto of one’s bitter mind. This is all anecdotal, I know. But it left an impression. It had some revelatory effect—it was no waste! In fact, I should thank her for being that way. So, thank you, Mary. And this story is not everything—does not cast a very long pessimism towards my own life or how I see the life of the artist.

The artists that are poured out like sludge from academia are performers, mainly. Performing an identity. An IDENTITY no different than the biker gangs, the cult followers, or the adult entertainers. 

They have their own clothes, their own slang, their own signals, their own emblems. They thrive on separation. Not totally, just separation by groups. That great American comedian George Carlin said of our betters, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” I believe it’s something like that, if not exactly. I find them abhorrent, saved only by the grace that is their unawareness. They cannot stand on their own two legs! I have not made a group of them, they have done that to themselves!

Ambition. I would like to kill it. Whatever is ambitious inside me is troublesome, irksome, injurious. The trouble with ambition is that it knows no bounds. Once it gets going, it can never be apprehended—perhaps only killed. Snuffed in the cradle, so to speak. And this is funny, because I don’t want to kill ALL my ambition. I want to keep some, like the candle in the rib cage. Complete eradication of anything is not appealing to me. I would keep at least one or two philistines around. A few diseases, some criminals, some horrible people. I want to kill all my ambition except a modicum of it. I tend to think on Charles Bukowski’s “Bluebird”.

Kill your ambition, mostly, but keep a small part of it hidden. You may need it one day, I don’t know yet. Ambition towards your craft, your work, is no small thing. And, of course, that is not what I mean. I mean worldly, monetary, social, and public ambition… 

 

Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter

In college and later, I was inspired by a few novelists and poets, but I did not camp on their doorsteps. I did not write them letters, or wish they were around to advise me. 
After taking a creative writing workshop in a community school in 1982, I did not spend a lot of dime hanging out with other writers and poets. 
I was homeless, a 5-year stretch, 2000-2005, and a 2-year stretch, 2015-2017. I wrote plenty about that at my blogs, some of which became books.
I read Vereen’s diatribe the day Erik posted it, and I read it again this morning, and I still don’t know what to make of it.
In some ways it reminds me of how Donald Trump whines about what doesn’t go to his liking. 
Because I was raised with very large silver and gold spoons in my rich white spoiled brat kid mouth, I view Donald Trump differently from people who were not raised like he and I were raised. 
So, it’s not fair for me to liken Vereen to America’s Philistine-in-Chief. 
I’m 81 and climbing. I wrote my first book when I was 40, after I was overwhelmed with a sense that I would write a book about something I had come to know very well when I practiced law. The “vision" came to me as my second wife and I were driving back to Alabama from a two month trip up America’s Atlantic seaboard. 
My physical health and the rest of my life had gone into the shitter. I was hoping to reinvent myself. Writing the book rejuvenated and caused me to want to be alive again. 
Oh my God did I want it to be a bestseller, and make me feel wonderful about me. It was good enough to be a bestseller, but the Gods, Goddesses, Fates, Karma, Whatever, had other plans. 
I wrote all about that and what came down instead at my blog post yesterday, starry starry night pain ain’t always genius, which was inspired by Erik’s Van Gogh post yesterday.

I would like to think any starving artist by any definition might find that blog post interesting.
In 1991, the first poem wormed its way up out of me, as if it was dictated to me. In 1992, the second poem leaped out of me as fast asI could write it, as if it was sung to me. 

"Living Poets" 

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark 

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets never stop singing it 

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life 

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself 

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

"The Mockingbird”

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing its fool head off –

I asked it how and why it sang?

But all it did was look ahead,

all it did was sing.

It never turned to see if I was watching,

or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

or asked if I liked its music,

or expected a recording contract –

It was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird.

In 1994, this poem exploded out of me as fast as I could write it. If not already, I figured my Muse had drawn her line in the sand, and I ignored Her at my soul’s very peril.

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse. Please tell me, yes, please tell me, who, just who, invented that really silly rule? Surely it wasn’t the marker of the first stone- otherwise, there’d be no stones to break all those slaving rules!

In 1990, I was invited to present at a writer’s conference in my home town, Birmingham, Alabama. The audience did not seem interested in my topic, “Writing as a mystical experience”.

Although he sometimes tries to write fiction, every. character was a character in himself, every plot a plot in him. There are no surprises, only his, to discover parts of himself he has lost, thrown way, forgot, or never even knew were there. Perhaps in this way, God and he are somewhat alike, they both create to discover just who and what they really are.

When someone asked what I did about writer’s block, I said I don’t get writer’s block. When it's time for me to write, I have to write. When nothing is coming, I do something else. Not all of you are writers, or poets, or artists, or sculptors, or craftsmen, but you are something, and what is import is to find that something and be it with everything you have, If you are writers, then write about something you know about, because you have lived it.

That is what Vereen did, but I wish he did not remind me of Donald Trump.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com