Blog 5: Better late than never

I’ve been reading “Sculpting in Time” by Andrie Tarkovsky recently and there’s a passage that I’m rather enamoured by. In his conclusion he writes: “It’s all too easy to fall for the ‘Fishers of human souls’; to abandon your unique vocation ostensibly in pursuit of loftier more general goals, and in doing so to by-pass the fact that you are betraying yourself and the life that was given to you for some purpose.”

I don’t fully agree with the idea that we are put on this earth by some demiurge for a greater purpose (I’m more inspired at the notion that we are the lucky few who get to experience a trillionth of a fraction of the universe while it still has some light left in it and we get to make sense of it all), however I do support his greater point that we must strive to love ourselves so as to be willing to honour our individuality which forbids vein self-interests in pursuit of something spiritually fulfilling; to live heroically for the betterment of the world.

I find it refreshing to read this from an artist. Today the artist’s profession is considered unessential and self-serving; a vein desire for fame and admiration kindled by the modern condition. The notion that the artist is generally some vapid free agent that’s just trying to express themselves is completely misguided. Good artists are spurred by a duty for their time. They are honest, hardworking people, dedicated to their craft and determined by a willingness to solve problems they see as pervasive in society. They have the courage to interrogate what we consider normal– not always to glorious ends– in order to strive closer to the ideal.

Now there is a case to be made for the insipid clowns who claim the mantel of artist. Those who spew uninspired offal into the world for commercial gain or to account for their lack of identity: we can call these people bad artists. And there are a great many of them, just as there are many bad builders, doctors and cooks. Not all bad art is made at the hands of bad artists however. You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, as the saying goes, and the road to perfection is strewn with the corpses of experiments, missteps and failed attempts. Look at any illustrator’s sketch book and you’ll see a lexicon of disproportioned scribbles that with each subsequent page allude to a more adamant understanding of form and expression of style.

This blog is a scrapbook, filled with my own clunky experiments; each entry a note in a bottle cast into the flotsam of the world wide web, for the purpose of getting better at expressing what I see as wrong with the world. That is my purpose with these notes. To enrich my ability to articulate, formulate and express my argument.

Spinning back around to the axil of this entry, I think it is supremely important that we have the courage to love ourselves; to get out of the rat race and start striving for something greater. Let’s cut our losses now, cash in our chips and make a big ol’ break for it. Start honouring who you are. Appreciate the knowledge that you exist in one of the most brilliant light shows the universe has to offer before it roars into a lightless abortive nothingness, void of time and memory.

Be like Tarkovsky and get poetic and shit.