Jan. 29, 1981
It’s easy to get pissed off at the limited mentality of our
so-called academic saints, those grand masters who in their egotistic self-aggrandizement,
establish the rules for what it takes for an artist to achieve greatness.
Many of these academic bullies have a stranglehold on truly
creative people while they themselves have largely been unable to attain any
status except as arbitrators of other people’s talent.
They hold the keys to the promised land of greatness, and force
young aspiring artists to jump through academic hoops in order to qualify.
These fools try to channel young artists into categories,
comparing them to those who came before as if that is the only criteria.
Yes, it is hugely important to know what came before, how
great artists achieved mastery, and what specifically made them great.
But to assume that a young and upcoming artist cannot come
up with original and great work on his or her own is arrogant.
Van Gogh, Walt Whitman, even beat poets and writers like
Ginsberg and Kerouac defied traditions, while still maintaining the continuity.
I love Blake as much as I love Shakespeare, but I don’t see either one confined
by rules set up by academia – if anything the opposite is true. These people
learned what they needed to learn, then ran to the edge of the world and jumped
off, relying on some inner instinct to raise them to the heights of greatness.
But from what I’m getting in this place of higher learning
is this idea that we should not try and put two words together without first
consulting the literary elite to get a gauge on whether we are going in the
correct direction.
Michael talks a good game and has irritated a number of
professions with his punk approach to art, but in the end, even he seems to be
married to the academic standards he slowly loudly protests.
I guess my coming out of a working class tradition makes me
sympathize more with ritual, seeking to draw art out of something more inherent
in human nature than in the repeated diatribes professors give us.
I want to believe in people like Jack London are just as
valid literary snobs like T.S. Elliot (who I love despite his footnotes).
I want to think that there is hope for people like me, who
are not geniuses like Shakespeare, but who struggle to write about the birds
and bees, and the deeper human emotions I see in everyday people around me.
Shit, man, I’m only a street kid, who wants to mug and rape
you with pen and paper rather than a switch blade or a gun.
I want you to feel every thing I want you to feel, the high
emotions, the low, the good feelings, the bad, the bitter and the sweet. I want
to make you love me or hate me, want you to praise me or curse me, I want you
to cry when I say cry, and laugh when I say laugh. I want to be able to do
anything I want to you, take advantage of you, make you ache for me in ways
only my words can make you do.
I don’t want any academic master’s permission. In fact, what
I want most is to piss that person off, to make him eat his or her own words
about what he or she claims is great, to admit that anyone who works hard
enough and gets to know enough about the inner workings of people can achieve
greatness, even without first genuflecting in front of some poetic pope some
self-righteous critic, and better yet, I want some squirt of a writer who is
even young that me to come up and do exactly the same to me, to move me in ways
that I never imagined anyone could move me, not because he or she uses the
correct form, but because he or she has a handle on something I’ve never seen
or heard or read or felt before. I want that person to hit me harder than I
have ever been hit before, fuck me better than I could ever do, and to pour his
or her words over me in ways I could not do – and having done this to me, made
me want to do be that good. I don’t want to learn stupid rules of art, I want
to feel it in my bones, I want to be challenged by someone as good as I am or
better than I am, so I can become better, too.
I want to be Gaughan to Van Gogh, I want to feel so strongly
about art that I might be willing to cut off my ear or nose or some other
valuable part in order to create a masterpiece that is all mine, made possible
because someone else could create great things, too.
I came here to learn how to make what I do better – and find
that there are gates in the way, and guardians who make claims as to what shall
pass.
Fuck them!
Okay, so I’m hungry for concepts such as symbols and signs,
want to make love to every rose I see, bring down every glass house I walk
into, break down every egotistic, monolithic literary dynasty, create art
through revolution, draw out of common experience, raise up the rabble and
their feelings and their lives, and bring about true art that is not exclusive
and cannot be caged or contained.
Michael thinks I’m crazy. A lot of people do. Some even want
to stop me.
Let them try.
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