Botanical, Bali

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

I am vitally interested in the man who today has the misfortune of being an artist and a human being.  By the same token I am as much interested in the maneuvers of the gangster as I am in those of the financier or the military man.  They are all part and parcel of society; some are lauded for their efforts, some reviled, some persecuted and hunted like beasts.  In our society the artist is not encouraged, not lauded, not rewarded, unless he makes use of a weapon more powerful than those employed by his adversaries.  Such a weapon is not to be found in shops or arsenals:  it has to be forged by the artist himself out of his own tissue.  When he releases it he also destroys himself.  It is the only method he has found to preserve his own kind.  From the outset his life is mortgaged.  He is a martyr whether he chooses to be or not.  He no longer seeks to generate warmth, he seeks for a virus with which society must allow itself to be injected or perish.  It does not matter whether he preaches love or hate, freedom or slavery; he must create room to be heard, ears that will hear.  He must create, by the sacrifice of his own being, the awareness of a value and a dignity which the word human once connoted.  This is not the time to analyze and criticize  works of art.  This is not the time to see the flowers of genius, differentiate between them, label and categorize.  This is the time to accept what is offered and be thankful that something other than mass intolerance, mass suicide, can preoccupy the human intellect.

Henry Miller in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Comments are welcome!