Westbeth, NYC

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

An individual who has committed himself to art and now wrestles within it, having given up everything else, has also become strict, you see.  Such a person is more likely to warn off others rather than to beckon them to enter into a realm of the most tremendous demands and indescribable sacrifices.  And for someone sitting at his desk, behind closed doors, matters are still relatively simple:  at least he has to deal only with himself.  But an actor, even when his work originates in the purest experiences of his being, stands in the open and performs his work in the open where he is exposed to all the influences, detractions, disturbances, and even hostilities that originate in his colleagues and his audience and that interrupt, distract, and split him off.  For him things are more difficult than for anyone else; above all, he needs to lure success and to base his actions on it.  And yet what misery results if this new alignment leads him to abandon the inner direction that had driven him into art in the first place.  He seems to have no self; his job consists in letting others dictate selves to him.  And the audience, once it has accepted him, wants to preserve him within the limits where it finds entertainment; and yet his achievement depends entirely upon his capacity to maintain an interior constancy through all kinds of changes, blindly, like a madman.  Any momentary weakness toward success is as sure to doom him as giving in and drawing on applause as a precondition for their creation spells doom for the painter or poet.

Ulrich Baer in The Wisdom of Rilke

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