Oh, well, I think I can at least get this entry done. I have two thoughts to kick around. The first has to do with my opinion of myself. From the perhaps pretentious and definitely positive way I interpreted my poem in yesterday's entry, one would be justified in considering me conceited. That wouldn't bother me. There's another side to it, though: it is that I genuinely have trouble understanding why anyone could not have thrown together poems like mine. One isn't boasting if one claims to be able to do something just about everyone else could do. But, apparently, even with study and determination, most people would not be able to make a poem like mine.

To me, all you'd need to make such a poem would be a vocabulary, an ability to make analogies, and a sense of color. Wait. A desire to make art would be necessary, too. Perhaps that's the real rare thing, perhaps non-artists simply don't get the thrill from beauty that people like I do, so have little motive to try to make objects of beauty. Not that they are inert to beauty since just about everyone likes conventional gardens, for instance, just that that their liking for it is different in kind from an artist's.

However, it is true that certain abilities I have (or think I have) to such a degree that I feel like they came with my bones and blood, are not universal. Everyone has a vocabulary, but few have a flexible one (few having a superior accommodance, or ability to bobble things through varied permutations, so can't break out of conventionality of expression). The same problem keeps them from making fresh analogies. I remember, by the way, that I once--as a teen-ager--was in awe of writers who could make similes--of almost any kind. I felt I could not. I had trouble making the standardest comparisons, in fact. I can't remember when I suddenly started being truly metaphorical in my writing, but not till my twenties, if that early. It didn't seem like something learned, but like some organ within me suddenly matured. Good analogies still seem hard for me to come up with, though.

Working with colors seems more natural than just about anything to me. I suppose I could have learned what colors can effectively do with each other simply from my many years looking at reproductions of famous painting in books, or--a few times--real paintings in museums. But something started and kept me looking--again, the ability to get more pleasure from beauty, in this case, visual beauty, than others do?

My other thought for the day also has to do with why I'm an artist (all I've been saying being, ultimately, about that): it's safe. This struck me (not for the first time, I'm sure) while getting annoyed with both sides of one or another political question in the news, but not feeling I wanted to blast either of them for fear of alienating too many people. Hey, I'm an Aquarius, so friendship is very important to me! (It's my moon in Aries that makes me so violently argumentative.)

Seriously, very few people would go along with my political views, or even be able to avoid getting upset by them. My religious views are pretty innocuous but would offend any thorough believer in any current organized religion. And I'm about as politically-incorrect as can be. For instance, I believe that there are significant innate differences between the sexes. I could go on, but--as I said--I really really do not like alienating people. I do, anyway, because I can't keep from exploding at the activities of the people I consider enemies of poetry from time to time, and because I like to argue, so do that--strongly--at websites devoted to the Shakespeare Authorship "Question," which is about the least volatile subject one can have disputes about, being not very political or religious.

My point is, I feel a consideration in my choosing to be an artist, and an art-for-art's-sake artist, has been my preference for a socially peaceful life. Beauty is my chief desire, but avoiding agitation an important secondary desire.

COMMENTS

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