(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

This morning, just before waking up, I dreamt that someone had cut back my (ex-)bonsai to almost a bare trunk, and for some reason this worried me to the point of tears; the kind of dream that makes you feel relief when you wake up to realise it has only been a dream. Odd.


I'm read too much trash, and only trash. It's rather pathetic.

Also, I think I might be getting a sore throat. As if I haven't got enough health issues (well, issue, singular, not to exaggerate) at the moment.


Randomness: Does it bother anyone else that art so often is the result of, or closely linked to, personal pain and unhappiness?



And, because it bears repeating, I really love Stadium Arcadium. So very beautiful, not only, but also in a powerful, good vibrations (awful phrase, but can't think of a better substitute at the moment), smile-on-my-face way.

Comments

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, now I'll actually have to think through what was little more than an off-hand late night remark... ;)

Do you mean, specifically, the kind of art that comes out of personal pain?

Yes and no. Maybe in a more general way of what inner force drives someone to create, makes it a veritable need to turn their thoughts and emotions, their perception of the world, into words or images. There often seems to be some kind of conflict or dissatisfaction, a search for an outlet of some kind behind that, rather than perfectly balanced happiness, although I'll readily admit that this assumption is based more on sentiment than researched facts, and in any case it would be more valid for the increasingly personalised art of the last few centuries than earlier ages, when the artist's person wasn't as important and the content of any work of art more determined by a patron's or society's wishes and expectations.

What triggered the sentiment in the first place was that while I'd been a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails a few years ago when I went through a period of depression, I can barely listen to the music any longer or watch the dvd from the last tour. Part of the reason is a near superstitious wariness of this onslaught of negative emotion and how it might influence me, but part is something a little different... there's even, in retrospect, a lingering sense of guilt (I don't pretend that this makes a lot of sense; most likely I'm being neurotic or over-sensitive) of having enjoyed it so much, of having, in a way, used someone else's personal pain to work through my own issues, especially knowing what since transpired about just how bad things were then, concerning drugs and whatnot.

With any work of art that becomes really meaningful and influential to me, book, music, whatever, I tend to look for some kind of - in a very lose sense of the word - connection with the artist, develop an interest in biographies, that kind of thing, and of course this, in return, at least sometimes influences my perception of the work.

And it increasingly bothers me to know the drug stories, the biographies of at least temporarily badly messed up or nearly destroyed lives behind the music I enjoy or enjoyed, while at the same time I have to guiltily wonder if, if it weren't for some common force behind, perhaps I wouldn't like it so much.

Books, too. Reading Thomas Mann against the background of his diaries can be quite heart-breaking.

But in the end I guess it's very likely that my perception is influenced and limited by my choice of favourite artists, who on the whole are not the happiest of people, and that my perspective of things is still more than a little skewed by depression...

And perhaps I was looking at too many Goyas and Boschs in Madrid. *g*


As for my pictures... At the risk of coming off extremely pretentious and pseudo-artsy, they're part of a tentative effort trying to re-connect to the world, seeing and recording my version of it. I used to do ceramic, ahem, sculpture-type thingies, which were almost exclusively introspective, an expression of emotion, until I'd come to a dead end, and photography forces me to look at the world outside myself for a change.