the rix mix

"A devotion to an end tends to undervalue the means. A power of revelation may make one more concerned about his perceptions of the soul's nature than the way of their disclosure."

Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata (1920)

There's a great composer's take on Ralph Waldo Emerson as a spiritual adventurer. Ives has not come to praise Emerson's poems. He has something else on his mind.

But in art, we do not undervalue the means, for that is our art, our process of creating it, & disseminating it. The essays came about as Ives prepared to publish his 2nd "Concord" Piano Sonata. We can wish he'd done more, sooner, to fight for his music - the Sonata waited 19 more years for a complete public performance - but perhaps then he would not have been Charles Ives. He was a genius with an astonishing work ethic. By the age of 50 he'd nearly worked himself to death. The genius ultimately protected & preserved the art. Ives took a great gamble. Composer/critic Virgil Thomson said Ives didn't "give his all" to music. Except Ives gave to his own insurance business what Thomson gave to the Herald Tribune, & no one ranks Thomson anywhere near Ives as a composer.

That's another tale. Three years ago I briefly went out with a woman I'd met at an arts networking night at a local coffeehouse. I was there because I often hung out at the place. Sometimes I brought my old Brother laptop word processor & wrote as I sipped an iced coffee. She was there because she wanted to be an artist. If you want to be an artist, I'm a good person to be around. For as much as I habitually say No to myself, I enjoy saying Yes to artists. But you're either in it or you're not. It's a mindset. Professional or amateur, vocation or avocation, makes no difference. Given the Yes she claimed to be seeking, she couldn't do it. It didn't come naturally to her, a woman in her late 40s, who always assumed there would be a time for her own art, as if an alarm clock would ring & she'd wake up & suddenly want to make paintings & go to galleries & look at lots of pictures & begin soaking up whatever experiences & influences she'd turned her back on for her entire life to that point. She couldn't make use of affirmation. She had other strengths, to be sure.

I am an artist. To remain an artist I've acted in ways that don't make me proud of myself. But you'd have to live with the constant, nagging No voice in my head to best understand the differences between success & failure in my life. Treading water is still staying afloat, & to me that's swimming not drowning.

Making art is what makes you an artist. Putting that art out in the world makes you a public artist. The choice then I guess is whether or not one also becomes one's art, in the manner of say John Cage or Marcel Duchamp, or any poet who performs in person before an audience. I knew what I was doing, & why, when I recently turned down a live gig. But I've always been a public artist, which is why occasionally I still receive unsolicited invitations to show up somewhere & read my poems. I'm glad I'm not a painter or sculptor, because then my art would be filling up all my space & I would be compelled to exhibit it. Compelled is the correct word. By emotional need & a sense of duty. I have more to write on this topic.