The Artful Life
What does it mean to live artistically?
Morning. Before the sun. Cold. Coffee. Solitude. The shed, where I write, holds everything I need and some of what eludes me.
I've been thinking a lot about what I didn't know when I was younger. How I had no understanding of the ghosts of artists that were buried in me. How I had no emotional mechanism for why I was drawn to music, songwriters, and authors of prose and poetry. When I was 10 years old, I asked my mother if I could have a poster of Van Gogh's Starry Night to hang in my bedroom. I loved the intensity of Van Gogh but didn't know why, didn't even know how to correctly pronounce his name. But somewhere I saw his paintings and was transfixed. It was the same with the Beatles and other songwriters—Neil Young, Dylan, Joni Mitchell. What was it that drew me to play guitar, piano, and to write songs (although rather rudimentary and sentimental) at 15 years old? And the books. All those books. First it was Jack London's Call of the Wild, a book my mother insisted every young boy or girl should read. In time, it was Kerouac and Hemingway and Dylan Thomas. Still, I couldn't recognize what it was that had me hooked. What was it that burned inside and compelled me to lie in bed late at night with a small flashlight reading the lyrics to Dylan's "She Belongs to Me?"
She's got everything she needs
She's an artist, she don't look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black
She's an artist. What does that mean?
Decades later, I'm still attempting to fully answer the question only to find more questions. What does it mean to live artistically? To live like an artist? To live an artful life?
Although the questions remain, there are a few things I think I've come to understand.
One does not have to be a household name, famous or otherwise, to consider yourself an artist or to live like one. To be an artist is not to gain fame. Only a very few reach that level. In fact, fame might hamper the artful life. What one must be is deliberate. As Thoreau wrote, "live deliberately." Every experience might be a story to tell, every moment a poem, a painting. Forget about following a straight line. Roam. Take the "road less traveled" even if those roads are short and paved. One does not have to blaze mountain trails to live an artistic life. The artful life is also about solitude, embracing long stretches of creative aloneness. And maybe above all, it is the kind of life that one must live—it's what you are, what you do, how you move through your days. There simply is no other way.
Why when I was a boy, did I have these embers inside of me? Where did they come from? Why is it that one boy dreams of being a shortstop for the Yankees, another a marine biologist, and another a painter? The answers are more complex than I have the capacity to examine.
The other night I watched the documentary It Might Get Loud. I was late to the game on this film, first released in 2009. Three legendary guitarists—Jimmy Page, The Edge (U2), and Jack White—came together on a soundstage to talk about the magical lure of the guitar. What it turned into was a musical mosaic of three men who had and are still living the artful life. The film was far deeper than a trio of musing over a six-string musical instrument. It was about art and its undeniable hold on them. A day before, I was reading a review of Patti Smith's new publication, Book of Days, one year of short essays and photographs. (She has taken pictures with her old Polaroid camera for decades.) Her agent says Smith has a "hot brain." She is always in "a state of movement" in her mind, the artistic mind. I can relate. And last night when I couldn't sleep, I began reading my used copy of The Wild Boy by one of my favorite authors, Paolo Cognetti, a writer who reveres nature, the mountains, solitude, and whose work is contemplative and atmospheric. Cognetti writes that when a boy, he, like me, found himself perplexed over what was bubbling inside of him, about why he was drawn to stories and the deliberate life.
There is no true comparison between how I try to live and how these enigmatic artists live and work, only that the artful life manifests at every degree of public awareness, small and large. And that is part of the larger point. One should not compare or evaluate one's work next to the work of others. True art does not exist in hierarchies. That's capitalistic art, materialistic art, art judged by sales, by museum exhibitions, by packed concert halls. The artful life is not about the bestseller list at The New York Times or the top songs on the Billboard charts. Yes, we can be inspired by Page, Smith, or Cognetti, but we must not compare our own "artfulness" to theirs. Living the artful life is not a competition.
So here I sit. Where I'll sit many times again, alone, writing, recalling a boy who was swallowed in contemplativeness, wondering what to make of all the churning inside, the longing, and who now as an aging man is doing all he can to continually stoke the fires of yearning because he knows there is no other way to live.