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Two Recent topics:
passion, salvation, and the ordinary writer...

Two recent topics I have been thinking about are the passion and salvation of art and the ordinary writer.

I was watching 60 Minutes on Sunday night and got my first introduction to Gustavo Dudamel, the young man who has just been hired to conduct the LA Orchestra. During the interview, Dudamel talked about why he is passionate about music. As he conducts, he asks musicians (some old enough to be his grandfather) to reach deeply into themselves, he wants the passion, he wants blood.

It occurs to me that this is what I want of my own writing and also of my students' writing. Like Dudamel, I feel an almost messianic zeal about my art. Where does this come from? Like Dudamel, who grew up poor in Venezuela and who was saved from poverty by music, I also feel I was saved by writing. When I speak of poverty, I don't mean money, but poverty of the soul. I think Dudamel also means poverty of the soul.

The second topic is something that came up on a private message board that I contribute to. The question arose: what writer would you give up your life savings to study with? My answer was no one: that everything there is to learn about writing is there, in the books, in the novels and stories. I said that most writers are actually very ordinary people, not very interesting at all, that all their passion is in their work. All their wisdom is condensed in their writings. Afterwards, someone posted a quote by Oscar Wilde that she had found in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I had never seen the quote and was surprised at the way it expressed my sentiments:

"Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise."

Then I made the point that there are some artists who are geniuses, who are flamboyant, who are Dionysian, but that they pay a high price for that: I mentioned Dylan Thomas. Another person mentioned Rimbaud. Then I remembered Oakley Hall, the young man who is the subject of the documentary, The Loss of Nameless Things. Hall was a young playwright and director who was having great success in NY, until his fiery personality and lifestyle led to his falling from a bridge and damaging his brain. He is still alive but has in large part lost his ability to be creative. He is not the same person he was.

For my part, I think I am happy to be ordinary in my life and to live out my passion through my art. I do mourn the loss of great talents like Oakley Hall, though. I really do.