To be an artist requires a lot of time spent alone working on your art and on yourself.
Being alone is the first thing and most difficult part of getting a child to practice the piano. They are forced to spend time alone and children are by default social beings, as we also are, and most children seek playmates, someone to interact with, whether it be another child, a grown-up or a pet.
Drawing, painting or sculpting, no matter what it is, kids have an easier time doing that themselves because they become involved with their own work. But, it is still rather lonely work, and at the end of it kids always want to show it to you.
Dancing is something you can do in the company of others as most dance lessons are taught in a group, so you can develop friends and social contacts through dancing and possibly more important is becoming familiar with people of the opposite sex.
Singing is also an activity to do in a group like choirs. So, choirs can be a lot of fun for children and for grownups.
But, being a soloist in anything means to spend a lot of time working on yourself, and that forces you to be alone.
Nobody can memorize your lines for you. Nobody can do your fingerings for you, nor can anyone practice for you, or with you even.
The challenge of the arts is loneliness.
Most great actors don’t necessarily have big personalities. They can have big personalities but there is a side of them that is totally reclusive. To get into the mind of the role you must concentrate on the lines in a way that requires solitude, so you can become the person you are portraying.
In a way the arts are like sports in that you must harness your body to do them. But in sports there is one thing missing that makes it a bit less taxing and that is the mental and spiritual searching you do in the arts.
I know that in sports you have to dig in deep to in order to stay motivated and fit, but in the arts you become engrossed in the meaning of things. You are faced with defining everything you do on a much deeper and thoughtful level, and especially in the arts where you have to adapt to a role, you are morphing yourself inside to become true to it. That takes a lot of soul searching and getting close to your ego and ultimately surrendering yourself to the character.
When you study characters so intensely, you begin to be able to understand people in everyday life more and it isn’t always such a pleasant revelation. You begin to see yourself as a character and then everything in your life tends to be about choices rather than just living “off the cuff.” Every sentence you speak becomes edited, every response audited and every interaction evaluated.
Music, drama, and literature are all tied up in scoping the human condition.
Here is the problem with being alone and studying your art, yourself and the world: it takes you out of the world and makes you an observer. Everything you see is like a movie, unreal, surreal. The world is acting out a script and everyone is playing their roles to the tee and they wouldn’t change their ways because they think they are right about who they are and would never question it.
More tragically than that is the fact that people will judge you if you aren’t like them, when all they are is a choice too, but a choice chosen by someone else and forced into a mold.
It is this questioning of self in the arts that makes artists tick differently than “normal” people.
There is a claim people make that really bugs me and it is when people say, “I am the way I am, and if you don’t like it that is your problem.”
Well, people are the way they are because they were trained to be that way. Sure, there is a certain amount of born characteristics, but that has little to do with the choices people make. The idea that you can’t or won’t conform to others is simply avoiding the fact that you are the way you are to conform to the world you live in.
The real question is, who are you when you are alone? When there is no world around you to define you?
Having had looked in many mirrors, seeing the many different roles I have played I have come to realize that we are nothing but actors in a play. Without the play our character means nothing. That is okay.
But as artists, being alone means wrestling with your shadow. There is nobody to impress, no statements to make.
When you are alone with your art it is unclear what forces are in control. Do you control your art or does it control you?
Sometimes when I write a blog I am not sure what it is going to be about. This one is no different. It is a place to go or rather a path to go on to see where it takes you and sometimes it doesn’t take you anywhere, which is fine.
We don’t have to go anywhere, but we are free to. I guess that is the point really.
When we are alone we are occupying a space nobody knows about but us. There are no rules, nothing to break. So the stream of consciousness can flow without regard to limits or to what anyone else witll think about it. Travelling this path it is surprising what you will find out about yourself on the inside.
After all the rush in the world when do we really take time to spontaneously flow with our thoughts, digging deeply into our hearts and bringing it to bear in a place where we can write, and write and write and it has no consequence.
Rarely do we just search ourselves for inspiration, for feelings and for new ideas. We are so distracted with the lives we lead that we never examine our own being.
How can we know what we think, if we don’t think?
We are taught to think by the media, by our friends, family, jobs and churches. We are spoon fed what to think and are in the grasp of every Tom, Dick and Harry that has an opinion. We align ourselves with labels like conservative, liberal, christian, white, black, hispanic, male and female or whatever transgender affiliation one can subscribe to.
We are being taught to fit into a mind mold and are controlled by these thought bullies and led to believe that if we don’t think like them, we are awful people.
Being alone means you can remove the world’s bullshit and finally discover who you are.
“Someday soon we’ll stop and ponder what on earth is this spell we are under, we made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are.” Styx – The Grand Illusion.
If anything I want to break free from the conventions of the world, discover new ways of being, in a way I am calling back to the days of the Hippie, the 60s, when the youth of the world rebelled and said no we are not going to war, we are not going to hate, we are not going to live a lie and we are not going to be forced into a mold you want us to be in.
They could have been well advised not to do drugs, but most everything else was rather healthy actually.
Yes life requires us to do certain things to be a productive member of society, but is that really what we were placed on earth to be? A cog in the wheel?
I really don’t think so.
Maybe, we were meant to just live and be like the animals, in harmony with nature. No building cities or hospitals, no income tax or employers. No weddings or funerals and no money or greed.
When you watch the film, “The Gods Must Be Crazy” the bush man is free from our worldly entrapments. Of course he to is a victim of his upbringing, so he too would have difficulty breaking from the convention of his own life.
As I sit here, tired, sleepy and aching from a soreness that I don’t understand, I wonder, what am I doing? Really.
My thoughts take me to the narrow-mindedness rampant today. The way I see it, nearly everyone has been brainwashed. It is sad and a scary thing for me to observe.
I don’t want to become like that. I’ll do anything to not join the Matrix. I don’t want to tow the party line or join things that make me be a certain way or expect me to believe like they do. I am not a sheep to be herded with all the other sheep.
“God, please don’t make me be normal.” The Fantastics.
I am not saying I am better than others, I am just saying I don’t want to give myself up to other people’s ways in order to fit in. I guess I don’t want to fit in.
So in the self inflicted solitary confinement I am in, I search inside for what I am and determining whether it is important or not. If I don’t share my thoughts with others, does it make a difference that I have any? What is the point of thinking and creating ideas if I don’t tell others about them? Isn’t it a waste of time?
What good is my life, if I hide it from the world? Is it really a virtue to leave your genius behind to be found after you die? Am I so afraid of conflict that I run from it? Is it I just really am not into discussing my thoughts as facts at all. I hate arguing, besides, thoughts are fluid, and nothing is set in stone.
As I sit and struggle with the question of living a life on my own terms I think how much easier everything would be to just give in, join the matrix and go along with the crowd, saying the same phrases, repeating some lame political jargon and falling in line like a tin soldier.
Honestly, I’d rather die.
When an artist is alone, their potential increases. The deep space of the soul is there to be discovered and the treasures to be found are many. But, we must share our thoughts with the world, otherwise we are cheating the world of our existence.