It's like you, as a writer, constantly run across other writers who just bedazzle you with their talent. Their talent so sharp, so clear, it forces you to consider the idea of giving up writing and becoming a plumber. Or . . . if you're lucky . . . an accountant. Or maybe a trapeze artist. Or a crash test dummy.
Richard Godwin is that kind of talent. I read his material and walk off with my head down and mumbling to myself like a Coptic monk suffering through a religious crisis. Yeah, he's that good. His style, the way he slings words on the screen or paper, the ability to lure the reader deep into a story, all the hallmarks of a writer with exceptional talents.
It's not that I'm jealous or envious of his abilities (HELL! Who am I kidding!!) . . . it's just that why does my friend have to be so damn talented AND so gosh durn handsome at the same time! The world is a cruel, cruel mistress, me buckeroos. And Karma . . . Karma is a bitch. (I must have been a very bad boy in a previous life to get the mugshot I claim as my own currently. Very bad)
Anyway. Richard is always a fascinating conversation to wade into so I thought I'd ask him to share some thoughts over whatever struck his fancy. What struck his fancy is a miniature thesis on what is Art and where does it come from. It is both fascinating and thought provoking. So sit back and take your time perusing through the writing. I think you'll find yourself enthralled.
(Damn! Talented AND good looking AND an intellect!! Karma . . . you bitch!)
THE DIVIDE, Richard Godwin.
There have been many
debates about art and where it comes from and what rules govern it and at the
end of the day maybe no one knows.
Friedrich Nietzsche
posited the theory that it stems from a basis tension between the old Greek
gods Apollo and Dionysus, Apollo representing law and Dionysus chaos.
In his first seminal
work ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ he wrote:
‘...we have considered
the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic energies which
burst forth from nature herself ...first in the world of dreams, whose
completeness is not dependent upon the
intellectual attitude or the artistic culture of any single being; and then as
intoxicated reality...’.
This idea of intoxicated
reality runs like an undercurrent through all the theories of creativity.
Rimbaud used it for his
poetry.
Keats wrote of
imagination that it was Like Adam’s dream ‘he awoke and found it true’.
There is a central issue
of control.
If you paint with
watercolour you have to let go of control, or you will paint shit.
The colours run.
That is why Turner is
probably the greatest watercolourist and a great oil painter, he knew his
media. He also cleverly created many paintings of the sea, which is fluid.
It’s like tipping the
monster out of the pot.
The ego stands in the
way.
What are you evoking?
During the 1960’s and
1970’s in the US
a number of works were performed which transgressed the traditional boundaries
of Western genre in the arts.
Jim Morrison urged his
fans to ‘ride the snake’. Morrison also spoke of his reading in ‘The Birth of
Tragedy’ of the primal Dionysian art as the spirit of music.
Morrison moved his
performances towards shamanistic theatre.
Interestingly Mircea
Eliade, author of Shamanism: Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy writes of shamans:
‘they
express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung
from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be
reconciled at some illud tempus of eschatology, and on the other, the coincidentia
oppositorum in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by
turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and
destructive, solar and serpentine.’
Morrison’s
‘The Lizard’ took nearly half an hour to perform in concert and is an act of
descent.
We’re
into the underworld and back to the same divide.
Aristotle
based much of his philosophy around a basic opposition and Alfred Korzybski,
the Polish semanticist argues in ‘Science and Sanity ’ that mental pathology within
Western cultures stems from a basic confusion of signifier with signified, in
other words thinking that a table is identified with the verbal label we attribute
to it.
He
used to thump the table in his lectures and say ‘this is not a table’.
He
also saw the basic either/or basis for Western thinking as its primary flaw.
Hegel
moved it on in ‘Phenomenology of Sprit’ where he sought a unity stemming from
the synthesis resulting from the uniting of his thesis and antithesis, although
his may be a variation on the Christian trinity.
Like
John Cage, Morrison was drawn to the Lord of Misrule’s carnival.
David
Bowie said ‘I know one day a big artist is going to get killed on stage.’
Alice
Cooper enacted much of the Dionysian on stage, throwing live chickens into the
audience, axing dolls to death.
The
acid trip, under the influence of Timothy Leary became a religious experience a
sign for the Trips Festival read: ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS A GOD GO UP ON STAGE.
There
is a strong sexual element to this, as Euripides’s play ‘The Bacchae’ illustrates,
Bacchus being the Roman version of the Greek God.
When
Dionysus sheds Eros his energy turns negative.
He
becomes the Devil, as Norman O. Brown shows in ‘Life Against Death’ as the form
of excrement, waste and ‘filthy lucre’.
Then
something happened at Altamont.
After
Santana opened a freaked out kid tried to get on stage. The Rolling Stones had
hired Hell’s Angels as body guards, they dived into the crowd with five-foot
pool cues.
While
the Rolling Stones waited for darkness the Hell’s Angels taunted the crowd with
contempt. Then they parodied the rituals of religious cults. Sol Stern, a
former Ramparts magazine editor, wrote:
‘One of them, wearing a wolf’s head, took the microphone and played the flute
for us – a screeching, terrible performance; no one dared to protest or shut
off the microphone.’
Why?
Why
didn’t they protest?
Because
they were caught up in group psychology.
Why
do leaders use it?
It’s
good for business.
The
Mediterranean wolf cuts and the flute music of Dionysus, the wild music of the joujouka – the vestigial music of the
God which had entranced Brian Jones, Bryan Gysin, William Burroughs, Paul
Bowles and Ornette Coleman – had come to this, a preparation for a star.
Into
the darkness of Altamont, through the protective circle of the Angels on the
blood-spattered stage, came the Stones, led by Mick Jagger in a black and
orange cape and tall hat.
They
played well but their music spoke out the interface between savagery and
erotics, between the controls of art and the controls of magic, between Apollo
and Dionysus. Jagger began ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – ‘They call me Lucifer and
I’m in need of some restraint’. The earlier Angels’ attacks now climaxed. In
the spotlights, when Jagger went on singing this number, they stabbed to death
a black youth from Berkeley named Meredith Hunter. Panic-stricken Jagger tried
to cool the screaming people, but the death ritual operated as part of his own
performance.
The
antithesis maybe at the root of art and sexuality.
Blood
may flow from its veins.
Cultures
create their own paradigms.
The
scientists are the new priests if you believe in their religion.
Korzybski
believed that hieroglyphic sign systems are healthier than ours because they
use images.
Consider
flint.
Strike it and there’s a
spark.
We are as Shakespeare
wrote in ‘The Tempest’
‘We are such stuff As
dreams are made on; and out little life Is rounded with a sleep.’
I examine the themes in
Apostle Rising
and Mr. Glamour.
