Art and Honor

Works and Love. Art, poetry, writing as creative art, but for sure as well, science, endeavor, all labors and everyday sweat-to-purpose productivity: without love it’s nothing. True Love, true labors of love, even in the long long lifelong of them - whether running deep in calm waters, or dashing and turbulent, drama-filled, wearing on riverbed rock - alone render any possibility of meaning, worth. Love is the only substance.

At some point (at a decidely mature, probably hard-learned, and wise point), it demonstrates greater love to work to ensure that its expression is drama-free, respectful of energy costs, and not draining; but the always youthful, passionate, intense drama for love’s dream isn’t contradictory in its readiness for conflict. For career and relationships in real life, too much acting out the dramatic ala stage and screen is inadvisable overall, yet you need relentless urge to take you forward. Is the Beloved worth fighting for? Is the beloved object/subject of our pursuits worth it? - especially when so many societal modes conspire to deny it meaning (and money), to deny its intrinsic meaning and meaning-making. Glorying in intrinsicality is love’s mode.

“A love that did not advance could never renew itself.” - John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

Inspiration planted the pole of the poet's banner into his heart and he writhes beneath it, spitted! 

If he finds the strength to pull it out, and stand, he’ll heal immediately (magickally) and henceforth as he waves its blood-splattered hues, he'll know which end is his consecrated weapon.

He can walk with dignity now.    

For the artist who engages to do what art can do like nothing else, nothing is more honorable than to devote oneself to this calling in all its purity. In defiance of circumstances and outcomes.

For any and every form of love, to fail to honor this intrinsicality is to betray it.

Maybe it’s beginning to sound like I’m edging towards a plea for chivalry, for an attitude and orientation marked by some knightly quality, courteous and quixotic, dependent on the kindness of others, upholding civility and altruism as what the world needs now.

When I say the word “honor” to myself, when I hear the word “honor,” I hear Antonin Artaud - and if there’s some medieval smut in there of aristocracy, it’s flecked on the windmills taking high ground along an uncompromising road to El Dorado. Whiff of nobility, for real, for the real - for reality’s infinite whirl.

Artaud uses the word in this way¹:

     les aliénés authentiques des asiles se sont gardés...
     Et qu’est-ce qu’un aliéné authentique? 
     C’est un homme qui a préféré devenir fou, dans le sens où socialement on l’entend, que de forfaire à une certaine idée supérieure de l’honneur humain.

     “The genuinely insane men in asylums protect themselves… 
     And what is a genuine lunatic? 
     He is a man who prefers to go mad, in the social sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain higher idea of human honor.”

Honor, Honneur
     from "Van Gogh le suicidé de la société" by Antonin Artaud, "Van Gogh: the Man Suicided by Society," translated by Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 

     From the same piece: Ça va mal parce que la conscience malade a un intérêt capital à cette heure à ne pas sortir de sa maladie. “Things are bad because the sick conscience now has a vital interest in not getting over its sickness.”   

Setting madness aside (cavalierly, in keeping with setting honor to the fore), the world reflects itself in us, and resistance can take on forms that look distorted to the already warped. In a corrupt society, the person with integrity looks the fool. If Artaud not only forewrote but lived to precurse R.D. Laing and anti-psychiatry insights - how not only difficult but even unreasonable it can be to stay sane in an insane world, how certain manifestations of mental illness can be interpreted as natural responses and adaptations to prevailing lunatic conditions - then through a similar refraction, in a violent and greedy world, where baseness gets ahead and noble forebearance is for chumps, where nothing profits an endeavor except profits, to uphold incorruptibility (even as an ideal, if you’re for real about it) is really quite twisted! Also culpable with pretension, self-righteousness. Yet, the core of a healthy soul is incorruptible, and one’s own self sense of that - as crucial as conscience to morality - is personal honor.

I hate and renounce as a coward every being who consents to having been created and does not wish to have recreated himself,   i.e., who agrees with the idea of a god, at the origin of his being as at the origin of his thought.

I hate and renounce as a coward every being who agrees not to have been self-created, and who consents to and recognizes the idea of a matrix nature as the world of his already created body.

…

I hate and renounce as a coward every being who is unwilling to consecrate his whole life to the control as well as to the reorganization of the buried, unfounded and uncreated being of this thought.

- Artaud, David Rattray translation

How personal does it get? - deep into the void of being. When love, taking conflict to heart, Heraclitean Strife, has that intensity and willingness to go all the way, crosses that red line, thin line, into a radical - per Artaud, ontological - hatred, revolutionary hate and love indistinguishable, then at last something from ruins can be truly new or renewed. The abrupt, the surprising - spontaneity is destructive of the status quo.

I lost track of the source of the following quote from Artaud (feel free to help). Perhaps it’s apocryphal.

The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.

Make way for inwit, upsurge, irruption. Affirmative, there’s a stinger attached to all this, crusty and pointed, poised to strike.

We all know: to uphold honor and integrity as a way of conducting our business and our art, come what may, that’s the true success. Then again, success was never the issue, at core. The work has to root through to its own existential worth in the depths; fruit and flower are surface signage. Along a creative flash’s vertical axis abides the intrinsicality of honor and honoring.

In the end, beyond making and doing, we demonstrate who we are by our manner of enduring. Endurance includes stubborn resisting of conditions that would disintegrate us, but such resistance is a kind of singing. Presence cleaves through enclosing hollowness - rings through the air, a crystalline avowal of existence. Song of staying true to life, to being. It’s good to be aware of those inward rhythms that arrive ahead of an unbargained-for melody: for the first time in a long while, you might be surprised.

Alice Notley has a way into this singing true against the given,² for and from whatever arises.

righteousness is disgusting, says Notley, but at the same time, the singular self is larger than the planet, and the local is certainly part of the international...

the human animal bound to the globe in its suffering - which would seem to be its knowledge, but why? - must face its suffering as an entity self-invented eons ago and not caused by others for it (one) is the other. Please listen. 

Plus, from her "The Poetics of Disobedience," it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all.

This is a persistent feeling in a poet but staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience, sense and reason is a huge task. 

It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against... everything. 

1. in Artaud Anthology, edited by Jack Hirschman

2. Alice Notley, Telling the Truth as It Comes Up