PoM 213
Can art be useful to Recovery?
Part One…Money
A musician is someone who buys a $5000 instrument, to drive 500 miles in a $100 car to play a $50 gig.
Mark Twain, in his Autobiography, Vol. III, says “The artist breed…is foggy in matters pecuniary”.
So, we are generally broke as snakes.
Artists also, like alcoholics, are rebellious:
“I am not one of your players of music, stage actors, writers of books, or painters of pictures, who assume a station that the laws of their country don’t recognise.”
The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens
Drunks and artists don’t want you telling them what to do…and there is a reason:
According to the Swiss psychotherapist Alice Miller artists are people who, whether they know it or not, have had challenging childhoods and have found a way to treat that wounding by expressing themselves through the arts.
So, when people try to talk us into stopping and getting a job, a haircut, a suit or life insurance, even if we reluctantly agree, all that pain of childhood comes screaming back.
So, drunks and artists stay pretty much alone…and broke.
PoM 214
Part Two…The Amateur versus the Pro
Being an artist has nothing to do with talent or being professional. We can be complete, joyous amateurs:
“Really, Fred, I wish you would leave off playing the flute. A man looks very silly playing the flute.” “And you play so out of tune, a wheezy performance, into which he threw much ambition and an irrepressible hopefulness.”
Middlemarch
George Eliot
“I don’t see why a lady should sing. Amateurs make fools of themselves.”
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
“For every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises.”
Gustavo Flaubert
Madame Bovary
My teacher, John Cage’s favorite composer was Eric Satie who used to exclaim, “Viva la amateur!”
Part Three…Fame
People don’t think much of musicians:
Q: What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless
Mr. Pecksniff had no objection to music; not the least. He was tolerant of everything. He considered it a vagabond kind of trifling, in general”.
Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit
“He was some sort of travelling musician, indolent and feckless”.
Les Miserables
Victor Hugo
Yet, we worship talent:
“Even you can’t understand the wrath of the artist: he is of another caste than you.”
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
“She has all the anguish and anxiety of the artistic personality…without any of the talent….You worship talent!”
Interiors
PoM 216
Part Four…Success
Still, artists want success:
Q: What’s the difference between a musician and a pizza?
A: A pizza can feed a family of four.
“Mirah had risen from her seat and stood looking toward him with her little hands crossed before her, meekly awaiting judgment; then with a sudden unknitting of his brow and with beaming eyes, he stretched out his hand and said abruptly, “Let us shake hands: you are a musician.”
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
“We are descended from solid, stolid, thick-skulled, unimaginative, unmusical, ungraceful, German stock whose sole virtue is that it can never leave off working.”
Dead Eye Dick
Kurt Vonnegut
There are 30 million guitar players in America.
There are only 3 new jobs for talented new guitar stars each year.
Those odds are one in 10 million.
The Lotto Jackpot is only one 14 million.
PoM 217
Part Five…Peace of mind
What if you are not a professional, have modest talent, are not famous and receive no money?
“amidst the new abundance of music, and lingering strolls in the sunshine, could hardly be without some intoxicating effect on her…after her years of privation”.
George Eliot
Mill on the Floss
When this strain of music sounded, he softened more and thought that if he could have listened to it years ago he might have cultivated happiness with his own hands”.
Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
The great Jewish psychotherapist and longtime friend of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, said in his masterpiece “Art and Artists” that artists create a “second super-real world” and that if you fail to create art of some kind, you will become neurotic… Because you are disconnected from your soul.
That is a good reason to pursue art…to connect to your soul.