G. Steve Journal

Beautiful Responsibility

There may be as many reasons explaining what motivates a person to express themselves creatively as there are artists, but one of those reasons has to be the desire to, as Julia Margaret Cameron once recorded: "...arrest all beauty that came before me."

Recently came across some excerpts from the writings of Viktor Frankl that perhaps explains that desire more fully:

...it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! ... [W]hat we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality...  In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe....the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.

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Things As They Are

Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange chronicled the era for the Farm Security Administration and created one of the iconic images of that time, "Migrant Mother."

In a recent virtual presentation, MoMA curator Sarah Meister reveals that Lange displayed in her studio, the following quote from Francis Bacon:

 

                                                             The contemplation of things as they are
                                                              without substitution or imposture
                                                              without error or confusion
                                                              is in itself a nobler thing
                                                              than the whole harvest of invention.

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Fluid Questioning

Songwriter Andrew Bird on how he writes a song:

It’s kind of a racket. When I step onstage I feel myself adopting that comedian’s posture, a shrug of the shoulders that says, “I don’t know, folks. We’re all just puzzling through it together. I’m not going to pretend to have the answers but here’s what I’ve seen.”

To emerge from creative hibernation with my perfect oeuvre and worldview fully realized feels stifling and boring. And while I’m anything but an exhibitionist I have this perverse impulse to introduce half-written songs and invite the trouble that it might bring. Maybe I’m saying to my former teachers, “Look, by your standards I’m failing, but it feels great.” But mostly it’s that I just prefer a fluid questioning present to a fixed past.

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