The Art of Anxiety

So apparently, Labor Day was the last day I posted on this thing. When you major in English and spend a lot of your time buried in the basement level of a library that gets all of its money from these legacy alumni who didn't major in a humanity, you just...get busy, and tend not to want to spend your free moments writing in an on-line journal. But for now, it's either this or the thesis, and I don't feel like expouding on the ways in which the Counter-Reformation influenced the development of vernacular language in its ecumenical relations with protestant politics.

In something of a literary vein, however, I'm growing tired of the existential struggle that comes with studying the humanities when a concept such as "meaning" continues to be subjectively appropriated and all one can really do is passively examine the various manifestations of this phenomenon without being able to circumvent this stasis of flux and grasp the ideal of Absolute Truth. Though perhaps it's believing in Absolute Truth that's the trouble...

The other day, I was meeting a friend at Starbucks to lend him my digital camera, when he pointed out this pair of what seemed to be angst-ridden disaffected youth trying to pull off this darkly-dressed-wandering-soul-reincarnation-of-Jack-Kerouak...thing. At a freakin' Starbucks! You can't be a non-conformist at a Starbucks, the grand capitalist symbol of suburban aesthetic similarity, and drinking coffee and growing a goatee doesn't make you artistic. Of course, for an educated crowd, the ideological holes in the concept of non-conformity are nothing new (hopefully), but the idea of subjectively constructed reality is always one approached with a level of caution because of the uncertainty it brings. Are we doomed forever to be content with a kind of formalist deconstructionism, where things mean what you want them to mean becauase nothing means anything, everything means nothing, and the relationship between signifier and signified is more adulterous than it was once thought to be? To what purpose is creating a persona for oneself, no matter how intellectually incredulous or rationally obtuse it may be, when it's only meant to be self-accomodating, and why must all other opinion be marginalized to the "to each his own" cliche when something such as this is so clearly devoid of existential thought?

I'm oddly fascinated by how sycophantic and self-serving our ideas of subjectivism and deconstructionism really are, as well as the extremes to which these ideas are taken, be it angst in a coffee house, the Jackson Pollock imitator who thinks he's capable of looking at the world in the abstract, the introspective academic who plays at insecurity, the athlete given in to the Adonis complex, or the guy who runs around chanting "spiritual, but not religious" as his own self-centered mantra without being able to tell anybody what it really means. Being rationally aware of assuming these kinds of archetypes (and sometimes a strange mix of any of them) is so disconcerting to me because doing so is all about you--all about the self. It's all a self-accomodating attempt at finding meaning, but what's even more bizarre to me is the construction of these kinds of realities in hopes of being externally validated, be it to "get someone to like you," gain something such as money, an audience, or sex, or simply to hide the person you really are when it's apparent the reality you're fabricating is a reaction to the fact that you really don't know who you are in the first place. All the same, this kind of personal creation is driven by a need that serves a single purpose: you.

And it's funny because doing this is what it means to be an "artist," or at least, taking a part in that exercise called "art" in either creating or imitating, often both. Of course, this kind of questioning and understanding of artistic expression has been around in the West since Plato, revived in the Renaissance, and abstracted in any number of ways in Modernity, so it's nothing new, but I'm simply still unsure of what to make of that fact that to be an "artist" means to be aware of yourself as a creator and imitator of reality, and thusly to possess the deepest anxiety; to possess no reality of your own when you realize that you yourself can be anything. Is art then merely a self-serving expression of self-aware insecurity and internally self-motivated desire, giving form to an inner formlessness that's subjectively inescapable? In that case, can art really be appreciated as "only art" from any perspective, when either you as an admirer are externally validating another person's art, or you as an artist are being externally validated? And even then, the trepidity of the Renaissance is revived in wondering what meaning lies in artistic creation when all it points to is either itself, or another person's self-interest, and ergo nothing real.

I suppose the motivation for all of this tenuousness is that I've recently written a poem and at first set out to share it, but the academic in me set out to thinking (which is probably never good). The recent helicopter crash in the middle east, referred to as "the deadliest day" in the history of our war with Iraq, was the final prompting to elegize the recent wave of devistation fallen upon humanity, the incessant hurricanes of 2004, the Indonesian tsunami, the suicidal maniac causing a train collision all being among its decimating crests. Each of these haphazard events deserve their own mourning and sensitivity towards the gravity of loss, but I suppose what struck me about this helicopter crash was that it's meaningless devistation within a meaningful cause (or is it?), and the lives of those willing to die for it were instead taken by nature's own capricious decree of finality. These questions concerning art and subjectivity worry me because I would like this poem to mean something, but readily admit that at its inception, it became an intellectual exercise in the effectiveness and place of poetry in the arena of global ammeliorization. Is it at all selflessly helpful when it's merely a manifestation of my own questioning as to the efficacy of aesthetics? I guess, for now, all I can do is bow to subjective experience...and let you be the judge.

(As a side note, I'm a sucker for the iambic tetrameter...embrace it!).

An Elegy

A deadly day on desert sands,
Far from home in foreign lands,
And fragile nature loses form,
Trampled dust beneath the storm.
By one man's whim compelled to fight,
Souls of soldiers take their flight,
While reason steels itself to will
So good men die but standing still.
What power then lies in this art,
When Nature's fabric falls apart?
Do Daphne's laurel leaves restore
That Troy Apollo's grace foreswore?
Oh wisest Pallas, noble Mars!
Name such men among the stars!
May all their souls salvation gain,
To honor Paradise with pain.
Should those who live forget this day,
And poetry thus fade away,
Remember such men's armored trust,
And set their cause among the just.

~~Michael Fancher, 2005