flesh and bone

the space inside a human being

lungs and heart working in unison

happy little landscape

shadow of myself

Selfishness

For me the risk does not come in making art, the risk is in compromise.

Don’t want to spend all my energy on sortof creative profession like teaching, for me that would be a kind of failure. I’ve done it before. My dilemma is to be unable to sacrifice the integrity of what I do. Selfish or maybe self -indulgent, isn’t it, to just want to create and live off the system.

‘The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about 30 they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end…’ Orwell

Sometimes it would be nice to write without having to censor. The thing about painting/ drawing is that it is total self -effacement, it is in and of yourself but not in a vain, fixed way. Writing about your self is much less satisfactory. Words are so strong and linear and I don’t necessarily think like that.

Songs and Sparrows.

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eye
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

W.B.Yeats

Too often the contribution people have in them to make is not wanted

Or the contribution they make is misused or misunderstood..

Orwell ‘…if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged- something like a house sparrow- and one gets on better if one realises one’s position from the start.’

One does, does one? Maybe this is something I needed to know.