We Are For The Cheque

I hand her the manuscript. She looks at it the way I looked at that chipped beef on toast I looked at during the last convention, and then she starts to hand it back to me, but then I shake my head and start to hand it back to her.

"For me," I say. "A gift. I've typed a lot, and then still more. I want the dough."

She is standing with her back to the great reddish-yellow neon sign of this bank, and it seems to me that light is streaming from her as it does from a cash register, that she is glowing, that she is luminous, that she is brilliant, that she is gleaming, that she is herself becoming a cash register.

"Mammon save you, Lady," I say quietly.

All of the words of the galaxy are whirling about me, around me, within me, through me, above me. I will type them all. I will take this contract and take what it pays, until I take another.

"Mammon save you," I say quietly. "Mammon save you, Lady."

I am alive. I am aglow. I am agog. I am typing at random. I am filling the pages. I am pouring into the trough. I am winning a Hugo, a Nebula, a Mars bar. I am going on and on and on and on and on. I am slaughtering the verb To Be in a great sacrifice.

"Mammon save you," I say quietly. "Mammon save you, Lady," I say quietly. Soon I will be saying it again.

-- From, "We Are For the Cheque," by Robert Silverberg.

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[Monday, August 31, 2020.]

Life Is Not A Problem To Be Solved

I suspect that, for many people, the sadness, anxiety, and confusion of life are problems to be solved, but for people who work in (pardon this hollow term!) "art," the pains of life are fuels that drive (pardon this one!) "creativity."

Experience, and reflection upon experience, are what allow people to write, draw, compose, dance, build. Others, uncompelled to do such things, emphasize recovery, closure, "moving on," but these healthy responses would harmfully deprive "creative" people of the forces that drive their work.

This is the paradox of mental pain: most of us, quite understandably, hate pain of the private skull, steer away from it however we can, and work to overcome it when it strikes, but for others, mental pain is what makes work necessary. Without broken hearts and minds, would we have the arts at all?

All Dreams End

At the end of a complex dream, I held my last girlfriend close, and said, "I'm sorry to be so difficult: I never expected anyone to love me back."

Maniacs Of Music

Click for a better jpeg.

Although I've never understood jazz (in all of its variety, a complex form of music), I could probably understand jazz fanatics, because I, too, am fanatical. Many of us in the "classical" world are wild-eyed maniacs, always in search of that elusive live bootleg CD of Klemperer and the Orange County Abbatoir Philharmonic performing the undestroyed Sibelius Eighth, or of Reiner's doubly rare phonebooth recording of the Scriabin "Scratch 'n' Sniff" Concerto.

But for unbridled rabid devotion, nobody, no human being, can match an opera fan. Even baseball fans, with heads full of batting averages that go back a century, are no match for opera fans, with heads that go back to Monteverdi.

Opera fans are the Star Trek fans of the music world, and their well-stocked brains, like an Escher print, twist and recoil back and forth in tunnels that no sane lover of sound could imagine.

Compare Your Work To The Work Of Others

Should you compare your work to the work of other people?

Yes. No.

Yes, because craft will always be a set of skills worth assessing and, if the skills match your needs, worth acquiring.

Yes, because other people might reach depths of individuality, thought, and emotional courage that you have not yet fathomed. Their willingness to peer through telescopes at the world, and through microscopes into the pits of their own personal hells, can strengthen your own resolve to face your own obsessions.

No, because the concerns of other people are not necessarily your concerns, and because their techniques will not suit your intended purposes.

No, because other people can gain popularity when they reflect the Zeitgeist back to itself, when they provide, not interrogations, but echoes of any fads or delusions that have gripped the public. From this you can only learn what not to do; learning to work as you need to work is a task both separate and central.

Yes. No. Choose with caution.