Validate me
What is your profession?
Writer. Though I’d call it a vocation.
Of course you would (smirks to self: no doubt he’s an “artist”). And what kind of writer might you be?
Oh, all sorts. Novelist, poet, journalist.
And how does a novelist, poet, journalist live?
Writing novels, poems, and reportage.
What I mean to get at is, how do you make a living? For whom do you write? You say you're a journalist. Of what journal?
All. And none particular. Free-lance.
I see; so unemployed.
That'd be the dysphemism.
So you have no respectable income.
Monetary, I suppose you mean.
Your supposition is correct.
He who undertakes decisively to live by his pen alone is certainly at a loss for material amenities. Though the pursuit is ennobling, and enriching, in other ways. So at least he convinces himself.
One needs to eat and lodge, however.
I have found that to be true.
And how do you plan to rectify your station?
Now it's you that's using euphemisms.
Very well. How do you plan to recitfy, Mr Shweky, your current state of—economical—penury? (Another hrmfing to self: Never mind your ennobled soul... A mocking he-he ringed his mind; he both heard and visualized its onomatopoeia. He had contempt for these ostensible “artists”—the self-called ones even more so than the so-called ones.)
One hopes it will rectify itself, in time. But the concern must always be to fashion something of worth, whether or not of value to the current market. “No man…can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.” I have, albeit begrudgingly, taken what one—what you—would call certain “practical steps” towards that end, to “employ the crowd.”
Which would be…
A popular online forum, where one can monetize one’s…little hobbies and self.
You seem to have some trouble keeping a contemptuous tone out of your statements.
I wasn't trying.
Why so contemptuous, then?
Having been baited, I feel an odd fish in a bowl of blowfish. A corsair in a sea of internet anglers, fly-casting for attention.
Explain.
I see nothing invidious in promoting one's work. You may consider art or knowledge apart from, say, the productions of a carpenter or cobbler. (No one’d suggest the artigiani forgo their workshop’s salary.) Tolstoy and Federov, united in this view, believed in forgoing payment for art and knowledge, respectively. Art is singular, but it is not apart; for the artist who produces it, a forger of imagery, is as much a man, however spiritualized he may presume himself, as the forger of objects. An artistic production contains a singular message, an expression; each individual imbibes the world uniquely through his sensorium, and every artwork presents a unique, idiosyncratic angle to the numinous world. Respect to Tolstoy, there is nothing reprehensibly materialistic in selling one's productions. The most invaluable resource any individual has is not, in the end, material, but time. To speak of time as ‘lost’ is not quite right, for it never can be found again. It can evidently be wasted. Often the artist, to make art, is better off selling his work than selling his time to jobs which, so far as his personal production are concerned, would waste it. Recompense allows artist or artisan to allocate more of his time to the creative act, as opposed to manual (I’ll not be so condescending as to say menial) labors of the utilitarian sort. If the patron sees the artisan's contribution to the times better placed in his workshop than elsewhere, in the studio than in the factory, over the canvas than over the turret lathe, a fair and just transaction takes place. It is the particular way we go about it that instills in me a feeling of plasticity.
Explain further.
In these lordless days every internet idol is his own godhead. Even private individuals, having no work to promote, live through their own simulacrum, a self-fabricated representational self. We’ve each erected underneath us a digital stage; we are the star. Life is the show. We are all an exhibit; we are all a spectator. The goal is to amass as large an audience as possible. Not as discriminating an audience—numbers is what counts here, so to speak. The symbols of this religion are thumbs, hearts, stars, checks, and smiley faces. Through these we come to validate ourselves, our actions. Validate me. Confirm me. Tell me I’m liked. Make me feel I’m accepted. By whom? Who cares. By enough of them, the unknown mass of them. The comment-leavers. Here we have a new form of the old religious ‘confirmation’. The more we pile up of these affirmative symbols the further we are validated. We even rely on others to confirm our choice of dinner, it enhances the experience to know that others watch our decadent dining. Every fleeting event is a spectacle. We all eat vicariously of each other’s minor experiences, and experience nothing directly, viscerally. We find sanction for our adopted lifestyle in the blither and piffle of a comments section—that frenzied vortex of sputtering poison, spluttering nonsense. The result is carcinoma of the soul. Eventually we come to confuse our social face, caked with maquillage, with our true countenance, suppressed underneath. We have become our avatars.
Yes?
Modernity presents a pathetic case for the writer. Our day hyperfocuses on the relatability of the messenger—nevermind the message. This world concerns itself ever more on the author as opposed to the authored. The author has supplanted the text; the playwright has superseded the play; the actor, the acts and scenes; the politician overthrows his politics. The persona has taken the place of the person. In the culling carping eyes of public curators, the artist takes precedence over his art. The author is no longer behind the text, but has emerged before it.