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[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
As I alluded to in an earlier post in this series, I am a writer. There's far too much of my text all over the Internet, in notebooks, document files, work guides, forum posts, and journal entries for me to claim otherwise. And since I've done both fiction and nonfiction writing, opinions and linking to other sources, short form and long, poetry and prose, there's not really an escape for me to claim I'm not a writer. I could claim not to be a writer because I haven't written a breadlik or a vianelle or any specific form, but that's a rather pest-eaten fig leaf to try and hide behind.
Most people are artistic in one way or another, in some form they enjoy working with, or that they have success in, such that they have a medium that they prefer. Some people are multi-media artists, who can work in different things, or at different things, and produce works that fit their taste, or they use their chosen medium in such ways that their designs appear on other objects through the use of other professionals and their machines that create such things. In an earlier entry, I said that I was a person who draws things, but I wouldn't step that all the way up to being a visual artist, because I'm not drawing the things out of my head onto various media, or engaging in cinematography or cut-up artistry or other such things that would indicate that I feel like I'm something more than a complete amateur at those things. They are things I could do or learn and study how others do them, but I'm not practiced enough at them to think of them as art, necessarily.
( Words, however, have been with me for a very long time. )
We could do more, of course. We could always do more, and we won't really understand just how much art we are capable of until we live in a society that takes care of people well enough that they can create their art without having to worry about whether or not they can stay alive doing art. I really do wonder what people do as work and as art in that world, and whether we would recognize anything at all about it from our own perspective. I suspect we wouldn't, because true utopia would be entirely alien to us, without even a frame of reference to orient us.
As I alluded to in an earlier post in this series, I am a writer. There's far too much of my text all over the Internet, in notebooks, document files, work guides, forum posts, and journal entries for me to claim otherwise. And since I've done both fiction and nonfiction writing, opinions and linking to other sources, short form and long, poetry and prose, there's not really an escape for me to claim I'm not a writer. I could claim not to be a writer because I haven't written a breadlik or a vianelle or any specific form, but that's a rather pest-eaten fig leaf to try and hide behind.
Most people are artistic in one way or another, in some form they enjoy working with, or that they have success in, such that they have a medium that they prefer. Some people are multi-media artists, who can work in different things, or at different things, and produce works that fit their taste, or they use their chosen medium in such ways that their designs appear on other objects through the use of other professionals and their machines that create such things. In an earlier entry, I said that I was a person who draws things, but I wouldn't step that all the way up to being a visual artist, because I'm not drawing the things out of my head onto various media, or engaging in cinematography or cut-up artistry or other such things that would indicate that I feel like I'm something more than a complete amateur at those things. They are things I could do or learn and study how others do them, but I'm not practiced enough at them to think of them as art, necessarily.
( Words, however, have been with me for a very long time. )
We could do more, of course. We could always do more, and we won't really understand just how much art we are capable of until we live in a society that takes care of people well enough that they can create their art without having to worry about whether or not they can stay alive doing art. I really do wonder what people do as work and as art in that world, and whether we would recognize anything at all about it from our own perspective. I suspect we wouldn't, because true utopia would be entirely alien to us, without even a frame of reference to orient us.
