Art - Real or Imagined?

I just finished Patti Smith’s memoir of her time with Robert Maplethorpe, from their amazing meeting – really, in a city as big as New York, how do you accidentally run into the same person three times in a short period in completely different places? – to right before they both became famous and went their separate ways. Just Kids was an astounding book. Some people just know exactly when and where to stand for lightning to strike.

Through the book, I again encountered the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Smith's hero, and someone who had also hovered over the life of Jim Morrison, another person I once studied for his uncanny ability to attract fame and fortune through poetry while in the middle of self-destructing.

I was a student of Morrison in the pre-Internet era, so this time when Rimbaud reappeared as the mystic inspiration and king of all poets, I researched him, only to find a callow, decadent youth who wrote the bulk of his poetry in his late teens and was burnt out by 21, dragging out his last years in the usual mayhem, decadence, poverty, and illness.

What do teenagers know? Smith and Maplethorpe were barely out of their teens when they spent hours together drawing sketches, making necklaces out of tackle shop beads and feathers, and taking Polaroids. And all this activity is somehow high art, important art, creating a world that is on a higher artistic plain.

When does the humble Polaroid become art? The difference between their photographs and the thousands on Facebook seems to be lighting and background. Plain, uncluttered, stark backgrounds, good natural lighting, an unsmiling person with a prop or two, that’s art. (It also helps to not have a television to drug you, so you actually do spend every evening cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages.)

So I examine my soul because I am unable to appreciate Rimbaud’s poetry. It seems so Anyone Can Do This. So much poetry is the recitation of things happening in nature that you then internalize to an emotion. My despair floats along the breeze like the withered maple leaves of fall. You are hopelessly in love. You are filled with desire to live life only on your terms, even if it means starving and dragging down everyone with you. You let go. You seize the day. You see the light. You plunge into darkness. You quoth the raven, nevermore. You contemplate a fork in the road and take the one less traveled by. Housework drives you crazy, white Godiva, I unpeel dead hands, dead stringencies, and then stick my head in an oven.

Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted, he wrote on her headstone.

Really, poet laureate of Britain, that’s all you’ve got? What does it mean? Anything you want, I guess. It’s the fun of poetry, to decipher it through a lens of your own experience and take it anywhere you want it to go.

Like Jackson Pollack’s art, it seems to be an acquired taste. Why are the same ramblings, or the same splatterings, art in some people’s hands and not in others? It must have something to do with believing you are an artist. If you believe hard enough, hard enough to starve and disrupt and annoy, you’ll convince enough people that you are an artist. My Polaroid picture is art. Yours is a Polaroid picture.

Maybe I have just never believed deeply enough in my own Polaroid pictures. How often are artists discovered that have no idea they are creating art, other than Smithfield the pig? Smithfield the pig meet Jackson Pollack. No, you discover yourself and just convince everyone else.

So, in the spirit of believing, I went back in time to discover myself and pulled out a book of my poetry, written between the ages of 15 and 18, when I was in my tender Arthur Rimbaud years, so ignorant of life that I was still comparing my new emotions to nature, the starry nights, the gentle breezes, the babbling brooks, the silence of a forest, butterflies in a meadow. How amazing to be 15, to have only been on this planet such a short time, in a body still growing, being controlled by a brain with so little information. Everything really was new. If a born blind person suddenly sees, how do they put anything in context?

I try to see art in it, but there’s been too many years, too many experiences, too much pain since then to appreciate how first love felt, why some callow young boy would be so damn important or inspiring, or why losing my virginity left me so thunderstruck and conflicted, when girls today toss it out the window like fast-food wrappers. All I can think now is I must have been crazy insane to feel this way about things that ultimately became irrelevant. Well, if I had drank or drugged myself to death a short time later, or stuck my head in an oven, and left behind these crazy poems, I guess they would be pretty damn relevant.

Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, the musical poets of my youth -- if they had lived, would they still find truth or beauty in their songs? Or would they be as embarrassing to them as my poems are to me?

In a book of astounding sentences in Just Kids, one of the more astounding ones to me was when Patti leaves her bookstore job to apartment-sit for a musician/lover who is touring with Blue Oyster Cult. When she gets to that part of her story, she remembers that it was the last time she ever had to “work” for a living at a day job for the rest of her life. She was barely 21, if that. It was all music, poetry, art, and writing from then on, because she believed she was doing great work at all of that, and so did others. She never punched a time clock again. Not that life was easy all the time after that, but it was art. And for her, it still is.