The shadow symphony becomes a real symphony. When we turn pro, the energy that had gone into the Shadow Novel now goes into the real novel.
#PRO PAINT SHADOW CONTEMPLATIVE STATE PRO#
Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation. They stand “at one remove.” They have grown so bored with themselves and so sick of their petty bullshit that they can manipulate those elements the way a HazMat technician handles weapons-grade plutonium. They have succeeded in stepping back from themselves. The artist and the professional, on the other hand, have turned a corner in their minds. He creates a “life,” a “character,” a “personality.” (This is not to say that Lady Gaga is not an artist she is.) He takes the material of his personal pain and uses it to draw attention to himself. Musashi Miyamoto’s dojo was smaller than my living room. The zen monk and the samurai swordsman often lead lives so unadorned they’re almost invisible. When you turn pro, your life gets very simple. There was only one problem: none of us was writing a real novel, or painting a real painting, or composing a real rock opera. These were our addictions, and we worked them for all they were worth. I had friends who were living out their own shadow movies, or creating shadow art, or composing shadow rock operas. It had plot, characters, twists and turns, action scenes, sex scenes it had mood, atmosphere, texture it was scary, it was weird, it was exciting the stakes were life-and-death it was a real rock-em, sock-em saga. The shadow enactment has been elevated to such a rarefied height that it becomes folklore, even (almost) art. In the South you can get away with stuff like that.
Have you ever been to New Orleans? In Tennessee Williams-esque southern cities (Savannah and Charleston also come to mind), you find “characters.” The colorful old lady with 39 cats, the purple-haired dude who has turned his apartment into a shrine to James Dean. Our life becomes a shadow drama, a shadow start-up company, a shadow philanthropic venture. Instead of composing our symphony, we create a “shadow symphony,” of which we ourselves become the orchestra. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk and exposure. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work.
We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. When we’re acting as amateurs, we’re running away from our calling-meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our best and truest selves. So do texting, sexting, twittering, facebooking not to mention living on your iPad, dancing with the stars, and keeping up with the Kardashians.) (When I say addiction, by the way, I’m not referring only to the conventional vices of alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic abuse and so forth. But the addict/amateur and the artist/professional deal with these elements in fundamentally different ways. The addict is the amateur the artist is the professional.īoth addict and artist are dealing with the same material, which is the pain of being human and the struggle against the self-sabotage of Resistance. They’re in the studio on Monday and in Betty Ford on Friday. Many are artists in one breath and addicts in another. Many artists are addicts, and vice versa. One point those posts made was that there’s not that big a difference between an artist and an addict. Some of the most popular posts in this space have been those in the “Artist and Addict” series.
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