After stopping at the beach where I’d found the seashells (on the trip I’d been telling you about, where I’d traveled south), I’d driven a little way to a nearby town, where I’d visited a friend who is also a writer, and whose two dogs I’d interacted with and had attempted to befriend while we sat on the porch with them and with his girlfriend, and drank beer, and talked, and looked out at the yard and at the road, along which I don’t remember a car passing, though there were houses here and there in that neighborhood, and though probably a car or two did pass, for we were not out in the country, or a very remote area, but in a part of the city that I suppose would be called residential, and that was merely very quiet in a pleasant way, with thickets and trees and foliage, and birds; and was not a development where the lawns are uniformly cut, or manicured, and where the houses are nice but are perhaps too similar to be distinguishable from one another, and where there is a silence that can make one feel conspicuous.
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For I suspect that what was most important to him, at least with regard to his television show, was not that he confront the viewer with the more ‘terrible’ aspects of creation (which is, if we are honest, indifferent to our plight), but to comfort the viewer with the knowledge that creation is alive, like we are — that it is unpredictable, spontaneous, and animated almost by a spirit of beneficence or good cheer. And that we are not separate from it, but are part of it, even if we can speak of our place within it as special, or ordained.
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Though whatever we are in fact introduced to, in his work, is, I would also maintain, enough. Because it was what he intended to give us.
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Which is to say that perhaps one can, after all, speak of his output as the expression of a preoccupation (if not an obsession) that may or may not be indicative of some truth that touched his soul in a complicated and irresolvable way. Even if that expression was not, finally, volatile enough, imaginatively, to introduce the viewer to the full spectrum of his feelings with regard to that truth.
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Though I should say that in the paintings of Bob Ross, and particularly in the prominence they afford natural landscapes, or the ‘wilderness,’ to the exclusion, even, of the human figure (though on occasion one glimpses a solitary or abandoned dwelling in them), there is, thematically speaking, evidence of humankind’s smallness or insignificance in relation to the grandeur of creation. Or, anyway, of humankind’s vulnerability in the face of that grandeur.
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Which makes me wonder, now that I put it that way, whether there is a kind of purity in some would-be artists that prevents them, regardless of their technical mastery, from giving expression to the more menacing aspects of their unconscious, even if, in terms of their interpersonal relations and their emotional sophistication, they have been able to achieve the sort of ego integration (of the ‘shadow’ with the ‘light,’ as Jung might have described it) that is characteristic of a tranquil adult psychology.
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By which I mean, I suppose, that even if part of his project was to ‘demystify’ a method of painting, for the casual viewer, one did not feel as though he was doubtful of mystery itself, nor that his decency or character (which was conveyed almost sensately through the TV screen, in his conversation, gestures, and asides) precluded in him the sort of obsessions and inscrutableness that, had his talent been of a deeper or more intensive cast, and his imagination more seditious, might have developed into a more complex and variegated expression.
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Even the late Bob Ross, whose television show The Joy of Painting attempted not to make of art something exclusive and intimidating, but to demonstrate how a simple and sincere approach can avail art, as a practice, to anyone, and to spread more generally the kindness and goodwill of his person, did not, I don’t think, pretend to the audience that his own talent (which, while not profound, was by no means negligible) would necessarily be replicated in what they, the viewers, might produce with their own hand, even if he was able to deconstruct his process to such an extent that one might not be blamed for forming that impression.
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None of which I mean as a defense of, say, wantonness or dissipation, which an artist should abhor (not only for the hurt it can cause others, but also for the ruinous effect it can have on that artist’s confidence and productivity), nor as a celebration of suffering for its own sake, but as a rebuke of the position that is so intent on ‘demythologizing’ the artistic process that it would remove from that process the very excesses and mysteries without which sublimity is not achieved.
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Though perhaps a better way to say this is that if an artist is combined of talent, luck, discipline, and obsession, then to diminish the role of obsession merely because it can be associated with abnormality (with respect to psychology), or even because, when it finds no outlet or channel, it can manifest as selfishness or megalomania or emotional instability, or any other unhappy configuration of life, is to allow a distaste for personal catastrophe and moral failings, which will be present in every artist to different degrees (and which clearly one does not hope for), to invade one’s conception of the artistic temperament in its broadest sense.
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Because one thing that differentiates the arts from other occupations is that the ‘wolf’ that is more dangerous to the artist (if only in relation to the artist’s work, and not to their personal life) is not obsession but caution.
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Which is precisely what it is, I think, insofar as it misrepresents the calling of the artist as not a calling at all, but a function or activity that can be, and ought to be, separated from the obsessions that would suffuse it. Or regulated so strictly, with regard to them, that they are not set loose, and allowed the disproportion of their range, but are kept mildly and politely, like children on a field trip with a chaperone.
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Well, ok. I have no objection to that observation because there is nothing objectionable in it. And yet my entire soul would flee from it, as if it were a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
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An observation that one encounters (and that came to mind a handful of entries ago, when I was talking about what I hoped to do with this diary) is that to be an artist one need not sacrifice the sort of work-life balance that is indicative of ‘good’ mental health, emotional well-being, and proper or appropriate boundaries with regard to relationships, self-care, political engagement, etc.; and that, to the contrary, the notion that an artist ought to abandon themselves to their pursuits, with a kind of recklessness or incautious resolve, and blind commitment, belongs to a romanticism that has no basis in reality, that is mythic instead of actual, and a relic of thought that is no longer applicable in an era as enlightened and conscientious as our own.
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Which, again, are not us, but are stand-ins or filler for the sacred void or desert that is closer to the reality of us, and that we hide or distort for many reasons, and that remains empty or arid so long as we do not know, or care, to seek God in it.
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So that we are almost always committing to one thing or another, whether we’re aware of it or not. And so that we become, without the instrumentality of our conscience, our own little empires of self, seeking to colonize the spheres of our activity by bending everything and everyone we encounter to the shape determined by our preferences, loyalties, and psychological appetites.
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And, anyway, any given relativism can extend only so far, meaning that it is, by necessity, incomplete, and necessitates in us, if we wish to navigate reality with anything resembling purpose, the engaging of our drives and our volitions (which is to say a commitment).
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And yet, insofar as commitment involves a disappearing of the self, perhaps there is no escape from such disappearing. Though I suppose I would say that when a commitment is ordered to the virtues, the self does not disappear by way of it, but instead becomes more real (if less conspicuous or obtrusive much of the time). It disappears only when the commitment is to a warped or disordered end.
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Not that relativism is the only culprit through which a disappearing of the self can occur, or that a relativistic view of things is never warranted, for often it is. But that it can postpone the commitment of the individual to a position (or to the so-called ‘tyranny of meaning’) for longer than does its opposite, which can be described as absolutism.
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Which authenticity even nature precipitates, I think, in the long run. For a culture or nation whose citizens become so enamored with enacting received ideas of who they ought to be, rather than remembering, and then living, who they are, will become so pliable, and so willing to indulge in illusions and self-deceptions for the sake of those things, or for the sake of someone else (which isn’t to say to express personality or individuality, for the sake of necessity or truth), that it will be extinguished or absorbed, at some point, by whatever neighboring or ascendant entity, well-meaning or not, has not diffused itself as thoroughly (as the former has done) by an excess of relativism.