art ♾ commerce

let's do both

This gives me hope. Wallace Stevens wrote poetry that is so singular it’s hard to describe. Let's just say, it’s beautiful. Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955 — a copy of it has been sitting next to my bed for years. I check in with it every now and then when I need to commune with (lowercase) god. I enjoy being able to reach for it in a time of need. His words are full of life. I like to let them wash over me. Not stopping to think about meaning or purpose.

Just letting them be.

As they are.

As they will be. Forever.

Wallace Stevens was also a man with a day-job. He was not a hippie. He was a lifelong businessman, lawyer, and eventually a VP at The Hartford.

wally

The duality of man. In order to have peace you must prepare for war. To afford the time and space required for creative pursuits one must have a steady income. But the inability to commit, whole hog, to the craft is the blocker to becoming a success, whatever that means, in the arts.

There are two well worn paths to achieving success in the arts. Be rich already or be so poor that you’ve got nothing to lose.

What do we do with the middle class artist? Can it exist? If so, it seems that it is destined to toil away in obscurity — beast in the underground — for eternity. But a Wallace Stevens may pop into frame every now and then as an example of someone who was able to somehow compartmentalize those halves.

Business/pleasure. Love/hate. Drive/malaise. Everybody is capable of both. We are not one thing, we are everything. Only if we want to be.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to strike a balance between creative pursuits and the desire to make as much money as possible. To the detriment of both my professional life and my creative pursuits, I refuse to choose. Funny enough, this failure to make a choice does a disservice to both sides. Ah, the paradox of choice — not to choose is a choice in and of itself.

And so we beat on..

Play the song!