"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his."
- Tanner's monologue from George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"
I'm only a third into this play and already Shaw has illustrated some slightly horrifying truths about the self-serving mindset of artists. We tell ourselves that no matter what we endure or experience, somehow it will feed our imagination; coal for the creative furnace which will burn the past into something warmer, something brighter, in the future.
We are storytellers, and we are always hunting for a moment worth sharing. Feeding on those around us. Living to collect memories.
But sometimes you stop and wonder if your collection of moments is building toward a sum of its parts. Maybe it's not. Maybe memories just boil down to that thing that happened to you once. Nothing more.
I say this because I used to be very concerned with my NUMBER. As if the number of people you sleep with has some bearing on the depth of your human experience -- your expertise on the nature of love, sex and relationships. I'm not advocating sexual addiction, just a healthy dose of romantic experience in the time you have to be selfish and free... your youth.
Sometimes I think I'm just competing with my idea of what a normal man is supposed to be. He's supposed to divide and conquer like Attila until he's tired and old and ready to be responsible. It's that point in the future -- when man is fat and content, when the lover and the fighter is replaced by the husband and the father -- when he will look back on his collection of moments and feel sated. Satisfied. Finished.
How many moments until you're finished? How many hearts get broken?
Now I've tried to be a good (vampire) person, even though the definition is vague and dangerously subjective. But I have hoped that my experiences are going to add up to a full life, and the old man I turn into will have broken his curse before devoting himself entirely to the happiness of others (namely a family). That's the plan. Feed for half of your adult life, then build for the rest of it.
Even I know this plan is hardly foolproof.
Someone recently accused me of being "a man of many interludes". If you've ever been accused of being an operator by the opposite sex, you might feel a disarming mix of flattery, denial and existential angst. It's not a sin to breakup, but if you're always the one leaving, you start to question if you're never going to be happy. Perhaps you've simply been engineered to consume and destroy. Cue the guilt. You're a walking curse. A vampire.. The kind of person people warn their girlfriends about. You claim your innocence, you claim good intentions, but deep down you know there's a trail of bodies in your wake.
Maybe that's some kind of badge of honor for some people, but the game ends sooner or later. The tools you wield to make people fall in love with you will fade: Your looks. Your wits. Your youth and energy. It's going to leave you. And when it does, maybe nobody loves you unless you can compensate with status. Money. Power. Respect... things romantics claim are irrelevant while biology insists otherwise.
And we're hoping we're married by then, aren't we? We hope we slide under the door just in time because we only want to be alone by choice, not by the force of nature that makes us lepers in the eyes of the young.
(I suppose we could dovetail into abandonment issues or whatever clinical term best reduces a person into a schematic of faulty wires and damaged psyches. But let's not even bother.)
I don't want to be a vampire. I want to be a person. I want great moments in my life to inform my work, but I don't want the hunting to overshadow the living. You can collect moments and memories, but you can't collect people. When they're gone, you can keep the photographs, you can listen to the songs that remind you of them, but you don't get to keep the woman in a bottle. She does not belong to you. All you have is your perspective on who she was and what she mattered to you.
So you write a song, or a script, or paint a picture of the people you've known and the way they changed you, or failed to change you. Because these moments get lost so easily unless they are immortalized. Repurposed. Shared. And fed on by others to inform their own experiences.
That's as close as an artist gets to keeping what they've lost. This is our religion, our sense of meaning. Our belief system. And when we cannot express these experiences, when we worry that they will all be lost... well, it's a terrifying thought.
And thus, we feed to live.
- Tanner's monologue from George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman"
I'm only a third into this play and already Shaw has illustrated some slightly horrifying truths about the self-serving mindset of artists. We tell ourselves that no matter what we endure or experience, somehow it will feed our imagination; coal for the creative furnace which will burn the past into something warmer, something brighter, in the future.
We are storytellers, and we are always hunting for a moment worth sharing. Feeding on those around us. Living to collect memories.
But sometimes you stop and wonder if your collection of moments is building toward a sum of its parts. Maybe it's not. Maybe memories just boil down to that thing that happened to you once. Nothing more.
I say this because I used to be very concerned with my NUMBER. As if the number of people you sleep with has some bearing on the depth of your human experience -- your expertise on the nature of love, sex and relationships. I'm not advocating sexual addiction, just a healthy dose of romantic experience in the time you have to be selfish and free... your youth.
So why is it that lately... I can't remember the goddamn number in the first place?
If it's so important, why am I blanking on certain names or certain moments? I used to think sex was so important. I thought I was behind the national average and trying to catch up. But I'm only 30 and already I feel like some of those moments have gotten blurry.
Strange.
Sometimes I think I'm just competing with my idea of what a normal man is supposed to be. He's supposed to divide and conquer like Attila until he's tired and old and ready to be responsible. It's that point in the future -- when man is fat and content, when the lover and the fighter is replaced by the husband and the father -- when he will look back on his collection of moments and feel sated. Satisfied. Finished.
How many moments until you're finished? How many hearts get broken?
Now I've tried to be a good (vampire) person, even though the definition is vague and dangerously subjective. But I have hoped that my experiences are going to add up to a full life, and the old man I turn into will have broken his curse before devoting himself entirely to the happiness of others (namely a family). That's the plan. Feed for half of your adult life, then build for the rest of it.
Even I know this plan is hardly foolproof.
Someone recently accused me of being "a man of many interludes". If you've ever been accused of being an operator by the opposite sex, you might feel a disarming mix of flattery, denial and existential angst. It's not a sin to breakup, but if you're always the one leaving, you start to question if you're never going to be happy. Perhaps you've simply been engineered to consume and destroy. Cue the guilt. You're a walking curse. A vampire.. The kind of person people warn their girlfriends about. You claim your innocence, you claim good intentions, but deep down you know there's a trail of bodies in your wake.
Maybe that's some kind of badge of honor for some people, but the game ends sooner or later. The tools you wield to make people fall in love with you will fade: Your looks. Your wits. Your youth and energy. It's going to leave you. And when it does, maybe nobody loves you unless you can compensate with status. Money. Power. Respect... things romantics claim are irrelevant while biology insists otherwise.
And we're hoping we're married by then, aren't we? We hope we slide under the door just in time because we only want to be alone by choice, not by the force of nature that makes us lepers in the eyes of the young.
I don't want to be a vampire. I want to be a person. I want great moments in my life to inform my work, but I don't want the hunting to overshadow the living. You can collect moments and memories, but you can't collect people. When they're gone, you can keep the photographs, you can listen to the songs that remind you of them, but you don't get to keep the woman in a bottle. She does not belong to you. All you have is your perspective on who she was and what she mattered to you.
So you write a song, or a script, or paint a picture of the people you've known and the way they changed you, or failed to change you. Because these moments get lost so easily unless they are immortalized. Repurposed. Shared. And fed on by others to inform their own experiences.
That's as close as an artist gets to keeping what they've lost. This is our religion, our sense of meaning. Our belief system. And when we cannot express these experiences, when we worry that they will all be lost... well, it's a terrifying thought.
And thus, we feed to live.
