On Vicariousness

Okay, my first two posts have been thoughtful and abstract and thereby kept you all ignorant of my true nature: I am a complainer. And a procrastinator. What's more, I fully believe my complaints justify my procrastination, that is, until I watch something like Ansel Adams on American Experience.

It was stunning, I didn't know much about him before watching. I was awed, enthralled, and convicted about my own lax quotas for daily writing (half a page a day typed, if that). But these exposes on great, above all, diligent, artists have become a sort of temporary fix for me. I vicariously pull their all-nighters, scour their starving-artist fridges, hang on through their roller-coaster love lives, waste away with their terminal illnesses--all the while producing jaw-dropping work from some other-worldly energy source. It's all irresistibly romantic. But does it change my attitude about writing?

I don't think so, because it's (I really mean "I'm") placing all the emphasis on the artist, and all the artist's romantic agonies, rather than the art. And forgetting self is the first step to finding something new. 

But I can't honestly say I'm going to reform and wean myself off of American Masters and American Experience. These programs do have valuable things to teach me, I just have to be sure I don't allow to think of myself as "one of them," as an artist; the artist at work is always a nobody. To disappear in the act of creation is the only real romance.