A Credo for Artists? 11-28-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/26/2025] 

That is what I thought when I read this in John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916; The Free Press/MacMillan Company, 1966):

As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by its association with other callings. A person must have experience, he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment. He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other relationships—a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness and sympathy of his interests. What is true of an artist is true of any other special calling. There is doubtless—in general accord with the principle of habit—a tendency for every distinctive vocation to become too dominant, too exclusive and absorbing in its specialized aspect. This means emphasis upon skill or technical method at the expense of meaning. Hence it is not the business of education to foster this tendency, but rather to safeguard against it, so that the scientific inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher merely the pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and so on.

Chapter Twenty-three: Vocational Aspects of Education; p. 308

I never got back to the writing some people expected of me, until I got arrested and had to stop my self-destructive ways. I had no solid idea what to write about until I came to New Jersey and this prison. I did not know writing and publishing were two different things until I read Roland Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel and Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird. Yes, I want to publish so I can show what I can do and - most importantly - not eat out of dumpsters, and let what I remember (and who I remember) continue after me. We need not be intimidated by the writer's of style - Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, José Saramago, Vladimir Nabokov - for style is only how writers deliver meaning. Willa Cather lacks the style of Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Faulkner, and that may be her style on the way of getting across the meaning of her stories. (Yes, the profile of Cather I heard on Studio 360 haunts me still.) 

I will continue writing, even though I believe in the end no one will publish a felon like me, who is not only a felon but a moral leper. You need not be so limited.

sch

[4/26/2025: Well, I have published a few things - see the column to the left - but with little pay. On the other hand, I am not eating out of any dumpsters. sch.]