Posted by pancho (148.244.221.182) on November 18, 2001 at 19:04:47:
The Breaking of An Artist
Our community is a peasant one. We produce brilliant and talented people…but the ones who succeed run away from us. I was told, for my own good, to have nothing to do with the community…now I am being driven out, for the good of the community. Most of our talented children never have a chance, they wilt and die before having tasted creative life. In place of that they are hounded by fears of security and propriety, drilled into them by equally deadened parents, parents who want their own choices vindicated by the stunting of their children… proof that it “had to be”…as they were stunted, they want dreams smashed as theirs were…when none of it is inevitable and there are people out there flying and singing and playing and earning a living just as well as that real estate agent or teacher.
I always felt that’s what long hair was for, that and tattoos and nose rings and wearing your pants backwards etc. These are the little rebellions the society allows its children, even though it frowns disapprovingly. They allow it because they know it is fake…the only rebellion these kids are ever going to see. And the kids know it too, know that it is last gasp before they “grow up”. It’s a way of letting them blow off some smoke…pretend they are daring beyond words, when we’ve seen it all before. Usually the children are aping some older custom…Pygmies have had tattoos and body jewelry for centuries and if you stand still long enough every fad and fashion will repeat itself to groans of disapproval and the feeling of daring boldness. But the kids feel they’ve had their rebellion thing…their fling with being wild and unconventional when the poor bastards are as conformist as can be…and you will see a lot of bank tellers and frustrated and bored teachers in years to come looking like washed out jungle natives…getting out of sensible cars in the parking lot, briefcase in hand, lecture notes in order, the mortgage looming so they can’t talk back to anyone…with the rings in their nose and bones in their hair and dread locks or whatever. And think of their poor kids…think of what they’ll have to do to rebel against two cannibals for parents…probably wear Oxford shirts and Ivy League suits.
There is nothing, NOTHING, more conventional than breaking your dreams for fear that someone else will do it for you. There is nothing rebellious at all in thrashing at the end of a rope…of flipping the finger at the one who holds the end of that rope. It takes nothing so difficult or daring as simply cutting that rope and walking away. The rebel is caught in a trap and knows it…and he or she struggles mightily…but it is a false struggle, totally unnecessary and meant only to fool and compensate himself of the inevitable defeat, when he will “see the light” and shape up. The revolutionary, the artist for real, the one who would be free…just walks away…to where her heart calls her.