the artist and his shadow living balls to the wall, whole hog, risking pretty much everything, free reads at archive.org

 

Mustang Sally

    Ok, younguns, today is what Christians call “Good Friday”, which, given what happened on that day 2,000 or so years ago, according to the Gospels, don’t seem good for the guy it happened to.

    Yesterday, someone “liked” the first comment I made under a Poetic Outlaws offering I stumbled across about 9 months after it was published. My second comment pretty well summed up what it has been like living in my skin.

The Artist and his Shadow

By: Erik Rittenberry

POETIC OUTLAWS

SEP 15, 2022

He is unfit for this life, this

unduly managed era devoid

of poesy and freedom, a time

of useless haste in honor of

the illusion of progress,

a life starving of life, a life

dripping with chains as dull-witted

bureaucrats and political

imbeciles run amok.

There’s something dark and peculiar in him

that forbids his full participation in

the blatant absurdity of

today’s world.

Even as a child he felt something

fierce was there in him — an unrest, an

unrealized freedom, something

shadowy but knowing,

a deep-seated primordial power

groping endlessly in the

apocalyptical night.

It’s still there, stirring in the

inmost abyss, this esoteric ghost,

this daemon, dwelling

in the shadows of the soul,

convulsing and throbbing like a

diabolical gypsy in the throes

of ecstasy.

He tries, at times, to wash it away

with morality and decency, bowing

down to the sanctified normalcy

of his fellow humans. But still,

it’s there, raging, taunting him,

hounding him, forcing him

out of the prison of SELF

and into the creative realm,

the destructive realm,

into the elemental kingdom

of existence.

It calls forth the spirit

into a higher dominion of being

and yearns for expression, this

enigmatic drive,

even at the cost of reputation

and alliance

and it tempts the body, the vehicle

of the soul, to thrive with

Dionysian defiance,

and it wants to flip over the table

of conventionalities and go to war

with all customary forms and

cultural norms.

It’s this archaic force that burns from

the most profound depths

of his being, an insatiable rapture

that coalesces the dark of the unconscious

with the universal light, arousing

the sheer realization of his

utter nothingness — the

true awakening.

He could hardly put on a mask and

endure the typical occupation, or

partake in the social games

of the ordinary, blindly acting

out his role on the stage of culture,

following the fashions of the

day, living uncritically as a

conditioned child.

Undefinable,

with no creed or title and a

fierce contempt for conceptual

reality, he’s in spiritual exile

from the place and time

he was born into. Terribly

alone among his contemporaries,

misunderstood

by an arid society, an

aimless wanderer, he is, laughed at

by the well-adjusted, their minds

chloroformed with low-grade

entertainment, their meanings

and desires built into them

from the outside.

The more emaciated they are inwardly,

the showier they become outwardly.

But he cares nothing of status

and spectacle or the unimaginative

interests of the bourgeois, so he

ventures onward

towards

an austere existence,

choosing the possibility of

poverty over pointless labor,

autonomy over dependency,

art over it all –

an unconditional renunciation

of a secure existence in

search of the sublime.

He’s in flight from the endless trivialities

that make up the modern world, choosing

instead to live perilously close to

the primal forces within.

His fate, he knows. He is doomed

to suffer alone.

When uninspired, the firm grip of melancholy

takes hold and he becomes the unhappiest

of mortals, endlessly sloshing around in

a cesspool of despair, nourishing

his apathy with whiskey and

mascara-smeared love.

But when enthused, he’s lit up,

galvanized, electrified, and his

heart is filled to the brim

with poetic rapture and the

forces at work within him

become relentless. He is

transformed into a mere

instrument of supremely

powerful forces,

consecrating and sacrificing

every fiber of his BEING to the

supreme task of

CREATION –

quenching the thirst

of a bone-dry

generation.

“O melodies above me in the infinite,

To you, to you, I rise.”

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

July 5, 2023

I might like to know some of the backstory on this poem.

Poetic Outlaws

Jul 5, 2023

Author

I appreciate you my friend. Thanks for reading. It was loosely based on some of the 18th and 19th century artists that I adore. The solitude and the twinge of madness it takes to truly create penetrating art. 

Sloan Bashinsky

Jul 5, 2023

Twinge of madness, surely you jest? :-)

I probably am lucky I didn't get locked up and the key tossed into the Mariana Trench. 

Imagine what psychiatry would do with William Blake today :-)

Or with Shelly, or Keats, or Yeats, or Poe, or lots of other poets, and anyone, who spoke and/or wrote of their what most people would view as stranger than fiction or too ugly and awful to tell.

Yet it seems to me, regardless of all else, poetry, real poetry, poetry that grabs and digs and never lets go, boils up out of a well so truly deep, personal and disturbing that demands its own voice. 

I suppose because I never did it, I can't fathom how people become poets by attending poetry workshops. Or by listening to other poets recite their poetry, or someone else recite it. I think that might open a crack where the light might be able to come in. 

But living balls to the wall, whole hog, risking pretty much everything, getting mangled and chopped up, drowned and swallowed, digested and shit out by lions, tigers, crocodiles and great whites, orcas even, and boiled alive, and ripped to shreds by tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes, and blown up in volcanoes, buried under glaciers, and bitten by cobras and black widow spiders, and smashed by meteorites, etc., and fucked to death many times, and loved ones dying, or changing or going crazy and leaving us writhing behind, adds a bit of flavor otherwise lost.

    I told an amiga today, who likes to read books, that the only way to really get to know me (other than by living with me) is to read my novels, and to grab her best hold, ‘cause she has no idea what she’s in for 😎.

    I suppose the novels could be viewed as epic poems, but they are laid out as wild, wooly, passionate rides that maybe happened somewhere else and swooped through a wormhole into the so-called Heart of Dixie and then wiggled, squirmed, oozed and leaped about.

 KUNDALINA (A Strange Tale)

 (1992)

https://archive.org/details/kundalina

Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale

(2001)

https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212/page/n1/mode/2up 

 

Return Of The Strange
(2023)

https://archive.org/details/retun-of-the-strange-v-20_202306  

    Thanks to my tech buddy Bob, those tales, and my often stranger than fiction nonfiction books, are being read in 33 languages at the free internet library, archive.org, at the rate of 8,000-12,000 complete reads per month, per book.

    Endowed and staffed by various colleges in America, archive.com specializes in out of print books and books whose authors allow them to be read for free. 

    To read my books online, go to archive.org and type Sloan Bashinsky into the search space and click Enter and icons for the books will come up and you can open and read one by clicking on its icon.

    Same procedure for reading books by other authors in the free library.

    If your device asks if you are sure you want to open archive.org?, know that it's being used by people all over the world to read books they otherwise cannot find, buy, or even know exist.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com