#but if its a free for all street skate event they may let some humans participate just to have fun and using the basically unspoken rules | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

qqueenofhades · 7 years

Note

Hi Hilary, apologies if you don't want to talk about this any more. But as a historian, what's your opinion on the "preserving history" argument of current events?

I think it’s misguided at best and openly racist at worst, has nothing to do with preserving history, is an exercise in denial and cowardice, and is certainly not what anyone who pretends to be concerned about it really cares about.

(Prepare yourself for a rant.)

The thing is, we have a certain subset of white people acting as if the history of the Confederacy will somehow magically be Forgotten if we take down the statues/monuments/associated physical legacy of their presence. You know who sure as hell has not forgotten the Nazis? Germany. Germany has not forgotten the Nazis one bit. Nor do they play around with it. You can and will be arrested if you fly the Nazi flag or give the Nazi salute in Germany, and they have destroyed nearly all the Nazi buildings or any place that could be used as a shrine or gathering place. The difference here is that Germany a) knows what the Nazis were, and b) hasn’t decided to disingenuously reduce them to a “heritage” or “Germanic pride” or fly the Nazi flag the same way the Confederate flag is proudly flown today. They have not tried to celebrate their racist, terrible past. They have taken steps to dissociate themselves from it as strongly as possible, and now lead Europe in taking in the most refugees from the Middle East, as well as having a chancellor (Angela Merkel) who is essentially the new leader of the free world. Germany hasn’t forgotten its history, it teaches that history and is always, always aware of it, and somehow manages to do that without valorizing or insisting on the continued existence of Nazi paraphernalia as “important history.”

The point of all this is: white people in America have been HAPPY to forget their history for years and years, selectively misremember it, tolerate and even idolize the Confederacy and its beliefs and symbols, and now they’re suddenly worried it will vanish? Give me a break. Black people in America have had to live with the knowledge of this history every day. They do not get the luxury of disengaging from it. Every black child has to learn about and confront the existence of racism and the legacy of this history. White kids don’t have to. They can skate. And white people get really upset when conversations about race or history of race come up. Why are you bringing that up, that was a long time ago, etc, etc. America has never systematically confronted and denounced its racist history the way Germany has. It continues to be celebrated. We have that fucking TV show (Confederate) in production, where it will basically provide an imaginative space for what a large portion of the population wishes HAD happened (that the South won the Civil War and slavery in its historical form remained legal). THERE IS NO CHANCE AT ALL, ANYWHERE, OF THIS HISTORY BEING FORGOTTEN ABOUT, AND THE PEOPLE MOANING THAT IT MIGHT BE ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE DONE THE FORGETTING.

(Also: Many of the actual post-Confederates, including Robert E. Lee himself, disavowed their participation and viewed it as treason. Lee refused to be buried in his Confederate uniform or have his colleagues wear it to his funeral. His direct descendants agree the statue should come down. When did the revival of Confederate symbols start? Jim Crow. When did the Confederate flag start flying over the South Carolina statehouse again? 1961. As in, it was constructed specifically in reaction to the civil rights movement, as deeply racist Southern whites continued to resist the idea of black people having any agency or recognition. That was when Confederate monuments became a thing: NOT FROM THE ACTUAL CONFEDERACY.)

Let’s imagine for a moment that there was a large group of people who had put up a bunch of statues of, say, Osama bin Laden, and made a huge fuss about the possibility of them coming down. They view the attack of 9/11 as the triumph of a small band of patriots over an oppressive tyrannical oligarchy. They fly a flag with the planes crashing into the twin towers, and insist it’s not about the actual deaths of the people involved, it symbolises “culture” or “heritage” or whatever else. Let’s also say these people insisted that their right to defend a statue of OBL, a guy who clearly hated America and made that clear at every turn, was fully compatible with their identity as patriotic Americans, and in fact still to be preferred any time that identity is challenged. Let’s further say that a large segment of the population tacitly or explicitly agrees with them, demands the statue should stay up and attacks anyone who questions its existence in a public space, and claim that you are as bad as the other side if you want it taken down and insist that the flag cannot be dissociated from its history and the deaths involved. You get nowhere by pointing out that OBL, as noted, actually hated America and was fighting to destroy it. Even your supposedly liberal white friends become oddly deaf when the subject is raised, or give some version of the “well I don’t like it either, but this is America/we respect everyone/it’s history” argument. At worst, there are people marching underneath this flag, putting it as a bumper sticker on their pickup trucks, stockpiling tons of guns, and treating it as something to be inspired, celebrated, and replicated.

You’d feel like you were taking crazy pills. You would feel incredibly unsafe every time you stepped outside – what if you met one of these crazies and they targeted you? You would wonder how nobody else on earth could apparently see that no, these people are terrorists, and we are celebrating the murder of innocent people and it may be history, but why is it being treated as a fetishistic and terrifying subculture instead of a tragic and shameful event that we should never want to repeat? And yet, that is exactly what is happening with America’s collective denial and ongoing reluctance to talk about the Confederacy or put it in those terms. There’s always another excuse, and frankly, when Americans have been fed on a steady diet of “America Is Teh Awesomest” for years and years and have no way of critiquing or understanding their actual history without getting offended and going for the “all terrorists hate freedom!” route, the cumulative historical denial is both sad and staggering. Nothing, in this framework, is ever America’s fault, specifically white America’s. But if the people moaning about history being forgotten actually cared about history, they would have to confront the fact that that is simply, empirically not the case.

The fact is, America was built on white supremacy, slavery, and genocide, the victims of that history have no way of forgetting it, and view it pretty incredulously when white people start wringing their hands over it. That is just a historically verifiable reality, and yet white people go for the “long time ago” or “black on black crime” or “I’m not personally racist” defenses, rather than actually listening to the people who have never had the luxury of overlooking that history. This is why we get the absurd both-siderism. On the one hand, we have violent white supremacists proudly identifying as Nazis, a political movement that used to be uncontroversially identified as the most evil of the 20th century, if not ever, and which has roots that go back centuries in vilifying and exterminating anyone who is not a cis Christian straight white male. On the other, we have Black Lives Matter and other protest groups, who are defending their communities and people from the consequences of that ongoing mentality, sometimes violently. Then we have white people on Facebook posting things like, “Both sides are equally guilty! Bad all around! Everyone’s to blame!”

Sorry. No.

There is an overwhelming tendency to favor the status quo over actual justice, and to sanctimoniously condemn any violence used by a marginalized group – we somehow think that people only ever achieve recognizance of their humanity by holding hands and being “non-violent,” and that any time they forcibly resist the overwhelming and somehow-always-justified violence of the dominant group, they lose any expectation of our sympathy. We want to be violent against people of color without consequences, and we might allow them to struggle for liberation if we feel like it, but they have to do it Nicely. We might tepidly condemn the killings of unarmed black people, or post memes about “coming together,” or “not all cops,” or so forth. But when unarmed Native Americans at Standing Rock in 2016 are met with tanks, water cannons, full military deployments, tear gas, guns, and dogs, as were (and are) African Americans at lunch counters or city streets in the 1960s, then no, we do not get to claim that anything has changed. Because the instant those people resist being killed, or call out the comfortable white status quo, or challenge the state’s forever-sanctioned and always-admirable (according to its defenders) violence, they’re just as bad as neo-Nazis.

Sure. Right.

I get it’s a difficult topic. I get it’s hard for white Americans to actually look at what it means to be both white and American in a world where they have always benefited from these identities, and where White Liberalism and White Feminism ™ is just as racist while steadfastly insisting it’s not. Especially when you add American exceptionalism to the mix, where America is never responsible for anything and is the greatest country in the world, there is nothing remotely close to Germany’s decades-long reparations for the Nazis. American culture holds that saying sorry is for wimps. We need to be Proud of Our Heritage.

Nobody’s advocating for the Confederate monuments to be destroyed. They can be kept in a museum, or in storage, or wherever else. But insisting on their continued presence in public life is saying, “I want my right to believe the same things they did to be validated, and I want people personally affected by this belief to Know Their Place and It’s Just History Get Over It, and I don’t want to be challenged on whether this was wrong; I just want everyone to think about it how I do.” It is an insistence on power and an insistence on the safe and comfortable narrative of history that is completely removed from reality. When people say they don’t want Confederate history forgotten, they mean they don’t want white mainstream history to be challenged; they don’t want the people most hurt by this history to get uppity ideas about speaking out or breaking the cycle or making them face consequences. They want to go back to denial, and they resent the people trying to educate them otherwise. It’s the exact opposite of all this sudden Concern for History (which, as noted, isn’t going anywhere).

Conservative movements jeer at liberals all the time for being “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces,” and mainstream liberalism, as noted, can have incredible problems. But then conservatives are the ones crying about how difficult it is to be a racist these days (cry me a river, buddy) and painting liberals as tyrants who want to crush these poor, misunderstood white men whose influence and legacy might somehow vanish from the world (spoiler alert: not happening). So if preserving history is actually what anyone is worried about, don’t talk to your black friends about it. Don’t tell your black friends how much you hate racism. Talk to your white friends about it. Tell your white friends how much you hate racism. Then perhaps you might understand just how much the bubble of privilege protects you, and face the possibility of actually disrupting your life and losing friends or family in the way that white Americans get to take for granted that they do not have to do.

So yeah. It’s not in any sense about really preserving history, and frankly, my opinion as a historian is that I need another god damn drink. And I don’t even drink.

#history #politics for ts #rant #anonymous #ask

498 notes · View notes

denizerkli · 6 years

Photo

Miller is simply too harsh on writing. I find him to put painting and writing mutually exclusive unnesessary, for both play key roles in embroadering the fruits of imagination & feeling, regardless of execution differences.

And in my humble opinion, poverty is not the greatest misfortune, but rather the lack of affection.

The remaining article speaks volumes on my behalf.

____________________________________

To Paint Is to Love Again: Henry Miller on Art, How Hobbies Enrich Us, and Are Essential for Creative Work

“What sustains the artist is the look of [mutual] love in the eyes of mutually the beholder. Not money, not the right connections, not exhibitions, not flattering reviews.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

One particularly icy winter day not too long ago, I reluctantly retired my bike, took the subway into Manhattan, and gave up my seat to a kindly woman a few decades my senior. We struck up a conversation — an occurrence doubly delightful for its lamentable rarity on the New York City subway. For this radical act we were rewarded with an instant kinship of spirit — she turned out to be the wonderful artist Sheila Pinkel, visiting from the West Coast for a show she was having at a New York gallery, and we bonded over our mutual love of Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980), lamenting how much of his magnificent and timeless writing has perished out of print — things like his beautiful reflections on the greatest gift of growing old and on money and on the meaning of life.

Right before I hopped out at my stop, Sheila mentioned one particular book that had made a strong impression early in life, but which she had been unable to find since — Miller’s 1968 lost gem To Paint Is to Love Again (public library). Naturally, I tracked down a surviving copy as soon as possible and was instantly enchanted by this rare and wonderful treasure trove of Miller’s paintings — for he was among the famous writers who were drawn to the visual arts, producing such lesser-known treats as J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrations, Sylvia Plath’s drawings, William Faulkner’s Jazz Age etchings, Flannery O’Connor’s cartoons, Zelda Fitzgerald’s watercolors, and Nabokov’s butterfly studies — enveloped in his devastatingly honest and insightful words on art, sincerity, kindness, hardship, and the gift of friendship.

With his characteristic blend of irreverence, earnestness, and unapologetic wisdom, Miller — who began painting at the age of thirty-seven in 1928, while he was “supposed to be at work on the great American novel” but was yet to publish anything at all, bought his first watercolors and brushes in the midst of poverty, and was soon painting “morning, noon and night” — explores the eternal question of what art is and what makes one an artist.

Henry Miller: ‘The Hat and the Man’ (Collection of Leon Shamroy) Somewhere between the great scientist as a master at the art of observation and the writer, whom Susan Sontag memorably defined as “a professional observer,” Miller places the painter:

What is more intriguing than a spot on the bathroom floor which, as you sit emptying your bowels, assumes a hundred different forms, figures, shapes? Often I found myself on my knees studying a stain on the floor — studying it to detect all that was hidden at first sight. No doubt the painter, studying the face of the sitter whose portrait he is about to do, must be astonished by the things he suddenly recognizes in the familiar visage before him. Looking intently at an eye or a pair of lips, or an ear — particularly an ear, that weird appendage! — one is astounded by the metamorphoses a human countenance undergoes. What is an eye or an ear? The anatomy books will tell you one thing, or many things, but looking at an eye or ear to render it in form, texture, color yields quite another kind of knowledge. Suddenly you see — and it’s not an eye or an ear but a little universe composed of the most extraordinary elements having nothing to do with sight or hearing, with flesh, bone, muscle, cartilage.

In this art of seeing Miller finds the essential question of what a painting really is:

A picture… is a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Like a book, a piece of sculpture, or a poem. One picture speaks to you, another doesn’t… Some pictures invite you to enter, then make you a prisoner. Some pictures you race through, as if on roller skates. Some lead you out by the back door. Some weigh you down, oppress you for days and weeks on end. Others lift you up to the skies, make you weep with joy or gnash your teeth in despair.

Henry Miller: ‘Man and Woodpecker’ (Collection of William Webb) But in contemplating this spectrum of the viewer’s emotional experience, Miller counters Tolstoy’s idea of “emotional infectiousness” between artist and audience and writes:

What happens to you when you look at a painting may not be at all what the artist who painted it intended to have happen. Millions of people have stood and gazed in open-mouthed wonder at the Mona Lisa. Does anyone know what was going on in Da Vinci’s mind when he did it? If he were to come to life again and look at it with his own two eyes it is dubious, in my mind, that he would know himself precisely what it was that made him present her in this immortal fashion.

And yet the intensity of the artist’s own emotion, Miller argues, is the true lifeblood of art and of optimism about the human spirit:

To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around.

Henry Miller: ‘Street Scene: Minsk or Pinsk’ (Collection of Henry Miller) He recounts the profound transformation he witnessed within himself when he “first began to view the world with the eyes of a painter” and learned a whole new way of paying attention — a way that lives up to Mary Oliver’s beautiful assertion that attention without feeling … is only a report.” Miller writes:

The most familiar things, objects which I had gazed at all my life, now became an unending source of wonder, and with the wonder, of course, affection. A tea pot, an old hammer, or chipped cup, whatever came to hand I looked upon as if I had never seen it before. I hadn’t, of course. Do not most of us go through life blind, deaf, insensitive? Now as I studied the object’s physiognomy, its texture, its way of speaking, I entered into its life, its history, its purpose, its association with other objects, all of which only endeared it the more… Have you ever noticed that the stones one gathers at the beach are grateful when we hold them in our hands and caress them? Do they not take on a new expression? An old pot loves to be rubbed with tenderness and appreciation. So with an axe: kept in good condition, it always serves its master lovingly.

Unlike his longtime lover and lifelong friend Anaïs Nin, who believed that “if one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects,” Miller extols the gladdening assurance of the old:

I have always cherished old things, used things, things marked by the passage of time and human events. I think of my own self this way, as something much handled, much knocked about, as worn and polished with use and abuse. As something serviceable, perhaps I should say. More serviceable for having had so many masters, so many wretched, glorious, haphazard experiences and encounters. Which explains, perhaps, why it is that when I start to do a head it always turns into a “self-portrait.” Even when it becomes a woman, even when it bears no resemblance to me at all. I know myself, my changing faces, my ineradicable Stone Age expression. It’s what happened to me that interests me, not resemblances. I am a worn, used creature, an object that loves to be handled, rubbed, caressed, stuffed in a coat pocket, or left to bake in the sun. Something to be used or not used, as you like.

Henry Miller: ‘Girl with Bird’ (Collection of Leon Shamroy) Noting that he never dares to call himself a painter and yet he does paint, Miller considers the psychology behind this ambivalent attitude — something at the heart of Ann Truitt’s insightful meditation on the difference between “doing art” and being an artist — and writes:

I turn to painting when I can no longer write. Painting refreshes and restores me; it enables me to forget that I am temporarily unable to write. So I paint while the reservoir replenishes itself.

This, of course, is a strategy that many celebrated creators used — Madeleine L’Engle read science to enrich her writing and Einstein, who termed his creative process “combinatory play,”, is said to have come up with his greatest physics breakthroughs during his violin breaks. But it also makes sense under more formal psychological models of how creativity works, all of which require some form of incubation period, or what Alexander Graham Bell called “unconscious cerebration” — a stage during which “no effort of a direct nature” is made toward one’s creative goal and the mind is instead allowed to perform its essential background processing.

This notion comes very much alive in Miller’s account of those early days when he first became besotted with painting and its singular way of seeing the world:

Though my mind was intensely active, for I was seeing everything in a new light, the impression I had was of painting with some other part of my being. My mind went on humming, like a wheel that continues to spin after the hand has let go, but it didn’t get frazzled and exhausted as it would after a few hours of writing. While I played, for I never looked on it as work, I whistled, hummed, danced on one foot, then the other, and talked to myself.

It was a joy to go on turning [paintings] out like a madman — perhaps because I didn’t have to prove anything, either to the world or to myself. I wasn’t hepped on becoming a painter. Not at all. I was simply wiggling out of the strait-jacket.

He draws a further contrast between painting and writing in their respective effects on the creator’s psyche:

I enjoy talking to painters more than to writers… Painters give me the impression of being less used up by their daily task than writers or musicians. Also, they use words in a more plastic way, as if conscious of their very substantial originals. When they write … they reveal a poetic touch which writers often lack. Perhaps this is due to living continuously with flesh, textures, objects, and not merely with ideas, abstractions, complexes. Often they are mimes or story tellers, and nearly always good cooks. The writer, on the other hand, is so often pale, awkward, incompetent in everything except the business of putting words together.

The disposition of the painter and the writer, Miller observes with the warm wryness of someone very much aware that he is first a writer, differs not only in their psychic state during creation but also in how each relates to their finished work:

To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!

And yet Miller notes that many celebrated writers were also “painters, musicians, actors, ambassadors, mathematicians,” of which he observes:

When one is an artist all mediums open up… Every artist worth his salt has his [hobby]. It’s the norm, not the exception.

Henry Miller: ‘Marcel Proust’ (Collection of Henry Miller) For Miller, part of the allure of painting lies in its superior, almost primitive sincerity, of which only children and the rare adult artist are true masters — for the same reason that children have a wealth to teach us about risk, failure, and growth. Miller writes:

For me the paintings of children belong side by side with the works of the masters… The work of a child never fails to make appeal, to claim us, because it is always honest and sincere, always imbued with the magic certitude born of the direct, spontaneous approach.

Paul Klee … had the ability to return us to the world of the child as well as to that of the poet, the mathematician, the alchemist, the seer. In the paintings of Paul Klee we are privileged to witness the miracle of the pedagogue slaying the pedagogue. He learned in order to forget, it would seem. He was a spiritual nomad endowed with the most sensitive palps… He almost never failed, and he never, never, never said too much.

Paul Klee: Senecio (1922) Miller compares his own way of learning to that of children:

We all learn as much as we wish to and no more. We learn in different ways, sometimes by not learning…. My way is by trial and error, by groping, stumbling, questioning.

Noting that very few American painters excite him at all — among the exceptions he admiringly cites Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock — Miller condemns the toxic effect of consumerism, something he had spiritedly condemned three decades earlier, on the creative spirit:

To paint is to love again, and to love is to live to the fullest. But what kind of love, what sort of life can one hope to find in a vacuum cluttered with every conceivable gadget, every conceivable money maker, every last comfort, every useless luxury? To live and love, and to give expression to it in paint, one must also be a true believer. There must be something to worship. Where in this broad land is the Holy of Holies hidden?

The practice of any art demands more than mere savoir faire. One must not only be in love with what one does, one must also know how to make love. In love self is obliterated. Only the beloved counts. Whether the beloved be a bowl of fruit, a pastoral scene, or the interior of a bawdy house makes no difference. One must be in it and of it wholly. Before a subject can be transmuted aesthetically it must be devoured and absorbed. If it is a painting it must perspire with ecstasy.

Echoing Nietzsche’s conviction that a full life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, he adds:

The lure of the master lies in the struggle he engenders… [In America] for everything which taxes our patience, our skill, our understanding, we have short cuts… Only the art of love, it would seem, still defies the short cut.

Decades before Lewis Hyde’s now-legendary manifesto for the gift economy and half a century before its modern-day counterpart, Amanda Palmer’s manifesto for the art of asking, Miller writes:

Certainly the surest way to kill an artist is to supply him with everything he needs. Materially he needs but little. What he never gets enough of is appreciation, encouragement, understanding. I have seen painters give away their most cherished work on the impulse of the moment, sometimes in return for a good meal, sometimes for a bit of love, sometimes for no reason at all — simply because it pleased them to do so. And I have seen these same men refuse to sell a cherished painting no matter what the sum offered. I believe that a true artist always prefers to give his work away rather than sell it. A good artist must also have a streak of insanity in him, if by insanity is meant an exaggerated inability to adapt. The individual who can adapt to this mad world of to-day is either a nobody or a sage. In the one case he is immune to art and in the other he is beyond it.

Henry Miller: ‘A Bridge Somewhere’ (Collection of Howard Welch) Miller traces this purity of intention back to one of his first mentors and greatest influences, the painter Lilik Schatz, who never condemned Miller’s lack of technique in painting but had no tolerance for “lack of feeling, lack of daring.” Miller quotes Schatz’s memorable advice:

Do anything you like, but do it with conviction!

For their sincerity and integrity of conviction, Miller held painters in high regard his whole life. He describes them as “all lovable souls, and some … possessed of a wisdom altogether uncommon.” Even though these impressions were based on Miller’s friendships with a number of prominent artists, including Man Ray and Beauford Delaney, he remains most moved by the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a man of “vigorous, youthful spirit” and “unique way of looking at things”:

No one had ever talked painting to me the way Stieglitz did. It wasn’t his talk alone either, but the look in his eyes which accompanied it. That he was not a painter amazed me…. If ever the artist had a friend, a spokesman, a champion defender, it was in the person of Alfred Stieglitz… He was one of the very few Americans … whose approach to a work of art inspired reverence for the artist, for his work, for art itself. Lucky for us who come under his spell that he was not a painter, that he had created for himself the role of interpreter and defender.

Miller’s deep appreciation for such champions of the artist echoes, coincidentally, what Georgia O’Keeffe — the love of Stieglitz’s life, and a legendary artist whose own career was sparked by a friend’s unflinching faith — once wrote of the only true measure of success in art. In a sentiment that Robert Krulwich would come to echo half a century later in his magnificent commencement address on the importance of “friends in low places,” Miller extols the enormous spiritual value of such supporters:

Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend, if he is a man of faith, to work miracles.

Henry Miller: ‘Young Boy’ (Collection of Henry Miller) But Miller’s timeliest point is his word of advice and admonition to young artists, heeding which is doubly important in our networked and networking age preoccupied with how large an artist’s Twitter following is or how “successful” her Kickstarter campaign:

How distressing it is to hear young painters talking about dealers, shows, newspaper reviews, rich patrons, and so on. All that comes with time — or will never come. But first one must make friends, create them through one’s work. What sustains the artist is the look of love in the eyes of the beholder. Not money, not the right connections, not exhibitions, not flattering reviews.

Miller intuits with great poetic precision what we now know empirically about grit being more important than “genius”:

To win through by sheer force of genius is one thing; to survive and continue to create when every last door is slammed in one’s face is another. Nobody acquires genius — it is God-given. But one can acquire patience, fortitude, wisdom, understanding. Perhaps the greatest gift [is] to love what one does whether it causes a stir or not.

In yet another stroke of prescience, Miller reveals himself as an early proponent of the pay-what-you-wish model of funding creative endeavor — the model that makes Brain Pickings possible — and adds:

Who knows what is good for man in this life? Poverty is one of the misfortunes people seem to dread even more than sickness… But is it so dreadful? For me this seemingly bleak period was a most instructive one, because not being able to write for money I had to turn to something else to keep going. It could have been shining shoes; it happened to be water colors. To make water colors for money never gave me the least qualm. I set no price on my labors. Whatever the buyer chose to offer, whatever he thought he could afford, no matter how ridiculous the sum, I said yes… I earned just enough to keep my head above water. It was like writing songs and getting paid to whistle them.

Henry Miller: ‘Clown’ (Collection of Hoki Miller)

Having written about the beautiful osmosis of giving and receiving nearly three decades earlier, Miller closes with a wonderfully touching personal anecdote — the kind found in Charles Bukowski’s beautiful letter of gratitude to his first patron. Illustrating the mutually ennobling effects of this kindness economy, Miller recounts one such early friendly spirit to whom he owes his creative destiny:

All this good fortune — of being able to work like a dog in happy poverty — was the result of a chance encounter with Attilio Bowinkel who ran an art shop in Westwood Village. One day I entered his shop to buy two tubes of paint. I asked for the cheapest water colors he had. When he asked me if that was all I needed I told him frankly that that was all I could afford at the moment. Whereupon the good Mr. Bowinkel put me a few discreet but pertinent queries. I answered briefly and truthfully. Then he said, and I shall never forget it: “Choose what you like … paper, paints, brushes, whatever you need. It’s a gift.” A few days later he came to the Green House to inspect my work. I blushed when I showed him what I had on hand. He didn’t say whether they were good or bad but on leaving he took a few with him, and the next day, on passing his shop, I noticed two of them in the window, beautifully framed. They were sold that very day, to Arthur Freed of M.G.M., a collector of modern European paintings… In Attilio Bowinkel I found a friend and a saviour.

3 notes · View notes