“Any artist who develops the will risks its hegemony. If he is at all wary of that sympathy by which we become receptive to things beyond the self, he may not encourage the will to abandon its position when its powers are exhausted. Willpower has a tendency to usurp the functions of imagination, particularly in a man in a patriarchy. Yeats’s shopworn formula—that “rhetoric is the will doing the work of the imagination”—refers to such a state, for when the will works in isolation, it turns of necessity to dictionary studies, syntactical tricks, intellectual formulae, memory, history, and convention—any source of material, that is, which can imitate the fruits of imagination without actually allowing them to emerge. Just as there are limits to the power of the erotic, so there are limits to the power of the will. The will knows about survival and endurance; it can direct attention and energy; it can finish things. But we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower. We cannot stay awake on willpower. Will may direct virtù but it cannot bring it into the world. The will by itself cannot heal the soul. And it cannot create.”
—The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage) by Lewis Hyde (via Findings.com)
July 2012
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The escape from an overorganized society and an overly managed life could and should be the pursuit of creative activities that provide autonomy and individuality. The arts, crafts, and even some trades, such as cooking, allow people to claim a small piece of territory for self-ownership. Time spent creating, rather than consuming, is time spent controlling, rather than being controlled.
The problem with music, literature, scholarship, comedy, craftsmanship, cooking, etc., is that they require time, effort, and energy. To put it simply, they require work. Learning to play an instrument is difficult. It’s much easier to master Guitar Hero. Writing a good book is a challenge – much easier to just start a blog. Studying a topic of interest takes a lot of time. It’s easier to just watch a couple of YouTube videos.
Creativity is the escape hatch that the soul demands from societal confinement, but American culture discourages creativity. Instead it offers consumption. Consumption can be fun, and it is always easy. Technology continually makes it easier – click a button for a song, type in a web address for a movie, and so on and so forth until you get your fix.
” —Caped Crusaders and the Flight From Society | Front Porch Republic
“If you put him in a brain scanner, instead of in bed in his middle class home next to his wife, you’d see that Madrigal’s brain was different from non-Internet users. The areas responsible for gainful employment, communication skills, and quick thinking had grown; the areas responsible for appreciating network television and weekly magazines and the love of dirt under his fingernails had atrophied. There was something wrong with Madrigal relative to the people right before him, who had been addicted to more profitable mainstream media.”
—Confessions of an Internet Addict - Alexis Madrigal - The Atlantic
“In this summer of discontent, with a divided nation heading toward a divisive election, it’s altogether fitting and not a little ironic that so many of us would be willing to pause for a day, or even a week, to reflect upon Guthrie’s extraordinary influence on the American scene. His life and music remind us, at bottom, that we’ve all been here before, that we’ve endured economic dislocation and corporate control over the levers of power, and have survived. In an age of so much political discouragement, that itself is an encouraging tune to hum.”
—Why Woody Guthrie Endures - Andrew Cohen - The Atlantic
“Meaningful links are still out there, of course, but they’ve been overwhelmed by spam links, lazy links, automatic links, SEO links, promotional links, and, yes, self-links. The good links have been crowded out by all the links that exist for ulterior, usually self-serving purposes — that have nothing to do with one human being making a careful assessment of the value of the work of another human being. The currency has been debased. That’s why Google now has to evaluate something like 200 different signals to rank search results. Links are far less reliable than they used to be.”
—The nepotistic linker | Rough Type
“An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change. An age in which no one sacrifices to his genius or daemon is an age of narcissism. The “cult of genius” which we have seen in this century has nothing to do with the ancient cult. The public adoration of genius turns men and women into celebrities and cuts off all commerce with the guardian spirits. We should not speak of another’s genius; this is a private affair. The celebrity trades on his gifts, he does not sacrifice to them. And without that sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free. In an age of narcissism the centers of culture are populated with larvae and lemures, the spooks of unfulfilled genii.”
—The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage) by Lewis Hyde (via Findings.com)
“The assumptions of market exchange may not necessarily lead to the emergence of boundaries, but they do in practice. When trade is “clean” and leaves people unconnected, when the merchant is free to sell when and where he will, when the market moves mostly for profit and the dominant myth is not “to possess is to give” but “the fittest survive,” then wealth will lose its motion and gather in isolated pools. Under the assumptions of exchange trade, property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases.”
—The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage) by Lewis Hyde (via Findings.com)
