Anti-community

I've never been a joiner. I can trace "the loner" psychology to childhood, being raised by a mom with dad at sea, who devised any number of projects to keep me busy (alone) while she did what she had to do, getting me used to being self-sufficient.

This comes to mind because I was wondering if I'd have become a writer if born, say, twenty or thirty years ago, with the same temperament? Writing communities are much larger and more visible than during my day, when it was a bit off-center, eccentric, to want to "be a writer." In Portland, today, writers are everywhere. It's like screenwriters in L.A. Who is NOT a writer around here? If young, would I therefore rebel from this and do something else? Or not live here, go somewhere where writers are harder to find?

Theoretical, meaningless question. I have no idea. But I can't imagine being a young writer in Portland with my natural loner temperament. I'd move to Fossil or somewhere. I hung with a few writers in grad school but only because we were such a minority, surrounded by PhD types. I had as many blue collar friends.

This also may be related to my natural suspicion of art institutions. I have a hard time getting past the fact -- and it is a fact -- that the culture prefers its artists dead. The exception is the celebrity artist, but there are few of these by definition. The culture has never really supported LIVING artists as much as the archived work of dead artists. And it isn't all that sure what to do with this. To paraphrase the last line of my favorite short story, Art doesn't save anyone from anything. And this is precisely the rub. Because, in a saner culture, art WOULD save us from literal experience. Art would educate and inform the spirit in a way that changed social behavior. But it doesn't. Hitler was an artist.

Philip Glass has noted that everyone is an artist and all art should be anonymous. This is the vision of an idealist. How different the world would be if all art were anonymous! That is, if artists were not celebrities. This would only work in a culture in which art actually DID SOMETHING, it had a social function that improved the culture. If the social reality of art matched the way certain works of art can affect individuals. Many of us have encountered art that changed our lives. But art never stopped a war. Art hasn't made the culture less greedy.

I'm just damn glad I'm not 20 or 30 today. I'm damn glad I am exactly who I am.