Poetic
Matrix
a periodic letteR on the poetic experience
online spring/summer 2009 letteR 7
Essay by IVANA PLUCINSKI
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Clocks and Artists
I've got a clock. I'm listening to a story about time. It's telling me about my time. It's amazing, if you
sit and listen to it, if you are not distracted by a superficial version of your life and if you have time to
listen to the time - every tick is different!
It's not what Newton had in mind. The ticks are not linear. Each tick emerges from the last one, and
so if you look backwards at the times, they look like an amorphous jelly and each tick is like a bird,
jumping off a high cliff over a black ocean. (Black ocean: When your struggle becomes a part of you,
you will know that the ocean is black and you will be looking into a blue-grey haze). Is there anything
wrong with your struggle becoming a part of you, and that struggle is not about what you 'let in' but it's
about what you 'shut out.'
I have no idea what the next tick will sound like. I'm sure that you can contemplate on your own clock
and tell me your experiences from your raft of survival. And perhaps you can tell me, which is more
painful: access or deprivation?
So many writers are relatively incompetent and they are wishing to write about a life they didn't
experience! They haven't lived their art, and in this respect, there are many painters of Toscana
landscape but they didn't live there, and so the work is of shallow colorists; it is not true because they
only ponder, to a fashion. They fake their own significance. Such an artist is regretting his lack of direct
experience of his own soul. There are many creative people, and as they age a bit, and they look back
at the quality of their inner life and their outer life, they wonder what they 've learnt!
In most cases in their writing or their sculpture or painting you will see a regret, you will see their
yearning for a truth that they've never lived. You will see a lack of courage to engage with the Great
Unknown. And you will see, that their visions are copies!
But unfortunately, when you take any artist who engages with the Great Unknown, their
interpretations will not groom the vanity of the copyist, and so always originality and true creativity will
languish in obscurity for many years and you really have to realize that this is the case.
The path to quick success is to groom the vanity of the privileged existing elite.
To be authentic you have to live your struggle. It is not to be seen as a temporary obstacle to
success - you must see your struggle as a part of the life you live. It's a question of perception; you must
embrace your struggle! That's what those people that are copyists, never did. They only echoed the
fashionable wisdom. So you must take pride in your struggle. Otherwise you become like these fake
artists. You become a populist, a colorist, you become a temporary amusement for bored individuals.
You don't want to be a transient amusement for over-satiated people, do you? Their minds are fat!
Over-full. They want to write about deprivation but they never lived (experienced) it, or they desire the
courage of true love but they never showed it, they want to write about the depth of consciousness but
they were too afraid to go there. And so, you have to take heart, you have to involve spirit in your
struggle. You have to embrace it. You have to see life as though you are peeling potatoes and as soon
as you peel one potato, there is another, and another, and another - there is no end to your search for
your meaning.
This is becoming the Western way - oh, somebody is peeling the potatoes - oh, the underlying
notion of the Western mind is completion and this is the greatest weakness of the Western mind. This is
where Western civilization will fracture. The Oriental mind, the eastern mind, will never fracture because
they have a natural cyclical sense that nothing is ever completed. If you go back about 500 years ago,
people ploughed their fields, they scattered their seeds, they took in their harvest and they knew that
after winter it will all be done again and again and again. There was no sense of completion.
And so, some of us like to live our own creations, some of us don't like to copy. There are artists -
and there are true artists. What is going on in the world that has no answers? We' ll make our choices.
You have to correct your faulty logic. Just live your own experience and embrace it. And if it is a
struggle to find your meaning, then so - be it! This way you 'll stop being a copyist and a plagiarism of
someone else's dreams.