Art And Substance

For a long time I have been interested in the connection between artistic creativity and the subconscious mind, one which definitely exists, as reported by those who have had the experience of making it.

Coleridge, for example, who described writing the lines 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree: 

while in an opium-induced state and then, interrupted  by someone and distracted, left the writing-table to come back to it. As indeed he did, for he eventually came up with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

And much more; but there is a time and space constraint here which does not permit the full poem. Look it up and read it sometime, I'm certain you'll find it enjoyable.

The point being that he started the poem under head and probably came back to finish it when he was level. The idea came in an alternate reality and when we come down to it the idea is the key to creativity and the rest is just the execution of the idea, the bringing of it to fruition: seeing it on canvas or paper or word processor, or listening to it on MP3, or dancing out a special dance. 

There are many forms of Art and many ways of expression. The classically trained musician works to replicate the music of the creative geniuses. Practice and more practice each and every day. He feels the music, he can replicate the music but he cannot or will not create it. So, is what he does Art? I suspect that it is talent, yes, but I guess not Art, for the role of the Artist is to create and while the one who replicates does in that act create, the creation is another's. He merely mirrors it. Many can imitate Picasso, yet who among them can create his themes? Where do the ideas, verses and melodies of the songwriter come from? Does he sometimes lower his bucket down into the subconscious by whatever means to conceive and create his Art?

Art varies and there are many forms, some much more difficult than others. Art does not depend upon who the artist is. It only depends on what the artist creates. It cannot exist without it's creator. Art is Art, full stop. You know it when you get it. You feel it somewhere deep inside of you.

What fuels Art? Is it genetics? Or is it what is absorbed in the womb? Can Art be taught?

More to the subject point is the question: what is the real relationship between the creation of Art and the influence of depressants and intoxicants upon the mind in the process of that creation? Does substance abuse influence Art? 

On the other hand, does a person who exercises regularly have a better grip on his or her Art than someone who does not? Does exercise give birth to artistic inspiration?  And if not what does?

Many questions, few answers. This remains a difficult and controversial subject.

Still,  much of what we consider to be Art comes to the creator through the subconscious mind, and often the channel between the conscious and the subconscious entails twisting the mind sideways.

Because We Can

Walking on the walkway approaching the entrance to the main building of the Port of Port of Spain I observed a sign which read No riding of bicycles on the walkway, and not ten seconds after I read this a black guy with a rasta hairstyle passed me riding a bicycle, smiling and busily chatting on his cell phone. This in plain view of the security guards on duty. The guards did not seem to notice.  If they did, they ignored the rule-breaking.

Making a right at the traffic light at the juncture of Long Circular Road and Ellerslie Park, I was confronted by an indian man driving a taxi on my side of the road in clear conflict of the rules of the road. When I indicated my displeasure, he called me a "white boy" in spite of the fact that my days as a boy are long behind me and cussed me out in the foulest terms.

Driving on the C-R highway going east the other day came upon a police car doing the posted 80 KPM speed limit so slowed down to match it as a chinese guy in a big SUV whipped by us both doing at least 120 KPH. No response from the police car, so I speeded up and passed him too. He did not see fit to stop and ticket me, or the chinese man for that matter.

Lined up in the bank I saw a white woman cut in the line ahead of me to join up with her friend who then proceeded to bring her to the counter to transact her (separate) business with nary a glance back at me to see how I was taking it.

I'm certain everybody who lives in Trinidad and reads this has experienced a similar event. The fact is that whatever our age or race or gender, we all seem to act like recalcitrant schoolchildren trying to put one past the teacher, except that this is not school. This is real life.

Still, this type of behavior is a common facet of our society today. It has become the status quo to do what we want when we want and everyone else be damned. As George Harrison said "I, Me Mine". If George had lived in Trinidad the title of the song could have been "Me, Me, Me and Nobody Else" driven by a soca beat with suitable dance and wine lyrics. Then we could all sing the song and pretend to care about others while actually not caring about them as we sing.

Why do we do this? The simple answer is because we can. Those responsible for upholding the rules, from the cashier at the supermarket counter enabling the person without conscience to cash out twenty-five items in the one to ten line, to the manager of the air conditioning business giving his friends favored treatment, to the CEO of the credit union participating in bobol, to the Prime Minister using and abusing his influence in getting a gun for his son, simply have no interest in enforcing the rules and in fact bend the rules to suit themselves.

Is that any way to run a country?

It comes from the top and it dribbles down and it is a formula for chaos and anarchy and the breakdown of society.

Still we do it. 

Because we can.

Doctors And Patience

Medical doctors. Definition: licensed medical practitioners. Nothing more or less. Yet many people view MDs as minor gods. The truth is that doctors are people, and we all know that people are not without their problems. Yes, doctors too, have problems. Do you think that it affects their work? Probably. They are only people after all, some better than others.

Mengele performed abominations upon human subjects in the guise of a researcher. MacDonald, a sociopath, slaughtered out of rage and then necessity. Jeff, the doctor, the Green Beret, the family killer.

"Jeff MacDonald had a fight, killed his wife and kids that night.

Easy evil, calm and suave he sleeps easy, amiable knave:

Easy evil, calm and well, going straight down into hell,

Going straight down into hell".

Somebody wrote that.

Harold Shipman is said to have murdered as many as  a thousand people and was convicted of killing fifteen. John Huntington Story, the infamous "Doc" of the Jack Olsen book of the same title did time for his rapes in Lovell, in the United States. MacDonald, Shipman and others like them are extreme examples, lives out of control, desperate and twisted by circumstances which they have created. Not all doctors are like those fellows.

Human, yet having to appear above the average and often driven by their personalities, MDs become gurus to some. Dr. Kildare charmed us for years with his good looks and his good will. Has any one seen Richard Chamberlain recently? Yet the surgeon shows continue on television and other media. Heroes and villains. Isn't that what it really is all about?

Many MDs today double as businessmen. I used to know a man who waited for an hour every time he visited his optician. Turned out that the specialist he was seeing was running a private practice while on contract to the current administration. He was late from his other job so his patients waited hours upon hours. They had little choice. He was, after all, a specialist. He might as well have told everybody to take a number. Bad bedside manner.

Undoubtedly there are many good doctors, dedicated people, for after all the sworn duty of a doctor is to alleviate suffering and to save lives. A dedicated and morally upright doctor does exactly that, and when he cannot he is compassionate towards his patients and to all their satellites, especially the bereaved.

Yet someone told me that the doctor who diagnosed her mother's eventually fatal condition and who disclosed it to her advised her to "go home and pray" and then charged her the normal fee without batting an eyelid. I wonder what that doctor was going to do for the rest of the day.

Assuming an equal level of competence in the practice of the medical trade, what accounts for the differences between doctors? It seems to me that, just like you and me, they are only people, and so are different from us and from each other. To put them on a pedestal somewhere up above the rest of us is absurd.

Let us rather try to have patience with them.

The Deteriorating Landscape

Took a drive out to Mayaro recently in the company of my old friend Paul in the middle of the week, breaking Biche from my busy business life. 

We took the Sangre Grande route traveling through Valencia via the Eastern Main Road and the Curchill-Roosevelt highway, and from the beginning Paul kept commenting negatively on the changes in the landscape: the Ponderosa bar no longer exists; the Booznic bar is closed, and the greenery has given way to concrete housing projects.

By my reckoning it had been six years since I last took what used to be a two hour drive each way to Mayaro. 

Mayaro. 

Good old Mayaro, that beloved place. That escape to a different landscape. A truly different place back then in my days as a young boy in Trinidad. Then, it was a place of peace of mind and fun and sand salt and beach and sea and chip chip and small fish which jumped in the waves, a truly comfortable place, an environment in which we were guaranteed safe. Not allowed to drown in the big sea, and wash up on the beach with the seine.

Dark starry nights, and the sound of the surf pounding and then whispering on the beach, and the unceasing sound of the coconut trees, their branches blowing, blowing, a constant rattle on the breeze.

None of that now, or not much anymore. The Mayaro that existed in 1963 is gone. Ma George the proprietor of the store on the corner is probably long dead because the building houses now a renovated rumshop, masquerading. 

A Chinese restaurant and a jazzed- up grocery store which sells anything you may need, including snacks sit right next door.

I believe that the term we used was created by Paul as he whispered to me about the urban sprawl which Trinidad will become in days yet to pass. The man was sad all the way and so was I, lamenting the loss of the Mayaro we used to know. 

There is little charm associated with driving out to Mayaro these days. Much of the heavier, denser vegetation on that drive which I remember as an eight year old, a ten year old, is gone. Gone also are some of the people we knew in those days, and gone are their houses and their dreams. The abandoned buildings are a testament to the unforgiving sea blast of the Atlantic blowing through. Nothing remains to mark a building once named Now For Now. Now for Now is gone for good. 

Paul showed me some stone walls, one thrown over, the only remnant of a viable structure from 33 years ago when he stayed there. He seemed to have fond memories of the place.

We stopped along the way for breakfast and to revisit old places which hardly exist any more. Beaten by the unremitting wind and tide and salt they fade away even as this is being written.

The board and steel bridge which rattled as it was crossed and the so-called silver bridge, named because of it's color, that same bridge which when you crossed it, the radio would fade, (all together listen for it to fade), and when it did you knew you had reached Mayaro.

 

A different Mayaro now from the one I knew in 1963-1965. Sad but true. No charm. No rustic outing and only the sight and the sound of the sea for comfort for a short while on the drive, now replaced by different systems which have no charm. Sangre Grande and the the sides of the road from there to Manzanilla were approaching squalor at some points  and considerable stretches of road are now dominated by multi million dollar stretches of walls; most of the coconut trees in these enclosures are gone. Cocal is no more, just an old hut or two rotting away in the constant breeze. Distressing.

When we reached Mayaro we saw rumshops, and a market thriving, SUVs, shoppers, the whole thing. I might have been in Tru-Valu at Long Circular Mall. The beginning of that urban sprawl which Paul has predicted? Who knows? 

Maybe we will all eventually live in a place where Chinese restaurants and supermarkets are within arm's reach. Happy us.

Now, I can go on and on describing all the old times in Mayaro and all the changes I now see there until I run out of gas, but it will probably not make positive change.

After all, this is Trinidad, the land of nobody who can care, nobody who can make a difference, nobody who cares enough, really cares enough, who may do something to help change the status quo.

Nobody.

Goodness and Greatness

All men are different, if only in their DNA which is apt to the circumstance as it reinforces the concept hugely. 

No two or other number of men are the same.

There are all kinds of men. Some are short, some tall, some thin, some fat, but these are physiological aspects.

Many feeble men are mental giants. Go and talk to the genius in the wheelchair.

The impact that some men make is not related to their physiology, but more so to their outlook and their mentality. 

How many fat men do you know that you like? It seems to me that most fat men are likeable because it's not for how they look, it's for what they are.

"The difference between men is energy. A strong will, a settled purpose, an invincible determination, can accomplish almost anything and in that lies the distinction between great men and little men".  

I quote something I read somewhere, yet something so true that we all look towards that energy, that something, which makes the difference between good and great, some thing so sadly lacking in our society, it seems, that we have few great men in T&T

Where do we find a great man in T&T today? Where is the next Anthony Pantin?

It seems that all the great men have disappeared  so we now have to settle for the mediocre men, which does not make for a safe society. Today's leaders in politics and in sociology have failed and continue to fail us miserably. The mediocre men.

The inescapable conclusion is that it is the duty of those of us who are good to aspire to greatness, yet most of us have so far failed miserably to do so.