I keep returning to Rilke these days, particularly Letters on Life. The section “On Work,” speaks to me. If you don’t own a copy, I gotta say, that volume just gives and gives. Today I read this:

“Get up cheerfully on days you have to work, if you can. And if you can’t, what keeps you from doing so?”

From another section “On Art,” he says,

“There truly is a difference between art as a way of life for someone or simply something they do. The first option is so immense, so slow, and perhaps so strictly limited to people of an advanced age that you have no reason to compare yourself to the individuals bearing this strange name. Only the truly great are artists in that strict but exclusively true sense that art has become a way of life for them — all others, all of us for whom art is still only something we do, encounter each other on the same long path and greet one another in the same silent hope while longing for the same remote mastery.”

And you have to love that here, Rilke is lumping himself in with those who have art as something they do. From where I sit, he was obviously someone for whom art was a way of life.

I haven’t cracked open Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert in ages. But I’ve been thinking about “art as a way of life” for well, a very long time. (Thus the category “Live like an artist.”) As a young person writing, I used to yearn, I mean, fuckingyearn, to be a full time writer/artist/maker/whatever. But I’ve also never wanted to write those things (or tbh had the ability to write those things) that would be popular enough to allow that even for intervals. I’ve always known I would have to fit my “live like an artist” bit into other streams of employment. Okay, all this to quote from page 6 of Gilbert’s book, where she talks about the importance of Jack Gilbert in her life, a man she never met. (He died in 2012). They shared a last name (though they’re unrelated), and she held the same job and sat in the same office after he did. You might know his poem “A Brief for the Defense,” as it’s been widely quoted from time to time.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

I think it’s a different poem these days which isn’t a bad thing.

Elizabeth Gilbert writes that it was said “he had seemed not quite of this world.” “He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged [his students] to do the same. He didn’t so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why, because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of the world.” And this, to do this, required utmost courage, utmost bravery.

I put EG’s book away after it came out in 2015 and probably looked at it a few times since. Would I still need it, get things from it? Yes, is the answer. It’s generally a case of, “I know all this stuff, but need it repeated, and often.”

I needed to hear the boring job stuff that Rilke obv couldn’t write about from the perspective of our 2024 existence. (And maybe more could be added to some thinking around this since the publication of Big Magic, who knows). Gilbert tells us to give up our childish fantasies, “the dream of marrying for money, the dream of inheriting money, the dream of winning the lottery, and the dream of finding a “studio wife” (male or female).” She gets harsh with us:

“This is a world, not a womb. You can look after yourself in this world while looking after your creativity at the same time — just as people have done for ages.”

There is dignity and honour in this, she says. And I like this too: “it may be the case that there are seasons when you can live off your art and seasons when you cannot.”

When living like an artist, one needs days (at least I think so), to just take books off the shelf and leaf through them, reading this dogeared page, then that one. To just sit and stare off into space and imagine. Think. Consider. Always interesting when you keep coming across the same thought in various places, the same word. Today it was about reframing perspective. On Instagram I came across a text block by Cory Allen, “Reframing your perspective is a powerful move. When you feel stuck or resistant, pause and look for the upside. Shifting your thinking from “I have to do this” to “I get to do this” engages curiosity. This turns every experience into a chance for growth, wisdom, and understanding.” I mean, nothing Pema Chödrön hasn’t said before, but still, I enjoyed reading it in this context.

In the book I probably found most useful this past year, Exhausted by Anna Katharina Schaffner, she says, that there is a healing power in “philosophical reflections” and that they “help us to see our problems from a different perspective.” She says, “Shifts in perspective, both subtle and large, can propel us out of our paralysis and enable us to take action.”

It feels like now, these days in the relentless and ruthless furnace of the world, to live and work as an artist is just trickier and trickier. Ever fewer creatives get to work most of the time at their art. We are always shifting and reframing and considering the opposite and trying to have art as at least part of our way of life. Of course it’s heartbreaking some days, it’s exhausting, and it’s frustrating, the way the “paying the bills” life keeps encroaching. Life is more expensive now, and it seems that things like books and paintings are just harder to sell, to keep it real.

In the end though, it always come back to the why. If you can make delight the why of your art making process, if you can delight in the work of it, this helps make everything make sense. If you can remember that you get to do this, in whatever slivers of time you’ve made work for yourself, that helps. If you can remember that this is what makes a good life, a rich life, this helps. If you can go on being curious and delighting in these things you make, and create a few sparks and delight others, that’s a bit of gravy, isn’t it?

The photos, are as always, mine. The laundry machines with their out of order signs, resting, seemed to me to fit with this post.

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October 15, 2024