Excerpt from Coin of the Realm

The last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally—instinctively—is themselves, their own judgment. It is the result, I think, of an early training away from imagination, imagination being the means by which we think of a thing unconventionally—outside the norm. Those who raise us want the best for us—they hope to protect us from seclusion. But exclusion, at some level, is required in the making of the artist-art begins in the particular privacy of exile. What is required to be an authentically original artist is an inability to think conventionally—this, coupled with a for-the-most-part unconscious unawareness that one is thinking differently in the first place. It helps to have a sense of nothing left to lose, nothing therefore in the way of our speaking honestly; what’s to fear, if no one is listening anyway, or if we believe that no one is listening? Or if we believe that the listeners can’t hear, ever, what it is that we hear?

Hence to the cinema, generally, and most poetry, hence to the color choices available in the new cars, a governing mediocrity that promises to do no harm by standing out, by making what was once correctly called “a statement.” Not to fit in would mean being held accountable, having to believe in ourselves, that is, rather than having our worth be determined for us according to how much others are willing to invest in us. It’s related, I believe, to the irresolvable bind that attaches to democracy: how on one hand individuality is desirable, but on the other hand there’s a need to work in individuality is desirable, but on the other hand there’s a need to work in unison, and that can’t happen if there isn’t a large swath of agreement where the majority conduct their daily lives. But the result can be—and mostly, is—a blurring of signature, until everything looks the same. An X we hide behind. X is everything I keep meaning to cross out.

While the performance of art and the enjoyment of art may be democratic, art itself is not. Nor is the making of it, finally. More than having its own signature, art is its own signature—irreplicable, strange, never seen before, not seeable again elsewhere in the future. Time and space, at best, contextualize art—they do not confine it.

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I have never been one to show my work to others while I’m still in the process of making it. Partly, I don’t trust them to be able to be objective, free of any notions of how they themselves would make a given poem. And partly, I don’t trust myself not to be swayed by how they might think of the poem. Or to put it another way, the poem hasn’t yet earned from me the trust with which, eventually, I will be able to pronounce the poem finished, and as good as it can possibly be, and impervious to change, no matter how strongly suggested. Resistance—which, finally, is a form of belief, isn’t it, a belief in the self over that which threatens to engulf it?—resistance is crucial to the making of art, an essential tool and one of the most dangerous, as well, for it can lead to a resistance to the fact of flaw. It’s as if the making of art occurred in a crucible, where power and vulnerability find meaningful calibration. Or they should. It’s a tall order. Of course it is.

But how not to care about others’ opinions? How not to want to be accepted? And how to get past the need for acceptance, and take the risk of “unlock[ing] the heart, and let[ing] it speak,” to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, who goes on to say—in his poem “The Buried Life”—that

I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thought, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved:
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves…

How to trust ourselves, without compromising that gregariousness that is also a very real part of what it is to be human?

Trust you gut. In God we trust. Trust me.

Am I trustworthy, on moral grounds? If the ground shifts—is shiftable?

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About conformity, I also understand that it is inevitable—necessary, in fact, in terms of survival of the species. We’re still animals and if we don’t so much live by instinct anymore as fumble forward by means of it—technology having assisted the gradual devolution of instinct by making it in so many cases expendable—then it makes sense to think of conformity as protective camouflage, a way in which to pass undetected among the crowd. When I look for the exceptions—those who are most likely to dress, style and conduct themselves in ways that seem to demand our attention—I find myself returning to two groups: the young in general, and artists in particular. I note, too, that these are two groups whose sense of freedom (or recklessness, perhaps) in large part comes from an indifference to the fact of mortality, or a seeming ignorance of it, or a fearlessness in the face of it. Again, a version of nothing-to-lose, or a belief in that. And—whether on the skateboarding ramp, or across the blankness of a page or canvas—risk becomes, in turn, effortless: instinctive, we might say.

Risk; resistance. Exile.

By not fitting the norm, we become, at best, noticeable, and at worst we become easily discernible targets—of suspicion, fear, ridicule, or at least the possibility of these is always present. The original is always problematic because no one knows at first quite what to do with it, how to incorporate it into the norm from which it so stand out. in a sense, what that norm provides is an archetype, a myth that most of us can enter easily. That is all that advertising is, finally, and it is at the root of the notion of genre. We know that art is by defining it and then accepting as art only what fits the definition. More disturbing, we tend less and less to define ourselves than to wait for the definition to be provided—whether by advertisers or critics—and then we shape ourselves to fit the definition.

Specific to the artist is the danger of falling victim to a myth of the self, shaped by the self. What seems to happen is that, as a result of not fitting into the world at large, the artist turns to a world whose primary coordinates are the art and the maker of it. Fair enough. But it can become increasingly difficult to distinguish the art from the life, or so I have found. How much of a given poem is a record of what actually happened? And how much of what happens next happens in response to what begins as “mere” imagination, in the form of a poem? How much who I am now is the response to a projected self I’ve styled on paper? If (as I once suggested in a poem) art can become eventually all we have of what was true, what if we can no longer distinguish between truth and art? Does the distinction have to matter?

Copyright 2004 by Carl Phillips. All rights reserved.