“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.” TS ELIOT
I must keep remembering that quote given to me long ago by a friend. We all suffer, it’s just it all became one, and in the same place. Of course my editor was right in one sense – ‘cap it, it stays in the book’, or nothing gets transformed into art or by real art either. Perhaps she just did not understand the journey of those books, and I’ve myself to ‘blame’ for not asking, even insisting, someone else read my own work. I do think the psyche finds a way to heal, but I doubt it can ever heal being too exposed. A blog is also not a novel, or a non-fiction book either, and here there is also an attempt to be a little publisher, but something more personal than the norm too. Perhaps that’s why it works best though when blogging off the issue of why it started, with other’s stories, books, poems and cultural essays too. Problem with Eliot is you start recalling the Four Quartets, about the path ‘you did not take….into the Rose Garden.’, or something like that. Perhaps any life’s biggest challenge is always to resist those ‘Sliding Doors’ and ‘what if’s…’. There is another essay coming soon. DCD