For that friend called Tim, who tried to lecture me about ingratitude or claiming the ‘right’ to be an artist, somehow going on about some abstract suffering too, bigger than others, I’d like him to know that two new backers, with £7 and £20, are quite as important as £199, or £6000, and have edged me forward too.
Thank you so much, because whatever you can afford is precisely the energy I was talking about. The minimum pledge is £1, but if it was 10p it is a kind of listening too, or that’s how I can at least know! Another way is simply to write to this blog. You see, just words from fans very literally kept me alive a long time ago, so I have a little more experience than Tim. Just as, if people think that raising an eyebrow after only 5 days is giving up, they should know that what I’m talking about is really trying to communicate over six years, not just 30 days.
I’ve done a slightly different thing today then and as well talking to Cynthia Kern at the New York Supreme Court (who I’ve emailed in, bless her cotton socks – go on Cynthia – take the pledge and make up for your rank act of injustice!), or about Michael Jacobs, Mr so-called anti-censorship in New York, I’ve done a little reading from Fell and also speak about good or bad friends too, that became such a monumental issue, in the isolation of it all. But why this was a very hard fought battle and the opposite of some lazy gripe or sob story. The eloquence of stories are the things that should make us sob or laugh, or shout with joy, the need for art, fantasy, drama, catharsis and a mirror to real lives too. But TS Eliot said the artist must separate out the suffering man from the work and maybe that is just a process. Why it was so difficult becoming the story, or that coal face between words and facts, fantasy and reality got far, far too close, with astonishing results.
Never surrender, Light of the White Bear will come out this year at least to ebook! But Tim, a precious friend, is damn well wrong if he thinks this is just complaining, or that I did not earn the right to be an artist. I did and in contract and in humanity my publisher, people I knew very well indeed, had a duty to honour it all. Politics became the driving force instead and it was exploited shamefully.
I don’t know, I am just trying to talk and be heard and you can judge it by CLICKING HERE
Phoenix Ark's Blog 