Inspiration in Artistic Work

Visual arts, music, poetry and other forms of art.
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Mimesis
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Inspiration in Artistic Work

Post by Mimesis »

Kavi wrote: Have you any good tips in order to become a better writer?
I ask the same question, constantly! But perhaps David Hare can help us a little here:

"Write because you have to express something that you are absolutely burning to express. Write because you have to. Write because you are desperate to say something that you care very deeply about...."
"We are such stuff. As dreams are made on, and our little life. Is rounded with a sleep."
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Heith
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Re: Poetry

Post by Heith »

Well, I am not a writer but perhaps the same ideas as with drawing apply.

Write every day. Even if it's just an apple. Observe carefully nature and write your observations. Study carefully light and shadow, and write about that. Shadow gives your writing depth, makes it three dimensional, real. Consider that each good writing has a strong composition, a strong body: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When you understand the natural rules, then with your writing you can begin to break them.
Kavi
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Re: Poetry

Post by Kavi »

This seems to me like following advice: "How to become an artist? Be an artist." :D
I struggle awful lot with myself when it becomes a matter of arts. I know I could make art, but not any kind of art - only good art. And despite knowing that every good artist makes really bad art, it was some years I stopped doing any art and I started to think about making art. I hope you get the joke! :D

Anyways nowadays I am doing better with myself and I have discovered that time planning place a huge role in whether I practice arts or not. (This is reason I chose aspect of Stone)
The Little time consuming demons are otherwise directing me towards petty mortal sins. :D
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Heith
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Re: Poetry

Post by Heith »

Kavi wrote:This seems to me like following advice: "How to become an artist? Be an artist." :D
Hmm... I don't think one can really choose it in a way. One within their soul either is or is not. The core of it is not something one can learn, one is born with a kind of inner understanding and passion. And also if one has that, it's impossible to suppress it without experiencing huge problems.

But that of course depends a lot how one defines an artist. There's many people who are technically, for example, good at drawing. But their work is always somehow hollow and lacks depth. One can of course perfect their skill and get better, but if one doesn't have ideas, they will never "get" it. But perhaps I'm a bit strict in my thinking.

Just pondering!
Kavi
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Re: Poetry

Post by Kavi »

Heith wrote:
Kavi wrote:This seems to me like following advice: "How to become an artist? Be an artist." :D
Hmm... I don't think one can really choose it in a way. One within their soul either is or is not. The core of it is not something one can learn, one is born with a kind of inner understanding and passion. And also if one has that, it's impossible to suppress it without experiencing huge problems.

But that of course depends a lot how one defines an artist. There's many people who are technically, for example, good at drawing. But their work is always somehow hollow and lacks depth. One can of course perfect their skill and get better, but if one doesn't have ideas, they will never "get" it. But perhaps I'm a bit strict in my thinking.

Just pondering!
To cut things "short", in my life I am having existential crisis with this theme.
In traditional thinking this origin of inner fire of arts is found in Greek goddess Mnemosyne. Goddess of Memory who gave birth to nine muses. This memory can be thought to be memory of "true self" and with aid of muse this memory can be remembered in arts. I have always had a tendency to drift away to otherworldliness and to plain mediumism, while God of skill and structure, Apollon has had almost no "contact" with me. The optimal artist and magician even according to Ervast would be someone who has obtained knowledge and structurized it and is therefore more or less on influence of apollonian. This makes me feel myself a little bit more cheap in arts as usually the fire which has kept me writing is the emotions and feelings. This is also a problem for me as I never have hold an identity of "an artist" as I have seen it in much more different light and so has all people around me. Although nowadays I know that technical skills are not the most important thing - there is still a tendency in arts to teach in that way.

This lack of knowledge/ Apollon can be seen in every drawing I make, in every sentence I make - there is some kind of memory trapped in the creation but its full potentiality can never flourish as I can't even remember or handle simple structures and syntaxes of sentences and rules how to use commas. This bitterness of being in some sense "handicap" brought me towards satanism in the first place while studying closely the failure and mistakes one can make in arts. It was also nice to find out this similar idea in Verge's song called "because it's wrong" as I definitely have been born to this life "ass first".
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Smaragd
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Re: Poetry

Post by Smaragd »

Kavi wrote:This lack of knowledge/ Apollon can be seen in every drawing I make, in every sentence I make - there is some kind of memory trapped in the creation but its full potentiality can never flourish as I can't even remember or handle simple structures and syntaxes of sentences and rules how to use commas.
I can relate to the last part very much. I've treaded a similar path where the "feeling" or the dionysian side of things have ruled and technical side have been set almost totally subordinate to how things will unfold by themselves. Last year I delved towards Apollo and this 'Idea rules all' thing, which led to quite robotic offspring though I always tried to find some warmth and interesting angle to them. These things have been mainly musical but writing poetry in SoA related work have really helped me navigate towards the point of strong fusion, although it's always a struggle. Dabbling with other arts can give great perspective, especially if ones main work takes detours in to these ugly investigations of isolated aspects.
Kavi wrote:In traditional thinking this origin of inner fire of arts is found in Greek goddess Mnemosyne. Goddess of Memory who gave birth to nine muses. This memory can be thought to be memory of "true self" and with aid of muse this memory can be remembered in arts.
Thank you for this bit. I've had a bit trouble penetrating in to the Greek pantheon, but this makes me a good hole to peek in. This is also very close to that strong fusion point I think, for as emphasized in the Red aspect the spirit of ours is always on the move similarly as every present moment asks different ratio of the Apollonian and Dionysian influences as an answer to the world (and the subconscious).
"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets”, Numbers 11:29 as echoed by William Blake
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Heith
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Re: Poetry

Post by Heith »

Good conversation! I'll certainly partake. However, we are really offtopic, and I think we maybe should move this conversation to another thread, starting from Kavi's post. I don't know how to do that?
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Nefastos
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Re: Poetry

Post by Nefastos »

Heith wrote:I think we maybe should move this conversation to another thread, starting from Kavi's post. I don't know how to do that?


Just send me the specifics (which post, where to send, the name for the new thread) & I'll put my tremendous moderating knowledge in practical use.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Cancer
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Re: Poetry

Post by Cancer »

Kavi wrote:Just briefly to mention, I actually enjoyed your translation, Cancer!
That's very nice to hear, thank you!
Kavi wrote:I have not learned to use rhyming in my works and because of that I have always seemed to despise the use of rhymes. Until now, as I think rhymes and meter can work if text is written before hand, for example for music.
I used to think that Finnish in itself comes badly along with rhymes - and with other poetic tropes borrowed from Germanic and Romance languages when "literary poetry" began to be written in Finland. I still find Finnish-language sonnets, for example, kind of strange, a clumsy imitation - trying to force this stupid, barely-literary peasant-language into tightly regulated forms of European high culture. We have had a unified system for writing for a little over a hundred years, a "literature" for about as long; it's no wonder that the real European languages often seem to have better manners than ours!

The forms that I found "natural" for Finnish were alliteration and the 50's and 60's Modernists' "blank" way of writing, that does often make use of non-strict meter but otherwise strives for "clarity", "exactness" of an "image" etc. - the ideals, basically, that were formulated by Pound and others in English a bit earlier. Thinking back, the naivety of my semi-conscious theory is obvious. I had simply taken the forms I was most familiar with (my study of poetry began with Pentti Saarikoski, Paavo Haavikko, and Eeeva-Liisa Manner, three great Modernists of the Finnish canon, the first of whom is still the archetypical "boys' poet" here), or else had been taught were somehow irreversibly more original to Finnish than any others (the Kalevala, which I still haven't really read, is an alliterative poem), and made them the only appropriate ones. The poetry of the early 20th century, when rhyming in Finnish was truly made an art, somehow didn't resonate with me, and still doesn't, fully; it puzzles me. I have long been thinking that I should take the time to really submerge myself in people like Otto Manninen and L. Onerva. Certainly the translations of classics from this period are much better than most newer ones.

And to finally say something about rhyming itself... It's a risky device to use, because it intensifies poetry, riles it into extremities, so that a stupid rhymed poem sounds awfully stupid while a poem that pulls it off right can haunt us for the rest of our lives. Which brings to mind another memory pertaining to my thoughts above: the first poem I remember consciously enjoying was a rhymed poem - in English. I remember copying it into a notebook while very bored in class in the ninth grade, and shivering just from the succession of muted sounds. And I still recite this poem, "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe (which I'd come across on Arcturus' magnificent album La Masquerade Infernale), by myself like a little hubris-ridden prayer. That English established itself for me so early as a language of rhymed poetry can maybe also serve to explain my confusion about rhymes in Finnish.

It's strange, by the way, how rhyming is considered totally passé in literary poetry, while it can still be "cutting edge" in rap music, for example. Do you people have any ideas as to why this is?
Kavi wrote:Have you any good tips in order to become a better writer?
There is a lovely scene in Leena Krohn's novella Erehdys ("The Mistake") in which the protagonist, a frustrated older writer, is being forced to answer annoying questions from the audience at a book fair or something like that. Finally a mother, who tells her daughter dreams of becoming a writer, asks him how she could help her... And the first thing that pops into the man's head is: "You could die! That's what you could do!"

Art is in some secret and joyful way connected with not giving a fuck anymore.
Tiden läker inga sår.
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Smaragd
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Re: Poetry

Post by Smaragd »

Cancer wrote:It's strange, by the way, how rhyming is considered totally passé in literary poetry, while it can still be "cutting edge" in rap music, for example. Do you people have any ideas as to why this is?
I might go through the obvious road, but what the hell. In another topic I recently talked about juvenile satanism as a bit moronic thing, which led me to think of the juvenile aspects of Satan. Although rap music obviously has wide spectrum it remains a juvenile thing like rock. It's the "teenage lightning", which can also be found from fantasy, listening to Arcturus and elsewhere. So maybe it's about the actual rulers behind these things that gets to say what goes to where under their watch. The Trickster aspect might have lost it's power and influence over literary poetry while gained some within the new comer rap, where the Trickster can be seen quite literally making tricks with the rhymes. Maybe it's these different cultural forms that rise and bogart the powers of certain aspects to themselves. Under their new hosts the archetypes may continue to actualize, evolve and repeat their cycles in new colors, though the change is proably more like a gradient than sudden jump.
I think great writers don't bend to these cultural forms but are able to incorporate any aspect to their work regardless of it's "style" or form.

Looking at this from more conventional point of view, rhyming for me is a tool of finding meaning through restriction. Now I don't know the definition of "literary poetry", but might it aim to more open expression?
EDIT: Literary poetry as in poetry in written form? Well, in that case, my more conventional point is not valid. :D
Kavi wrote:Have you any good tips in order to become a better writer?
In relation to the above, I'm quite new to writing and found a way to embrace the fact that I'm a novice. I've played with childish composition and I make a rhyme every time a rhyme comes. The important thing is not to do childish or whatever things for the sake of it, but to follow the meaningful voices and try understand them in honest manner during the process of translating them to language.
"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets”, Numbers 11:29 as echoed by William Blake
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