Most artists I know, myself included, have created throughout our lives in a way that echoes what the Fisher King says in Part V of The Wasteland (What the Thunder Said): "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." I first encountered the phrase in the song "Poor De Chirico" by Natalie Merchant & 10,000 Maniacs. In the lyric, it is something that the artist says to describe his paintings. In such a context, the phrase immediately conjures Giorgio's silent, nearly abandoned dreamworlds of sun-parched town plazas and eerie pastel towers casting long shadows. Even as a senior in high school, I thought: those de Chirico landscapes really are what we can salvage from this life - places beautiful, but uncanny and permeated with an inexplicable loss.
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What I and many of the artists I know have been unable to do beyond creating and shoring fragments against our ruins is also diligently pursue & integrate into the infrastructural support that comes from applying for grants, fellowships, residences and involvement in the edifice of academia, not to mention the corporate publishing and entertainment edifice. In other words, writing/playing/performing/imagining has been part of a prolonged act of survival and I am grateful for art and all the artists preceding and contemporary to me who've made my survival and even internal flourishing possible. But the the parallel bureaucratic navigation that well-known and well supported artists achieve has always felt abstract and distant to me. That's unfortunate. And in my case, it may be due to something as banal as undiagnosed ADD. My mind all but shuts down in the face of things that are not immediately present and tangible to me. Well, the brain is plastic and there may be time for me yet to acclimate my mind to the landscape of forms and institutions that are far less real to me than the landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico...
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