A Happy Realization

You visit art here. E. is an artist of sorts.

This from an interview on To The Best Of Our Knowledge radio show with Jonathan Lethem, novelist, and author of Chronic City, a book that I plan to read.

Lethem: I do think art has a fundamental peculiarity to it. It's not very productive, you know, by the measurements that we usually apply to human activity. It doesn't really generate a lot of wealth, certainly proportional to the number of people attempting it. It's almost a pathetically minuscule amount of wealth. It doesn't really feed or dress people. It doesn't prove things. It doesn't educate as well as education does. It's just kind of there. It's just a thing. And I like that about it. I like it's resistance to usefulness. When I talk about what I'm doing, I often emphasize this idea that I am just trying to make something people would marvel at, or be confused by, or tickled by, and that would be good enough. A good enough reason to do it.

Jim Fleming: But isn't the idea of art or writing that, real or unreal, it helps to make sense of the reality and unreality of the life you're actually living? You read a novel in order to have a better understanding of people's relationships. You look at a picture in order to better understand the reality behind what you're looking at in the real world.

Lethem: Well, that's a very nice kind of productive Protestant Work Ethic excuse for art that you are offering me. But I actually think that it's not that. That it's to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one. And maybe also remember, and embody, sit inside, abide with, your own experiences, more deeply, in a more conscious way. But not to explain them. Because it couldn't possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it? (Transcription by E. )

I think this may qualify as my best damn post of the year so far. Embody, sit inside, abide with Eclecticity.