The Dionysus Thing.

I’m not talking about wine, of course. But artists.

I haven’t had much going on in the way of stuff that might be of interest to my two readers here until just this second. This is due to having actual things going on, and probably too many of them. I need to be getting to sleep because it’s going to be another 5am wakeup so I can get to the gym, but loading WordPress and seeing that ancient post as the last thing I did is frightening. Never mind that my strange brain seems to be hyperactive right now.

One thing that I haven’t been able to gel with is the public’s perception of how a musician and author ought to be. I blame some of this, but not all, on hipsters. Postmodern dandyism has all but destroyed the public’s perception of art in an intellectual manner, instead focusing on the idea of an artist, and that artist making himself and his personality itself part of his art.

People I talk to often have a warm fuzzy spot for writers and so on, and think that I’m a certain way. An example of this is how when I mention that I’ll be making a dayjob-career-change from health and fitness to civil engineering technology, they become frazzled and are sure that I’m just bending to public pressure to have a real job and be productive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps this is also a symptom of the right/left brain fallacy, which is something most still believe. Anyone who reads the reviews of my novel should notice a theme: the work is meticulous, structured, and quite steady. This is not an accident. Nor does this make it boring, un-artistic, or artificial.

In general, I’m a rigid, militaristic person (not my description; someone else’s) who loves structure. Look at how I go on about Lacan–it’s no accident I find every way possible to give structure to the human experience using that particular tool, instead of pissing it away with the kind of new-age nonsense I liked when I was in my early twenties. I still have an imagination though. I daresay it’s better in some cases than flighty flaky artists who live the Dionysian cliche.

What brought this to a head for me recently is having a quick look at Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus. Anyone remember that? I’d forgotten about it but as soon as I saw those drawings again, it had a certain familiarity. I probably couldn’t appreciate it as much when I’d seen it last. Anyway, the thing is incredible. And the creator is . . . big surprise . . . an architect and industrial designer. Whatever, Dionysus . . .

So here we have a society who has little appreciation for the artistic value of industry and technology and design, and thinks that a writer is a temperamental drunk and gives painters and musicians a special permit to be a moron. That’s why I don’t have a lot of artist friends. Artists can be selfish and really boring. And a really good piece of wisdom I read from one of those shameful paperback writers who makes a lot of money is: you can get away with anything except being boring. Of course the boring artist does fool the audience into being interesting by turning the attention to affect, like his dress and drug addiction and musical preferences, but that hardly counts.

Serafini’s work is a mind-boggling artistic exercise of his technical skills. If the average person is alienated from, say, Frank Lloyd Wright as “art,” maybe Serafini is an easier demonstration of how reason can produce amazing artistic works where intuition would completely fail. Maybe it seems hypocritical for me to make the Codex Seraphinianus as some champion of reason, given that it’s filled with asemic writing, but to me that aspect still dwells within the realm of technique and reason, despite that it evokes strange, mystical sensations in the reader. The man played with structure in a way that exposes the hoax of the symbol. That’s likely a loaded way of putting it, but I think it’s parallel to his own comments on the work. In Lacanian terms, I think this asemic work exposes the structure of the subconscious and underlines the fundamental unapproachable nature of the other. Humans are captivated by the symbol, but the symbol ultimately murders the thing, and we’re still completely alien to the rest of the world due to that flaw in symbol-making.

Joyce did this too, and while people tend to think his experimental works are garbage or psychotic, they’re missing what he’s actually doing with words and how it’s related to concepts like Freud’s theories about dreams and so on. I lack the expertise to delve into that fully, which is a shame, but I can’t see myself spending eight years in university to be able to do that. Anyway, I do notice similarities between the Codex and Joyce’s work. Both have deliberately played with symbolic structures and done things to them kind of like what the subconscious does in dreams through sublimation and compression and so on. Joyce’s endless puns and jokes, to me, are similar to the way Serafini turns ordinary things into grotesque but strangely humourous and even sometimes practical jokes in his diagrams. Joyce’s puns don’t work without reason behind them–the fact that he’s completely rewritten the structure for himself doesn’t take away from that fact. In the same way, Serafini’s grotesque creations still show technical skill in the design and they do make sense much of the time, in a strange way.

Neither of these works seem at all to be the work of a Dionysian. I think works like these show that reason, technical skill, and imagination make art just as much as those who operate simply on “inspiration” and other cliches of the trade.

This is why I have trouble getting into talking about my genre, or about music. Scenes are tricky for me because I don’t necessarily care about the specifics. Dieselpunk is where I’m at with my fiction, but instead of making costumes, the intellectual climate of the diesel era is what I take from it. All that fan stuff is fun and I’m glad other people enjoy it without taking it seriously like I make myself, but for me it’s such an internal and intellectual thing that talking about it and dressing up and being into the scene are things I can’t really get into easily. So here’s where the people who doubt that learning an industrial technical trade is really “me” come in. I’m at a point where my writing isn’t going to have vertical growth without delving into something with more intellectual stimulation. To me, even if I have to quit writing for a while to get through the program, having the kind of technical knowledge that allows you to understand how important things are designed and built is probably one of the most important things I can do to improve as an artist.

Will I have to cut out writing in order to focus on school? Who knows. I hope not. But the writing I do when I come back to it will be so much better than it can be right now.

Anyway.