Part 1 of 3: The Dog Ate My Homework
But A.I. writing and 'art' is far sexier, so who cares: A Rant
“PICTURES ON THE RADIO,” 2024; pen and ink; approximately 11x14; Richard Van Ingram
[I decided to cut this essay into three parts due to length and the challenge to people’s attention. Each section will appear a few days apart and I will add a link on this essay to the others as I post them for convenience if you wish to start here and read to the second then the final part of what I’m sharing. Part 2 can be found HERE. Part 3 can now be read HERE.]
I. A PREFACE, SORT OF
Many things have come to pass in the world and within my life since last I wrote for general consumption. As with all days, some matters were good, some bad, some in favor of my plans, others presenting obstacles. And as for the rest, we’ll see.
December and January have been filled with unplanned personal burdens not worth mentioning outside my home. And that is just the way of living in this world.
There is a thing I’ll admit that no writer, I think, ought ever admit out loud: I lost faith in my capacities for a period. There was an essay contest I intended to enter – and for weeks, I worked at a theme that entailed exploration of many subjects in order to make the point… or discover its temporary end inside the limits of an imposed word count and my capacity to speak reasonably and solidly.
The deadline for that contest came and went today, I with but a notebook of trials, some research – inasmuch as it was necessary – and many hours of futile brooding in between work and chores and sleep. One asks no sympathy in this matter: in the history of the world and humanity and this time as it passes, nothing I have to say will matter in the least. I’ve no grandiose notions of myself as I age. Such attitudes are for youth, when one ought have no notion of actual limitations so that one dares much and, so, accomplishes more than might be expected.
Youth is when one can play Icarus and maybe climb as far as the roof of a single floor house or the lower limbs of a high oak before slipping, falling, and if nothing is broken and one’s pride is only bruised a bit, one climbs again to see as far as one may before age makes one too brittle for hard failures.
The fortunate few – for whatever reason or no reason that ultimately makes sense – will ascend to the star of fame of some sort and perhaps gain the power provided by money before passing into the background as others catch popular taste (or what passes for attention in the more obscure corners of the world).
In the course of time, it will all be sorted out, as we are sifted by fate, by our choices, by circumstance, by our destinies, by accidents, like dust piled atop stratum of common, forgotten dust.
A fleck of gold – real or assumed – shines eventually after obscurity: there was a period of time, long, when Shakespeare was out of fashion in the English speaking world before being rehabilitated and elevated; Rembrandt’s paintings were considered by some too smoky and dark to be truly great for a while.
Leonardo DaVinci held sculpture to be the work of mindless laborers, low bred people with rough, dirty hands, painting being the pursuit of intellectuals and gentlemen. Yet, while Leonardo’s notebooks remain valued by us – and common opinion far overestimates his Mona Lisa and pays no mind to how few commissions he actually completed – Michelangelo emerges, sincerely, as the true artist of that time and age.
(Ironically, Michelangelo had a disdain for painting: His art was sculpture and he said so, even as he was forced to play around like some fop and paint the Sistine Chapel, a miserable task he thought a waste of time.)
Nothing from Leonardo’s gentlemanly brush ever presented and preserved the power, beauty, love, and the hopeless misery of humanity in any way akin to Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Those are all judgments – mine, of course. Some of that information is factual, the rest my own estimation informed by inclination, education, contemplated experience, study of philosophy, and exposure to art. That sort of thing is all anyone has to rely upon in the end, if that much.
Me, I never made it out of the oak trees or off the rooftops in youth except to fall –- hard -- due to illness and bad fortune and perhaps a lack of skill. Well, certainly some deficits in artistic as well as marketable skills; and stunted emotional intelligence, I’ll have to admit.
I got injured, but it was never from flying too close to the sun. More like: I accidentally fell off the roof into a pen of wild dogs. Black Dogs that I’ve rarely managed to shake loose.1
Genetically inherited illness and the effects of hidden “generational trauma” demand a price be paid from one’s good fortune, one’s actual abilities and dreams. Yes, “Buy the ticket, take the ride” meaningfully applies to many things, Doctor Thompson.2
By the time I found I would doubtless gain no more attention than most middling footnotes to footnotes to footnotes of history, I fell into a melancholy, an occasional loss of faith in my abilities, a dark eye towards the future which, soon enough, will not contain me.
Nor will the future notice my absence.
That the future may not include my works for very long after I die, either, is an increasingly depressing matter. Paralysis comes on some days, some weeks, months….
That I just turned 58 may have something to do with this. It may be coincidental. It doesn’t matter, really; the effects are what they are.
And so, the essay I might have written for the contest – remember that I was going to enter an essay contest?! – did not emerge. What will follow in the next two parts is what I have done instead for the moment.
With that, I leave you to your evening or day, wherever you are.
Peace,
Richard Van Ingram,
Gershom
First Week of January and 10 March 2024
“The Black Dog” is an English metaphor for being beset by severe bouts depression, lingering melancholy, despondency, feelings of worthlessness. Mental illness of the mood disorder variety.
Hunter S. Thompson’s now famous, or infamous, motto from the novel FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS.