Words that don't exist in English. My favorites:

1.  Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

2.  Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

3.  L’esprit de l’escalier (French): usually translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it

4.  Meraki (pronounced may-rah-kee; Greek): Doing something with soul, creativity, or love. It’s when you put something of yourself into what you’re doing

5.  Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods

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Alain de Botton on self-help books, and why he has edited a new series of them:

 There's no more ridiculed genre in the literary canon – and you can see why. Most self-help books are written by Americans of the most sentimental and unctuous sort. They promise their readers eternal life, untold riches and an escape from every grubby aspect of being human, all within 300 pages of upbeat, relentlessly repetitive and patronising prose. No wonder the unstated assumption of the cultural elite is that really only stupid people read them.

photo from The School of Life

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 Painter Agnes Martin, photographed in 1966 by Diane Arbus:

via Rachel Comey's tumblr

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Blue-Sky Art

I read this short essay this morning at one of my favorite blogs, The School of Life:

Sue Hubbard on Creativity

Blue-sky thinking, finding the inner you; if you look up ‘creativity’ on the internet you’ll be bombarded with sites to help you get in contact with your creative potential. I blame Joseph Beuys, that modern art guru of fat and felt, who claimed “everyone is an artist”.  Now we all feel we have something to say. But do we? Of course Beuys didn’t mean everyone has the potential to be a Picasso.  Motivated by utopian beliefs, culled from Romantic writers such as Novalis and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, he believed in the power of universal human creativity to bring about revolutionary change.  The psychoanalysts had a slightly different take. Hanna Segal saw art as an expression of the depressive position and the task of the artist as the creation of the world. Great art could be defined by how well it created another reality. In this world the artist mourns for lost relationships and experiences that have given meaning to life. Segal cites Proust who, on meeting some long lost friends, saw how frivolous they’d become. Realizing that his former world no longer existed he set about re-creating that of the dying and the dead. Art, therefore, becomes a form of mourning, where loved ones are given up in the actual world and re-created in an inner one.

Melanie Klein took these ideas further. For her art was a form of reparation for destructive infantile rage against the abandoning mother. While for the psychiatrist Anthony Storr reflective solitude was an essential component.  The cliché that genius is akin to madness is not so far off the mark. Artists, particularly poets, are known to suffer from a high rate of depressive illness. So no, creativity is not about ‘blue-sky thinking’ but about destruction and loss, transformed into art through the arduous creative process.

I have to say I profoundly disagree with her. Art can and often is about destruction and loss, but that's not the only thing it's about. Keep in mind that the psychoanalysts studied and worked in a pretty restricted milieu. There's a whole world out there and cultures that have never heard of and could care less about "destructive infantile rage". I think Josef Beuys was more on the mark than Hubbard gives him credit for. Art can be about loss, but it is also frequently about joy and every single thought and emotion in between. Why can't it emerge from a continuum of the human experience? Additionally, creativity and art does not have to equal "great art"-- how lofty!, and how boring.

The idea that artists are "mad" seems more like old-fashioned romanticism than the "blue-sky" view which Hubbard dismisses (which, ok, can be extremely annoying at times). Are artists considered "mad" in all cultures, or just ours? Maybe it's a chicken-and-egg situation. Maybe some artists are driven mad (or at least get horribly depressed) at the lack of understanding, not to mention cash.

Anyway, I think of the artists I know, the things I read and look at, the music I listen to. The "everyday" art that is a beautifully made piece of furniture or clothing. It is all worthy of our profound respect. I'll go so far as to say that even "bad" art (could we ever possibly even agree on what that is? I'd love to ask John Waters) deserves some respect. Clumsily made, poorly expressed, cynical, sentimental, whatever. We don't have to like it, or admire it, but it should be acknowledged as human expression of creativity. (Skill is not irrelevant here, but Hubbard seems to be talking more about motivation and world-view rather than mastery.)

The more everyone has the opportunity to engage in art-making, the more skills we teach, the more art gets made, the less elevated and mysterious and out-of-reach it is. It's essential for a decent life, and not "blue-sky thinking" at all.

On Determination and Cheerfulness

As I look out on my yard, which is chock-full of dandelions, I decide to use them as a model for survival. Here's my philosophical guide, from Richard Reynolds and The School of Life (I highly recommend you read the whole thing, it's short):

Taraxacum officinalis - the posh name for dandelions – even sounds unpleasant, like a demanding letter from HMRC. They are the definitive weeds but they are far from weedy. Dandelions are determination incarnate. “Be brave as a lion”. Fine. But “Be determined like a dandelion.” It’s not an ancient Chinese proverb, but it should be...

 

It’s the nature of a dandelion’s determination that is so infuriating to the lawn layer but of value as a guide to modern life. It puts down deep roots. Determination requires the confidence that comes from being grounded. This way you’ll be more resistant to the bluster above ground and able to grow and spread.

Besides, it's the basis of our tortoises' diet.

With this in mind, I am putting on some music and heading off into the studio.