i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written – too personal was it, too unfinished.
they were ignored.
instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.
tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.
her sister did not listen.
we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.
kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.
my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.
no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.
i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.
–
asked capitalism of the artist:
what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?
genuinely cant stop thinking about whatever early human first looked a literal wolf full in the face and thought domestication would be fun but ALSO cant stop thinking about the ENTIRE early human tribe that absolutely did NOT think to stop them
HOLD THE PHONE
Slightly related: I read a book by Rick McIntyre, who was official Wolf Guy at Yellowstone Park for 25 years (and studied wolves for 40 yrs total). He describes how, when they’re alone, wolves—both adults and pups—will pick up sticks or bones or bits of animal skin and toss them around to entertain themselves, the way you might toss a ball up and down. They essentially play catch by themselves.
So if wolves do this by themselves, in nature, that means that we saw them playing this game and thought “huh, that wolf enjoys fetching the stick it’s throwing for itself, maybe I could throw it further and it would like that more?” And thus began our two species’ mutual favourite game to play together
You rarely see a “wend” without a “way.” You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend” was just another word for “go” in Old English. The past tense of “wend” was “went” and the past tense of “go” was “gaed.” People used both until the 1400s, when “go” became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went” hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.
