The Aims Of The Diaries.
Public Aims:1. To engage the listening community at an earlier stage of the creative process than is commonly available.
2. To inform the listening community of the practicalities of that process.
3. To de-mystify the process which is, essentially, practical.
Private Aims:1. To encourage the Diarist to recapitulate their experience.
2. To provide the Diarist with a pointed stick.
3. To expose the Diarist to public ridicule.Comments:1. We continue to have a Romantic notion of the artist: a special creature set apart from common humanity, one favoured by the Muse.
These Diaries indicate the mundane nature of the lives of artists: their simple, human and practical concerns. These Diaries remove the mystification that we project onto the artists, their lives and activities. The creative process is shown as being straightforward, ordinary and practical.
At this point, with the commonplace nature of the artists’ work revealed, the creative process may appear more remarkable than before: how can ordinary people like these give rise to work which moves and touches us?
Then, we find a new and deeper respect for the benevolence of the creative impulse: it succeeds despite these people, not because of them.
2. Much commentary on the lives and work of artists is projection: unfounded, uninformed, without data, without direct experience, based on what we believe the lives of artists to be. Most commentary by “fans” is based on ignorance, rooted in personal prejudice, like and dislike. This is commentary from The Basement.
The enthusiast is better informed, able to engage with the process in the moment, and suspend the immediate rush to judgement. This is the view from the garden floor.
The connoisseur understands: they know, feel and sense the currents at work in the creative process. They have themselves undergone a training, but in listening and “appreciation” rather than in performance. This is the view from the floor above the garden room.
3. The recapitulation of experience, in the form of diarism, is a way to digest the impressions that life, and our living of it, naturally provides. The Diarist reviews th
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...and in the continuation from this (which my Typepad plugin has unhelpfully truncated) "Maintaining a diary is a process of engagement with oneself... that invites the Diarists to move beyond their natural lassitude, to go further than the merely comfortable"
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