on art, its purpose
“Poet With Flower“ (2008)
_____
wherefore art, I’ve long and often wondered,
with only a wink to Juliet’s Romeo, for my
question dug deeper, why, indeed, itself art
we build our souls on the stories we’ve
heard, the impressions we’ve received
from voices that spoke directly to our
senses, painters with paint, musicians
with music, writers with words, poets
with poems
it started with fairy tales, which told of
right and wrong, good and bad, courage,
kindness, responsibility, and dire
consequences for discord
Biblical stories also took up a lot of my own
childhood, Jesus, Adam and Eve, Moses
and the Ten Commandments, this last
reinforced by Cecil B. DeMille’s epic
but soon enough it was Oliver Twist, Little
Nell, and by an inescapable authorial leap,
since these were all by an irresistible
Charles Dickens for a guy my age, Sydney
Carton, who valiantly stands in for his
friend, Charles Darnay, at the guillotine, a
quantum, even existential, leap from
Peter Pan and Mary Poppins
though I had the good fortune to learn to
read and write music as a boy, play music,
learn about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven,
it didn’t take anyone else much more than
their enthusiasm to see what the Beatles
were similarly doing, the Rolling Stones,
the Supremes, they were not only singing,
but making history, shaping it, and us, we
followed the questions they rose, their
responses, the effects upon ourselves
for nothing is considered until it’s
mentioned, spoken, made clear, and they
were those prophets
the same goes for art, we see as we see
cause Monet, Picasso, Warhol showed
us how to see, what to look at
and of course poets, Shakespeare,
Rostand, Dante, Goethe, to inform, each,
their individual language, and culture
I have been Philip Carey, Scarlett O’Hara,
Blanche Dubois, Gary Cooper in “High
Noon“, both Martha and George in
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf“, lately
I’ve been even Hank Williams
as Babette would say, a French doll who
gets abducted in “Raggedy Ann and Andy:
A Musical Misadventure“, an animated
movie from the Seventies, – oo aahrr yoo
Richard
psst: all of them have been me too,
incidentally
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