Who am I?

This paragraph stayed with me this morning:


It is a quote by Wolfgang von Goethe, when talking to a friend, he asks of himself:  What am I?  
This is his answer:


'Everything that I have see, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals,  by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces.  Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts,....their perspectives on life.  I have often reaped what others have sowed.  My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.'


(extract from  'Common as Air' by Lewis Hyde  2010)


Whether we recognize this or not, this is who we all are, and for this reason, we are ever changing. 

The Believer

The November/December 2011 issue of The Believer (www.believermag.com) just arrived.  If you have never read this magazine, I strongly suggest buying at least one copy.  It’s not your usual arts magazine.  No glossy pages here, no advertisements appealing to fat wallets and status conscious consumers.  It is a magazine whose main theme is ‘real’, calling it how it is, telling stories for the story’s sake, real-life pictures of lives lived or ideas expressed honestly.  It’s a magazine which even smells real, the paper is somewhere between newsprint and school  primer.  The pages all have a coloured margin, a different colour for each issue.  This issue is orange, the October issue was purple.

I had devoured the October, #84, issue.  It was no quick read, so much chunky word food but when # 85 arrived last week, my appetite for more was at its height.

It’s a magazine that succeeds in informing the reader on a variety of subjects which otherwise he might not discover on his own (ex:  The Dale Guild Society – Article entitled ‘The Last Man for the Job’).  This particular piece was written in a deeply heartfelt way.  It was not a story about monetary success but about how a person found himself following an ineluctable path directed by a passionate desire to save an art form which otherwise would be lost for ever.

And then there is ‘Stuff I’ve been reading’, Nick Hornby’s book review.  Just by the tone of the title and the reputation of the contributor, how could you not read him.  There is something wonderfully accessible about the style, so much so, that after reading his review on Claire Tomalin’s book ‘Charles Dickens – A life’, I ordered it.  A Christmas present for one lucky family member, me.

I anticipate the arrival of #86 with the same excitement as when I was a young girl waiting for my monthly teenage magazine to arrive.  Admittedly, The Believer is of a totally different content, but relatively speaking given the almost 50 years that separate the delivery of that teen mag and today, the level of importance I place on the content probably equates to the same, that is to say: enormous.

Thank you, McSweeney’s for this pleasure.  

A start

I spend at least an hour each morning reading after breakfast.  Books of choice usually centre around psychology, human nature and behaviours, the why of all the differences amongst people.  Thanks to a Christmas present of several years ago from my son, I was introduced to Lewis Hyde (www.lewishyde.com), "poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination".   This introduction to the works of Lewis Hyde was appropriately entitled 'The Gift' and started me exploring more deeply the idea of the role of 'art' and 'creative works' in our society.


To speak to the content of the book directly would take far too long.  My random thought today is just to say how much the reading of this book prodded my brain and allowed me to widen my own reflections on the impact any creative process has on its public.  In short though I was caught by Mr. Hyde's clarity where he plays on the word 'gift' where in English, a 'gift, is both a 'talent' and a 'present' and how these two meanings intertwine.


Just a couple of months ago, while browsing in Amazon.ca, I saw another of his books 'Trickster Makes this World'.  I ordered it  and was excited to anticipate spending my morning read over the next couple of weeks with this in hand.   Once again, I was caught by one of its themes, the idea of how the artist allows the spectator to cross boundaries by encouraging him to look at something with a different slant and by doing so, to one degree or another changes and enriches his view on society.  To quote Lewis Hyde in his introduction:


"Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox"    


And then, as I was doing my research for Christmas books (a bit of a tradition in our family - rather than an orange stuffed into the toe of the proverbial Christmas stocking, our now-adult children get a book), I fell upon his most recent publication, 'Common as Air'.   The New York Times Book Review says this about the book:  


'An eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests'


With two kids in the creative business, one a writer, the other in the writing, editing, graphic design in the space of Art, I felt that in reading this book, there would be much fodder for discussion during the Christmas holidays.  Lewis Hyde explains so well the historical significance of 'commons' that which belongs to the people as it pertains to all things with the limitations and benefits.  He then takes the reader into the world of copyright and patents and how this plays into our current context of the digital world, once again outlining the advantages and disadvantages.  


And through this reading, my own vocabulary with regard to my favoured creative expression, embroidery, might become clearer.