
What do we actually aim for?
In life, in work, in our inspirations, our… end products? Our interactions, our contacts, our friendships, our helping and our longing?
Depending on your occupation, your passions or your likings the answer to everyone of those parts of a question can be varied and different… and ultimately meaningless to anybody else than yourself.
Of course we convince ourselves that this is not a basic truth and that whatever we’re doing ultimately holds some kind of sense, use or meaning for people around us, society or the greater good. Sand in your eyes, my friends…
This becomes a most apparently fact when whatever you are doing and whatever sense you convey upon it, is not met, acknowledged or even picked up upon by the people you aimed it at in the first place.
I’d have some problems to call myself a poet or even a writer (even a philosopher for that matter) outside of any reference of convenience for the action that I am doing at the moment. It’s linked to the conflictual relation I entertain with my passions and whatever I create. For reasons of simplicity however, let’s say I’m a poet.
As such I aim at people’s emotions. Like, dislike, love, hate, accept, concurring, disagreeing etc. are all emotions I try to bring up. The picture of the reader’s soul as a violin on which you try to strike the right cord or at least a certain cord springs to mind.
From that follows as a matter of logic that if if I don’t manage to strike that cord, I failed the ultimate goal. If poetry cannot bring out emotion big or small, then it’s lukewarm, dispassionate… and in the end meaningless.
It’s the worst thing that can happen to anything artistic is being met with indifference.
For the poet or the writer, the actor or the painter, it’s the end of all things.
In the end, when all is said and done, and if we are not lying in our own pocket, then it shouldn’t matter. If we are right in stating that ultimately we do it for art’s purpose, for some hgiher meaning, then the appreciation of anybody around us should not matter one single second.
And yet it does, doesn’t it?
Appreciation or at least reaction is just one of those things the human being depends on. Not because we’re weak, or fishing for compliments to bolster our own being.
But because we’re ultimately social beings. A reaction to you and your being and the things you put out there, is a way of simply stating ‘I see you and hear you’, add to that the ‘I don’t agree’ or the ‘I love it’ and there you have the whole spectrum of human interaction. It’s part of who we are.
So let’s stop kidding ourselves and simply confess that the reaction does matter.
If there is no reaction to be had, the world would be governed by silence.
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