poetry, and you, and solitude

I think it’s important that audiences discuss and share opinions about the art they are experiencing, it’s a vital part of culture, but that’s not what’s happening here. This is an attempt to bend the world around them to meet their specific preferences, while being unwilling to engage with it if it isn’t what they wanted it to be. To me, this attitude suggests a failure to actually interact with the work for what it is. There is an inability to consider art that is beyond their own personal tastes. Audiences seem less able to accept that an artist may have a different vision and maybe that vision exists for a reason. They’re also not accepting that other members of the audience may have enjoyed it and thought it was a success. It seems they put their own personal feelings above anyone else’s. The insistence on boycotting art because of the casting, or review bombing things with 1 star because it didn’t end how they wanted it to, suggests that there is an anger attached to the audience not getting their own way. The artist must be punished for not catering to each individual’s preference. The audience is putting themselves in the position of a customer, and the belief is that the customer is always right, even if every customer has different demands.

“If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.”