Patrick J. Walsh: Writing Portfolio
 
 
 
 
 
 
Write two poems and call me. . .

By Patrick Walsh
One large advantage of taking your college education seriously is the degree to which such commitment causes you to gravitate toward others who are doing likewise.

One of the great joys of my college years has been the depth and breadth of the types of people I’ve met. There have been those en route to “professional” vocations, those who have returned to school after many years of work or raising a family, and many who simply aren’t sure where they’ve come from, or where they’re headed. But probably because of my own keen interest, the group that I have become most intimately involved with consists of those involved in one way or another with the arts and humanities.

As a result, I have during my years as a college student met more “tortured artist” undergraduates than I’ve had time to write about -- which is, incidentally, one of the few failings of my educational experience that I truly regret.

As a graduate student who has faced many of the dilemmas such students daily confront, I recognize my responsibility to help them when and where I can; and, as are many people whose welfare I’ve come to be greatly concerned about, these are students whose great sensitivity leads them to live on the thin line between outward-directed creativity and inward-directed despair. They are, I suspect, a small group even at a college so oriented to the liberal arts as Manhattanville, and my involvement with them has been happily disproportionate. For, as much as the vocationally-oriented can be said to represent the brain of a modern educational institution, and the non-traditional students its heart, those who labor in the name of art represent the spirit; the soul.

I have been fortunate in this association, for although I have been privy to their dreams and dilemmas and confessions, I have never been one of them. My creative energies, such as they are, have always been directed at a wider range of disciplines, including but not exclusively limited to religion, writing, publishing, politics, information science, public speaking, teaching, and business. For me, the unifying element of all these disparate areas of interest is the manner in which they relate to the individual and his or her relations with others.

Perhaps that’s why, as much as I admire the single-mindedness of their pursuit, I am often worried about the emotional well-being of my young artist friends. While I urge them to push ever wider and deeper in their spiritual and intellectual inquiry, I also try to impress upon them my own personal belief, formed through years of hard experience, that creativity without direction or discipline is often creativity wasted.

At the same time, of course, those who have mastered a certain level of proficiency run the risk of becoming too detached from the wellspring of their creativity -- their own inner selves.

Often the gap between these two extremes -- the creativity of abandon which by it’s excess sabotages the validity of artistic inquiry, and creativity stunted by too great an emphasis on the technical at the expense of one’s own spiritual, intellectual and emotional instincts -- is insurmountable to the involved individual. It is often at this very point that I am able to provide some small service to my gifted friends, in meager compensation for the great reward of their friendship. The advice I normally offer, which may seem unduly pedantic or inscrutable to those who have not come upon this question in their own life or in the lives of others, is really quite simple. I try to remind those who are, in my opinion, being too hard on themselves that the ‘flip side’ of challenge is compassion, the great burden of dissatisfaction with one’s work simply a measure of the degree of one’s commitment.

And while I urge all my friends, creative artists or otherwise, to take their lives seriously, I don’t mean to imply that they should also take themselves seriously.

Being an artist does not necessarily mean that one has to suffer. Suffering for one’s art is only really valid when it is part of an artistically productive experience.

It’s important to remember that the first beneficiary of an artist’s work is the artist himself: while the rest of us enjoy the art that is the final product of the artist’s journey, we have to resign ourselves to the reality that art is a reflection of an artist’s actual experience. I do not believe that an artist needs to refrain from reveling in that experience.

There is, or at least should be at the collegiate level, a therapeutic element to creative art. While there is a great need for artists of all types at colleges throughout the country, these most sensitive of students need to remember that the same creativity that may lead them to despair can also lead them to new heights of well-being and communication with those of us who truly care, even when we cannot fully share their difficulties.

-- from Touchstone, November 20, 1991 Published Work:                       . . . by Patrick J. Walsh Article: Write two poems and call me. . .

published in Touchstone, November 20, 1991
Links:

• Pat’s Website (echoesamongthestars.com)

• Pat’s Portfolio: Home

• Contact Pat (dignity01@aol.com)
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