Basil Brylcreem here, watching sales of my new book, Chances, on Amazon.com and starting to write my next one. While waiting for the next sentence to manifest itself to my creative mind, letting the language generate the phrases, I contemplate the nature of Art or in my case, as Dylan Thomas put it, 'craft or sullen art', and the nature of Life. They differ.
I am not a minor god creating new worlds of imagination. I am an instrument of culture and language managing a creative process that is undeniably human, synthesizing language, paradigm, and database to a negotiated conclusion, as illogical as Life but different in its complexity and composition.
Why do I do what I do? That is the question I pose in 'Chances' and it is a very real problem in the analysis of human behavior. What motivates artists? Freud said, wealth, fame and beautiful lovers but that presentation is the way of artists who too often do not know why they create. We writers have an inside joke of graphomania that points to the compulsive nature of the creative process.
Prizes are nice and a lover who makes you smile when you break from the drudgery of compostion is indispensable, but are they truly the motivation for what I do? No. My motivation is my promise to myself and my God to contribute to a civilization I love in however small a fashion. I write because it is what I am in a culture that places some value on that endeavor.
Do well and be well.
Chances, available at Amazon.com.
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