the 27 club

The wing-tip touched a mountain. So begins the intriguing documentary by Alistair Cooke on his friend, William Kapell, who died in a plane crash at the age of 31. Maybe there's one for poets as well (Keats, Shelley). [Where's that Huxley chapter on this?]. Wasn't Bonnington 27 as well? You have to wonder, just how many people, how much potential, wars snuffed out. How many in the Trenches, how many in the Camps?

'I think greatness in art is something you come upon, after only yearning and pain, and a deep sense of being in a dark tunnel. Greatness in art is not something you tell yourself you have. It is the oasis, the greatness, the vision, or whatever you want to call it, after travelling the vast desert of lonely and parched feelings. After this, the oasis. And the older a musician gets who has once seen this oasis, the more he wants to live there all the time, so the more frequent are his attainments of greatness and vision...Any true artist at bottom must be an escapist. Because look to where or she escapes!

...Was life ever like that? Of course, children give an emotion similar...but life itself is a hideous mess, and aside from a few loved ones and dear friends one loves it is best to steer clear of the hatred and evil of most present-day occupations.'

---W.K.

There's something intriguing about people utterly devoted to a vision. Not just the energy and the commitment, but the idea of perfection itself, of the pursuit of something that is noble, independent of utilitarian considerations. The notion that someone can be so immersed in their own familiar world and that this can then flower into something beautiful, wondrous.

Well, guess we've become inured to the idea of the Romantic genius, the suffering artist, pushing against the norms of society, the constraints of religion or the simple platitudes of the bourgeoisie; burning like a flame, even if for too brief a moment. Lust for life, and all that. What else could creativity be without that tension? You wonder about the life of Rublev...

Doesn't this fly in the face of all our received wisdom:

'A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us-along withimmeasurable riches-snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions but as an organic habit of recreating what has been received and is handed on. It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality...

There may be other and better ways of being original than our concern for the writer's own individuality..our self-conscious fictions

We may come to believe that, great as some authors have been , their greatness is finally surpassed by that of the craft they have served; hence whenever we reckon their contributions we shouldalso remember their obligations; no credit need be lost if some of it is shared anonymously with others trained in the same techniques and imparting the same mythology.'

---From Albert Lord's Singer of Tales