Every contemporary creative person is embedded in a complex society in which she lives, learns her life lessons, and tries to sell her wares. She learns what is acceptable and what is not; she comes to understand what most people around her find entertaining; she learns her society’s conventions and idiosyncrasies.
She knows exactly what the phrase white picket fence connotes and what buttons will be pushed by words like welfare and abortion. Whether or not she knows it, she measures every conversation she has and every action she takes against the consequences she expects from violating the rules of her society.
How artists are affected by and react to their society is an enormous topic. Let’s focus on one corner of this vast territory: self-censorship. Most of us assume that we are free to think just about anything and to express ourselves in any way we see fit. In reality, artists do a lot of measuring, somewhere just out of conscious awareness, about what is safe or seemly to reveal and what is not.
They decide to set their novel in a foreign country because they do not feel safe talking about the evildoers in their hometown. They paint lively abstractions or cheerful landscapes because they fear what Goyaesque horrors might escape from their brush in a narrative painting. When a nonfiction idea begins to percolate in their brain, an idea that if published might cause the government to retaliate, they find reasons to dismiss the project. We all do these sorts of things.
We are talking about the most primitive and important of motives here, our personal safety and survival, and why, because of the power of these motives, so many artists and would-be artists practice ongoing self-censorship. One aspect of this self-censorship is the way we bite our tongue at our day job and, in a corollary safety measure, skip making art that reveals what our corporation, institution, or agency is up to. We don’t tell tales out of school about the school where we work; we don’t reveal the dirt about the police department that employs us; we don’t portray our madcap board of directors in our novel or paint a Kafkaesque likeness of our governmental agencies.
These knotty psychological and practical matters confront virtually every artist. Here is one report from a writer and performance artist in England, Louise:
“I have decided to quit my job as an art psychotherapist in the National Health Service after seven long years. I worked in a big psychiatric hospital with in-patients, out-patients, acutely distressed people, psychotic clients, people with personality disorders and alcohol problems, and suicidal people. When I was younger I could never have imagined becoming part of the mental health system, since I always thought there was something intrinsically wrong and bad with a system that still depends so strongly on the medical model. But I found myself with a job within a flourishing and lively art-therapy department, and for years I was quite happy there, seeing that good work could be done within this system.
“But I have gone right back to my previous position. I now think that our department has been systematically destroyed over the past two and a half years, that we’re only a shadow of our former selves, that we’ve lost all our autonomy due to ‘institutional restructuring’ (what a ridiculous phrase for such a violent process!), and it has become impossible for me to work there and still feel good about myself. One scary issue for me has been to see how I have felt silenced, just like my clients, by a system that in the end really only cares about economics and personal power.
“I have not yet worked directly with the outrage I feel about all this in my writing or my performance art, maybe because I have a feeling that I need to gain some distance in order to speak again, to find my voice again. I am German, and only when I moved to Britain twelve years ago did I start to slowly find a voice about the shame and guilt that I brought with me because of my German heritage. Now, twelve years later, I have Jewish friends and I am taking a performance piece on tour in which I honestly, humorously, courageously, and deeply speak about my experiences of being German here and about my outrage, shame, and deep sadness about the wounds of history. All this has finally found a voice. And I have a feeling that my next piece will be very much about my journey within the mental health system, my strange position within it. I am sad that I need the distance in order to really speak out, but better to speak at some point than never at all!”
Can an artist manage to live inside his society while at the same time daring to tell the truth about it? Or will he invariably be punished and exiled if he tells uncomfortable truths? One television satirist becomes a huge star for excoriating the sitting president, while another satirist becomes a pariah for telling the same truths. A museum puts on a well-attended show of Goya prints that point out the sins of capitalism, and yet no gallery within miles of that museum will touch contemporary prints on the same subject. How is an artist to calculate the odds that he will remain safe if he tells the truth or, if he courageously tells that truth, that he will garner any sort of audience?
An artist is right to feel confused and uncertain as to what will happen to him if and when he decides to censor himself less. You may do creative work in which this seems not to be an issue — say, basic biological research or cheerful watercolors — but funding for the former is connected to the politics of your society, and your interest in the latter may be more a flight away from dark material than an actual desire to paint cheerfully. Creative individuals owe it to themselves to ask and try to answer these two questions: “Am I doing the creative work I intend to do?” and “If I’m not, is self-censorship the issue?”
The Role of the Artist in Society
Artists are embedded in society. If we think about how artists have historically viewed themselves as functioning in their society and how they’ve positioned themselves in society, we see many different models. Let’s consider a dozen of them. As we proceed, think about which of these roles might be a match for you.
In each case I’ll use as an example a painter whose subject matter is flowers, to give you a sense of how artists who opt for a similar subject matter may nevertheless be maintaining a completely different relationship with society.
1. The classical artist aimed for technical excellence and formal beauty. “My art speaks to universals. I intend to paint beautiful flowers regardless of what is going on in society. Maybe my beautiful flowers will heal people who are harmed, maybe my flowers will bring a smile to the faces of people who are sad, but such outcomes are just happy unintended consequences of what I do. I am not looking for any outcomes in society — I am simply doing the art that speaks to me and to my sense of what is unchanging, eternal, and universal.”
2. The medieval artist aimed for a certain kind of anonymity and service. “One of the subjects that my guild employs to praise God and one of the subjects we use to decorate holy sites is the flower. Therefore I have apprenticed in the art of flower painting to a master flower painter, and I am humbly and rigorously learning my craft. When I learn it I will become one of many who serve by painting flowers.”
3. The Renaissance artist wanted his name known and sported an individual ego and individual ambitions. “My flowers are special and, frankly, a work of real genius. They may praise God, but it’s important to me that people know my name and recognize my uniqueness and my greatness.”
4. The court artist resided inside society’s most powerful inner circle and was beholden to and a plaything of the powerful. “The queen is attracted to lilies, but the king hates them. So although I am painting my next painting for the queen, I nevertheless must finesse her out of her desire for lilies and sell her on something that won’t upset the king. But I better not upset her either! — because she too can lop off my head!”
5. The society artist played a similar game to the court artist, only inside the world of the wealthy and the privileged instead of the regal. “I can’t wait for the Smiths to see my new chrysanthemum painting that the Joneses just put up! With luck, I can spend all summer at the Smiths’ place on the island painting them a chrysanthemum or two.”
6. The revolutionary artist stood as a witness to her society and adopted the stance of activist. “I am going to paint a series of flower paintings in which each flower is a martyr executed by our fascistic government. By using flowers as my motif I’ll be able to speak to the bourgeoisie, who would never listen if I painted firing squads like Goya. My flowers will help foment the coming revolution!”
7. The bohemian artist thumbed her nose at society and burned her candle at both ends. “Having been high for nine days now, I have some truly amazing flowers popping out of the psychedelic haze that is my life. As soon as I finish this Scotch and stumble my way to the canvas, I will express with great poetry and passion the flowers that are crawling under my skin.”
8. The modern artist aimed for progress and innovation. “Most people will not understand what I’m doing when I turn the common red rose into a blue abstraction, but artists will understand, some segments of society will eventually understand, and in the process I will have moved art forward from its sad past as decoration and plaything for the rich.”
9. The contemporary global artist can position herself broadly, worldwide, so to speak. “I have been painting here in Hong Kong for five years now, but my large-scale flower paintings do not fit the cultural norms or aesthetic idiom I find here in Hong Kong. So I am picking up and moving to Florence, where my flowers will strike a chord with a society brought up on and surrounded by Renaissance floral painting.”
10. The mass-market artist is interested in large-scale success and in reaching the most people possible, whether with a hit television show, a hit book, or a hit CD. “I’m going to finesse my way onto that new reality show where twenty people live together in a glass house and do my darnedest to become the villain on that show, since becoming the fan favorite isn’t in my nature. By the end of that series the whole world will be wanting my flower paintings — which I’ll hire some people to paint while I’m toiling away in that glass house becoming a celebrity.”
11. The small-business artist is functionally like any shopkeeper on any village street, hand-selling her poetry chapbooks, scented candles, homemade CDs, and watercolors — in cyberspace as well as in brick-and-mortar outlets. “I’m going to paint the idiosyncratic flowers I want to paint, put up an attractive website, and market to those members of society who might take an interest in what I paint. I’m going to create my cyberspace presence and see who comes along to shop.”
12. The contemporary postmodern artist is awash in competing choices, competing roles, competing metaphors, and competing narratives. “This month I’m doing installation flowers that speak to my sense of isolation and alienation from society, but at the same time I want to do a coffee-table book of flower paintings that is partly ironic and also just simply beautiful, and at the same time I want to deconstruct the flower and move it way past what Mondrian ever did.”
In one form or another all these roles are still available to today’s artist. There is a way to be a classical artist, a way to be a medieval artist, a way to be a society artist. Most artists will probably find themselves falling into one or another of the last two categories — that is, most will become small-business artists who try to hand-sell to those segments of society that appreciate them or will become postmodern artists whose relationship to society changes frequently and even abruptly. But while most artists will probably find themselves in one or another of the last two categories, it’s important to remember that all these categories continue to exist in their own ways, and that it will pay you enormous dividends to think through what relationship you want to fashion with your culture and your society.
Choosing Your Role in Society
Most artists never think through how they want to relate to their society or what role they want to adopt as artists. Rather, they accidentally fall into one role or another or into one relationship or another.
Let’s say that you want to prove the exception and mindfully choose your relationship to your society. Here are nine tips for doing just that:
1. Think through the many roles available to you. If you agree that, as a general principle, gaining awareness is a large part of your job, then this is an excellent place to pay some specific attention and gain some specific awareness.
You might run through my list of roles, or you might think the matter through in your own way and come up with some categories that you think capture the opportunities available to artists today.
Try not to decide right off the bat which roles attract you and which ones repel you. As a first step just think through the nature and meaning of each category. You’ll learn a lot just by thinking through what a contemporary classical artist might look like, what a contemporary society artist might look like, what a contemporary revolutionary artist might look like, and so on.
2. For each role that intrigues you, think through the pros and cons of adopting it. Using just one as an example, let’s say that the small-business artist model intrigues you. You would calmly and carefully articulate the pros and cons of being that sort of artist.
The pros might include that you can keep your distance from society and mass-market concerns and focus on those elements of society — those customers — who understand what you are doing and who want to buy what you make. Adopting this role, you could retain control of your product and your marketing efforts.
The cons might include that, just like the owner of the corner restaurant who has to come in at 4:00 AM to take deliveries and doesn’t close up until midnight, this role might have you doing business all the time, including during those times you would otherwise be doing your art.
For each role that intrigues you, do this patient, difficult work — you will learn a lot about how you want to be as an artist.
3. For each role that intrigues you, try to think through if it actually interests you or if it is resonating because of some old family messages, powerful family rules, or anything else in your history. You may, for example, be attracted to the role of medieval artist and the idea of service but only because you had a religious upbringing that stressed service and because that religious upbringing included churches, whose atmosphere remains with you and therefore naturally makes the role of medieval artist attractive to you.
You may be attracted to a role like bohemian artist because you are still rebelling against your controlling parents; you may be attracted to a role like massmarket artist because of the messages you got at home about the importance of money. Make sure that the roles that intrigue you actually intrigue you and aren’t calling to you just because of some old associations or dynamics.
4. For those roles that intrigue you, think through which are likely to feel like meaning opportunities and which, even though they come with significant pluses, are unlikely to generate the experience of meaning. For instance, the role of classical artist, with its focus on formal beauty, may speak to something in you. But as you think the matter through, you might begin to see that any art you create from that place might appeal to your aesthetic sense but leave you intellectually dissatisfied and existentially cold.
Certain roles may seem more congenial or more natural to you than others, and comfort and naturalness certainly matter. But you want to check in with yourself to make sure that the role or roles you adopt actually serve your meaning needs.
5. For those roles that intrigue you, try to gauge which ones best match your values and principles. You may find many reasons for choosing a role that focuses on the quality and the nature of the art you make, roles, for example, like classical artist or Renaissance artist, but when you think about it you may discover that such roles and such art do not really support your values and principles.
To put it aphoristically, you may want to be a Renaissance artist but need to be a revolutionary artist. You may conclude that your art must be the way you promote your values and your principles. On the other hand, you may decide that it’s perfectly proper to be a Renaissance artist, just as long as you support worthy causes also — that is, you may decide that your art does not need to carry an activist burden. You can come to smart decisions about these matters only by thinking them through.
6. Think through the issue of money. You may decide that you need your art to make money and that you need to choose your artist role and your artist products based on financial calculations. Not that those calculations are at all easy to make. Which is more likely to sell: beautiful flowers or something grotesque and painful to look at? It isn’t easy to answer such a question, since beautiful flowers are likely to sell more easily in general, but perhaps only at art fairs and for low prices, while grotesque art that crashes through and makes your name may make you an art scene darling.
However, despite the reality of this complexity, you can think the matter through and see if you can tweak a role that you want to adopt so that you have a better chance at an income. For example, you might decide that a revolutionary artist can also be a massmarket artist and that you are going to figure out how to do that marrying!
7. Make a choice. Your choice is necessarily tentative since you don’t really know if it will prove a good fit and because, as we’ve discussed before, genuine process involves a lot of not knowing. But you will want to commit to your choice even though you are holding it as a tentative choice. This is the same full-bodied but tentative commitment that we give to our creative projects, full-bodied because we really want to bite into them, tentative because a given project may have no life and no juice and may have to be abandoned.
Choose a role or roles that you think will really suit you on the several levels we just identified — one that will be able to meet your meaning needs, that relates sensibly to your principles and values, one that isn’t a mere shadow from the past, and so on — and tentatively and wholeheartedly commit to it.
8. Think through what might serve as a test of the rightness of your choice. What experiment might you try, what first steps might you take, what creative projects might you pick?
Say, for example, that you want to try your hand at some revolutionary art to see if the role really suits you. What first step might you take as a fledgling revolutionary artist? What project might flow from that decision? Imagine, returning to our example of flower paintings, that you have always painted beautiful flowers — what will you paint now?
Will you paint flowers in a revolutionary way? Will you paint a bouquet of flowers that’s informed by revolutionary iconography? Will you change your subject matter entirely? These are the sorts of questions and challenges that naturally follow from your decision to mindfully choose your artist role and your relationship to society.
9. Begin the process of trying out your new artist role. Bring some energy, courage, diligence, and other strengths to this task.
Remember that it is a process with all the attributes of process: that you won’t know a lot of the time, that you will make mistakes and messes, that you will doubt what you are doing and hate what you are doing some portion of the time, that you will be elated at other times.
Having made a useful decision that may pan out beautifully does not mean that you can avoid process just because you made the right decision. All that you’ve done is made new hard work for yourself. Mindfully choosing your artist role and your relationship to society is only the beginning of the process.
Engaged Creativity and Alienation
One stance a creative person can take with respect to her society is that of engagement. As employed by French existentialists like Sartre, engagement meant political and social action. “Engagement is a specialized term in the Sartrean vocabulary and refers to the process of accepting responsibility for the political consequences of one’s actions,” explains the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Sartre, more than any other philosopher of the period, defended the notion of socially responsible writing and was famous for writing scathing essays condemning French policies. Sartre argued that a socially responsible writer must address the major events of the era, take a stance against injustice and work to alleviate oppression.”
Engagement is conscience in action. No sphere of human life is shielded from ethics. Your conscience may require that you say something to your father about his treatment of your sister, that you destroy the invention you just created because you do not trust how it will be used, that you choose a principle over a person or a person over a principle, that you object vehemently when you hear a slur, or that you reject an immoral lover. If you only think about confronting your father, destroying your invention, or showing your lover the door, no engagement has occurred.
If engagement is conscience in action, what, then, is engaged creativity? It is an act of engagement to fly across the country to participate in a protest. It is an act of engaged creativity to fly across the country to protest and also to write a protest song on the airplane. It is an act of engagement to defend freedom of speech by protecting someone who is speaking out. It is an act of engaged creativity to speak out yourself in a painting that breaks with your usual subject matter and that tackles an issue that self-censorship had caused you to avoid.
Engagement is conscience in action. Engaged creativity is creative effort in moral service. Think how many of your creative efforts you want to be of this sort. Not all need be; but shouldn’t some?
Some of those itches that you can’t scratch, some of those episodes of sadness whose sources you can’t identify, and some of the vague doubts you can’t shake off may well have their roots in this particular dilemma: that you are caught in the cultural trance and burdened by your safety needs and not operating as an engaged artist. Often it is this lack of engagement that is most alienating to a creative person, who is “going along to get along” without quite realizing it.
Whatever relationships you manage to forge with your society and whatever role or roles you adopt as an artist, including the role of engaged artist, it’s entirely likely that you will still not feel like you really fit in. Most artists, even as they try to fit in, often remain significantly alienated from their society.
They remain alienated for all the reasons we’ve chatted about: that they’re likely to disagree with and feel the need to dispute many of their culture’s values, that they intend to make their own meaning, retain their individuality, and stand for principles that their society may not be honoring, and so forth. Given that you are likely to feel alienated from your society no matter what role you adopt or what relationships you forge, the following are some tips for dealing with that alienation:
1. You can try to focus on universals rather than on the particulars of your society. For example, you might write a useful cautionary nonfiction book about historical threats to freedom rather than getting caught up in the losses of freedom occurring right around you, matters about which you can take no effective action.
That is, by focusing on the universal nature of authoritarian threats to freedom and by doing a beautiful job of telling that story, you might do a lot of good for freedom and also reduce your experience of alienation by reorienting yourself away from the particulars (and the particular horrors) of your society.
2. You might try to create some useful society. Artists often feel moved to create writing groups, salons, and other artistic societies because, in addition to the other purposes that such groups serve, they may help an artist with her alienation issues.
How often this actually works is an open question, since the shadows that artists bring to these groups — the shadows of envy, ego, and so on — often make pleasant or useful relating difficult or even impossible. Still, organizing such a group may be worth a try, since some such artist groups have been known to serve their members beautifully.
If no such group exists in your area or if no group exists that seems to meet your needs, then you will have to create it yourself and maintain it — which of course is its own real job.
3. You might join a group with shared affinities and let that socializing serve your need to belong. The affinity group could be anything from an AA group to a conversational Italian club to a small-business group to a singles meet-up group to a watercolor group.
These groups will naturally bring in unfortunate aspects of the mass culture, since everyone in the group, you included, is a member of that mass culture; they will also bring in all sorts of problems associated with human beings gathering. But those challenges notwithstanding, if the group stays focused on sobriety or business-building practices or watercolor technique or whatever the group is meant to support, there is a real chance that the group may serve its members.
4. You might decide to actively fight your society. That is, you might fully acknowledge your alienation, credit it to the problems you see in society, and announce that your best recourse is to try to redress those wrongs as an activist artist or as an activist.
You might leap into the fray and leap into society, both as a matter of principle and as the way to be in society with other alienated folks who share your vision and your concerns. In this scenario, you are making the conscious decision not to throw up your hands and let the alienation win but instead to roll up your sleeves and arm-wrestle with your society.
5. You might focus on meaning rather than on what’s bothering you. You focus on your next meaning investment and your next meaning opportunity rather than on what mood you find yourself in or on how alienated from society you feel. To put it differently, you try the cognitive tactic of announcing that alienation is no longer an issue for you because you’ve reframed the matter and no longer hold your relationship to your society as worth your attention.
6. You can pinpoint and then physically move into another society that you suspect will prove less alienating. This geographic cure might mean moving to a college town in the hopes of finding more people who share your values; relocating to a major art city like Berlin, London, or New York with the intention of plugging yourself into a vibrant, avant-garde scene; choosing a rural, bohemian locale where you imagine you can live laid back in the company of counterculture types; or opting for a small art town like a Sedona or a Santa Fe, which you suspect possesses the twin virtues of an art scene and a liberating lifestyle. Sometimes these geographic cures work and sometimes they don’t, but they are certainly worth considering.
These six are among your options for dealing with what may prove to be your abiding sense of alienation from your society. All may prove imperfect; some may serve you reasonably well; one might turn out to work beautifully for you. If you’re feeling alienated, rather than writing the matter off as hopeless, consider these options — and dream up additional ones.
Out in the Cold
A woman named Sheila came to see me about a book she couldn’t get written. It was a book in which she intended to take the insular, cultlike ethnic community in which she lived to task for its general small-mindedness and its cruel treatment of women. My first question was the obvious one.
“You intend to write this book and also remain in the community?”
“Funny,” she said. “I’ve never heard the problem expressed so clearly — even in my own mind. Of course that’s the issue! And the answer is, I think I’ve been intending to stay.”
I nodded. “Because?”
She thought about that. “Because it’s what I know. Because I have friends in the community. Because — if I leave it, who am I? Because I’m not sure that the bigger world is any better — I might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Because…well, and because of my husband.”
“Where does he stand?”
“He’s a true believer in our community. Which should make him sexist and domineering, I suppose, but he isn’t. Which weakens my argument.”
“So part of you wonders if you believe your own premise?”
“That may be true.”
We sat for a bit.
“Maybe I’m making it all up,” she said finally.
“Did some event precipitate your desire to write this book?” I asked after a moment.
She nodded. “There was a woman — I knew her, but not that well. Her child was going to a community school where they taught about ‘enemies’ — all the people our community was supposed to watch out for. She made a stink. She said that was a crazy, backward way to be in the twenty-first century. There was an amazing backlash — all hell broke loose. Really, her life got ruined. She had to take her child and go away; her husband stayed behind.”
“And telling just that story, as fact or fiction, doesn’t work for you?” I wondered.
“Novels don’t effect change,” she replied instantly. “They don’t make a difference. And I don’t know her story well enough to tell it as fact, and I think I would be afraid of getting sued.”
“And researching other, similar communities —”
She waved that away. “Doesn’t interest me.”
“And writing a memoir?”
“That’s the one,” she said reluctantly. “That’s the one I want to write — and don’t want to write.”
“Because you have feelings for the people in the community? Or because you don’t want all hell to break out in your life?”
“A little of both.”
“Let’s look at it the other way around. How would it be not to write about it?”
She thought about that. “I’d feel unethical. I’d be disappointing myself — I wouldn’t feel proud.”
“Let’s run through all the ways such a book might be written,” I said, “and see if there are any approaches we’ve missed.”
We did that, although she didn’t have her heart in it. It seemed that she had already decided that she couldn’t or wouldn’t write this book — that the consequences would be too grave. We talked about screenplays, stage plays, nonfiction books of one sort, nonfiction books of another sort. We revisited the territory of fiction and memoir. We discussed blog posts, articles, even poetry. She paid only cursory attention.
“I’m guessing the form isn’t the issue,” I said. “The issue is, is it worth taking the risk?”
“Yes — and it isn’t.”
“You’ve decided?”
“I guess I have decided. I didn’t know I’d decided until we started talking. It isn’t just that I don’t want to be forced to leave my community. It isn’t just that I might lose my husband. It’s something more fundamental — who would I be with that identity stripped from me?”
“Free?” I ventured.
“It’s a nice word,” she said. “But who wants to be free like refugees are free? Like displaced persons are free? Like pariahs are free? That’s a very cruel and hard freedom — if it’s freedom at all.”
I nodded.
“Whistle-blowers may be proud of what they’ve done,” she said, “but are they ever happy?”
“That’s an interesting question,” I said. “Write about that.”
She glanced at me. For the first time she looked interested.
“Tell me more,” Sheila said.
“You’re wondering if the risk is too great — and you’ve decided that it is. What if you held off on deciding that and learned more about the risk? What better way to learn about it than to interview some whistle-blowers and see how they fared? Would they do it again? Do they think it was worth it? Are any of them happy?”
“Interesting!” she exclaimed. “What I like about this idea,” she said after a moment, “is that it’s a lovely way to keep the question open. But it’s more than that — I like it for what it is. The question interests me.”
“Then let’s consider that that’s what you’re going to be working on. First you’ll have to see if that book’s been done —”
“And if it has, I want to read it!”
“And even if it has been done, it may not have really addressed this thing that interests you — if a person can blow the whistle and find happiness afterward. You may find some books that come close to doing this job, but maybe don’t really.”
“That’s my intuition,” she said. “I have this hunch that the book I would do hasn’t been done yet.”
We talked for a while longer about the mechanics of her new project: what research she needed to do, what questions she might ask, what sorts of whistle-blowers made the most sense to interview. This was easy — so easy compared to the risk involved in exposing the secrets of her community! But just because it was easy didn’t mean it wasn’t the perfect place to begin. As part of her investigation as to whether or not she would make that other courageous journey, it was a reasonable first step.
You and Society
You might want to begin your exploration of your relationship to your culture and your society by answering the following questions:
• How does mass culture affect you?
• How do your affinity groups — your ethnic group, your religious group, your professional group — affect you?
• Which aspects of society affect you the most?
• For each one that you identify, ask yourself, “How exactly does it affect me?”
• What strategies might you employ to deal with all these cultural constraints?
Unless we are living alone in some rural wilderness, each of us is embedded in some culture and some society. That society is our safety net; it is our oppressor; it is our audience. It is no wonder that a creative person would find it hard, verging on impossible, to fashion a single, simple way of relating to society. However, your best life in the arts depends on your realizing that these realities exist. It also depends on your making decisions about what role you want to adopt vis-à-vis your culture, how you want to handle social and psychological self-censorship, and what you intend to do to tackle your feelings of alienation.