What About The Hieroglyphics Painters

Who says TV doesn't make you think?

I watched Master of None last week and it's easily the best show I've seen this year. Funny, thought provoking and feel-good. During the finale Aziz Ansari reads a quote from The Bell Jar about the fig tree and how each fig represents opportunities in Ester's life, non-overlapping opportunities, and her indecisiveness, leads to these opportunities being taken away from her, so she is left with less and less, eventually having nothing to choose from.

The quote is inspirational because it highlights the importance of being proactive, and choosing a life path. There is a supremely optimistic message, you can have anything you want, but then a bitter reality, these aspirations have expiration dates. The lie in this quote is, and I think this is mostly told to women, that "choosing one [fig] meant loosing all the rest..." What Ester wasn't able to understand is that she can eat one fig, and then after finishing it, pluck a fig that hasn't expired, or perhaps a fig that grew from her new position in life. After a person achieves one greatness, what else is there to do, but achieve another.  Only being able to eat one fig seems a worse fate than not eating any at all because of maturation of dreams and growing a deeper relationship with living.

I haven't read The Bell Jar in 10 years, but I'll go and dig it out of the garage this weekend and read it again. Sylvia Plath is one of the most famous American writers, and she died before ever reaching critical acclaim. Her mind, her brilliance, was exposed to the world after putting her head in an over. I liken her to Van Gogh, another artist who was plagued by mental disease and died before receiving any acclaim, but became one of the most prominent artists in the world. Their lives both share this ironic twist of fate, having unfulfilled dreams of acclaim fulfilled to astounding heights after death. Their afterlife had me thinking of their mental illness, their consciousness and subconsciousness.

Our reality is fed to us in linear time, second by second, but if our existence is whole, and our entire life is known to our subconscious, then there is an innate understanding of personal greatness or achievements. Maybe Plath and Gogh were driven mad by this lack of acclaim. They felt their importance, their influence on the world, but reality did not match up to these feelings. Plath, living as a single parent with two small children, a supreme isolation understood by anyone who has stayed home with young kids, easily sending someone with depression into a deep canyon of despair, unknowingly tormented by due praise.

I corresponded with my friend who renewed her subscription to The New Yorker. She mentioned how it's disheartening to see successful writers in their twenties on the pages of this publication, to the point of causing self doubt. I told her my thoughts on how in the arts, a field where a practicing person only gets better with time, it is far better to receive acclaim later in life because otherwise, it's all down hill from there. And in regard to being able to eat more than one fig, I mean, by "famous writer" being their first fig, then they will have to choose another fig next, that would most likely send them on a different trajectory.
Professionally peaking at 25 doesn't seem so great. I'm more fascinated by people who slog through life, and then hit it big after living through a wide range of experiences. People like Bukowski, David Sedaris or Wayne White, all above 40 before becoming widely known. Watching Beauty Is Embarrassing, Wayne White talks about his mental breakdown, and that added more evidence to my theory, because he was tortured by his lack of acclaim. Eventually he became the big artist he always knew he would be. Why I didn't buy one of those paintings on the wall in Fred 62 when I lived in Los Feliz 12 years ago is a question I can't ask myself again, since it would probably have bank rolled one of my kids' college education, or at least paid for a couple summers of Space Camp.

Then how does this explain tortured artists who strongly believe their success will come but don't end up with anything. I don't know. Maybe their fame has yet to come. Who knows whats going to get dug up in a thousand years. Even though David Foster Wallace is perceived as a better writer than JK Rowling, the truth is, there is a far greater chance her books will still be circulating in a thousand years. Regardless of modern popularity, there is no way of knowing if fan fiction e-books self published by a nobody becomes the Shakespeare of our time.

The point I'm making is that opportunities need to be taken when ripe, that more opportunities arise, but they're different, adapted to current phases of life, but deep down there is a calling, and our subconscious knows the greatness to come, even beyond the scope of physical existence. The depressive hieroglyphics painters of Egypt must have been completely unhinged.