Suppressing the Artist's Immune

 

"To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

Poet E. E. Cummings

Listening to Tarama Levitt quote E. E. Cummings this morning in relation to Halloween was a fun surprise. After flying home yesterday from a trip to the East Coast and wearing a mask for seven hours, it was a little bit of heaven to take it off. Granted, most of my co-travelers weren't masking, but I'm assuming most don't have immune suppressant drugs in their systems.

In any case - I love the quote - and now have a question. If you don't use your own name and only your initials, is that a sort of mask?

Can success be a mask? 

I'm thinking of another writer of Cummings' generation who wrote about climbing in and out of a sarcophagus he himself had created.

Artists want to create "reputations" and "brands" and be "known" and all that.

Isn't masking a part of the job?

Don't we all need immune suppressants when we're trying to create something that makes people stop and listen?

Don't we all have to strip away something of ourselves to get people to recognize themselves?

But when you go to market, your coat has to grow very thick.

So aren't artists almost constantly at cross purposes?

If it is a fight, then too often, marketing is the winner. 

And I guess that's what this quote is telling me this morning.

And this evening. On Halloween.

Photo by lilartsy on Unsplash