Following your dream

Almost everyone has a dream they cherish, lovingly polished in secret moments, which sustains them through the drear of chopping wood and drawing water as Zen would have it – putting food on the table and paying rent. A few rack up the courage to share, often meeting only a hurtful silence.

    The old philosophical conundrum, much beloved of epistemologists, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?", doesn’t hold good here. The dream lives on, with or without an appreciative audience.

 For artists and writers, the struggle to make their vision a reality can be painful yet the internal drive pushes them forward. Van Gogh completed 2000 paintings in his short lifetime and only sold one. Yet he said: "I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture." Vermeer only gained recognition 300 years after his death. William Blake attracted no interest in his lifetime; nor did Schubert or Edgar Allen Poe.

   Many present-day writers push on through failure after failure, rejection slips piling up. Some give up, others don’t, clinging desperately onto stories of hope. Jorge Luis Borges, now recognised as one of the great 20th century writers, couldn’t earn a living from his fiction until his late forties. Mary Wesley only published her first adult novel aged 71 and wrote 10 best-sellers in the last 20 years of her life. Popular authors like Lee Child and Ian Rankin only made it big after their fifth or sixth novel. What gives them tenacity? Do they write to fulfil an inner need or because they have a prescient sense that at some point lady luck will pull the switch if they just keep trying.

   The publishing sensation of 2013 was Stoner, a long- forgotten novel by the late John Williams. In 1963 he wrote to his agent: “The only thing I'm sure of is that it's a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one."  Two decades after his death he was proved right, which I find deeply irritating. He didn’t starve in a garret through his life, but other talents did and never lived to hear the applause. Which makes me want to give the fates a sharp kick; though with a lurking thought that success wasn’t what drove their muse.

   I’ve never had any illusions about being a great literary writer, seeing myself as more of a populist hack; and have no expectation of leaving a legacy behind. Yet cracking the code that translates a dream into a firmly rooted entity in the here and now does seem important. Much depends on the fashion of the moment but feeding the zeitgeist can be a dispiriting business. Proper painters must have torn their hair out when the anything-goes, disposable pop art became the rage. Best-selling novels often crash through every edict laid down by creative writing tutors and sail on up the charts. Wonderfully written ones fall by the wayside, anchoring their talented authors into their day job. There’s no algorithm that will make sense of it. And it’s no different in science where great discoveries lay unseen for decades since they didn’t serve the pleasure of the authorities in the field of the time.

   Away from the random chaos of what clicks in the public consciousness and what doesn’t, I do harbour a sense of wonder and awe at the internal mechanism that drives individual dreams ever onwards.  “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be” ― Abraham H. Maslow. Amen to that.   

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