Greek to Me Wanted: Dead or Alive ©2007 by Michael Raysses

Greek to Me

Wanted: Dead or Alive

I am always intrigued by where people grew up and the time frame of their childhood. It lends a certain context to a person. I grew up, for instance, in a place and time where people were obsessed with what everyone did for a living. Though they would routinely ask where you were from and what your ethnic background was, the question that got all the attention had to do with your occupation. Believe me, the answer is never as interesting as the intensity of the question as posed. Not surprisingly, as a kid, I did not meet a single artist, at least not one who would admit to being one. This only forced me to imagine what an artist would look and act like. Living in a town so small and tranquil it almost qualified as a deprivation tank, I immediately concluded that all artists must be French. (I never met a French person as a kid, either.) As such, I figured they wore berets and smoked clove cigarettes that they waved broadly, as they made sweeping artistic pronouncements about, well, art.

All my misconceptions about artists were magnified, amplified, and then appropriately distorted when I became involved in the arts as an actor. It had to do with acting's elusive nature. There is a nuts-and-bolts aspect to it that makes it feel like anything but art. That is "technique." When I got to actually act, though, (as opposed to merely auditioning), a shift would sometimes occur, although it was by no means guaranteed. When I stood in the wake of that shift, suddenly the idea of being an artist was not so far-fetched because I saw the impact of what I had been doing, and if that was not art, it sure was close.

Surprisingly, that revelation was not a source of comfort. It only made the water murkier. I started to notice that the underlying principles of creating what aspired to be art could, and arguably should, be applied to all walks of life, whether the ultimate expression be in a painting, a song, or a play. The attention to detail, the intention while I was acting and how I was transformed by that activity had application across the board of my life. So I began applying those tenets more broadly, and something strange happened≠though using the title "artist" in anything even remotely referring to myself no longer seemed appropriate, I began to feel a lot more artistic about the way I was living.

It would be comforting to think that my inquiry ended there, but it did not. Because like the sound that is or is not made when a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, being a living artist is not something someone can do in a vacuum. The unread novel, the unseen painting, the unheard song, only becomes art when consumed. It is not enough that it informed the person who created it when they created it. For the cycle to be completed, the artistic expression must be absorbed, experienced. And once it is, something beyond the art comes into being≠the artists' reputation. Now things get even trickier. Now there is an expectation placed on the artist by those who played such a crucial role in them becoming an artist in the first place. How many times have we bemoaned a singer, a novelist, or a film director, because their subsequent efforts were not sufficiently like their original? This line of reasoning places the artist in a very precarious position≠whom does he serve? The people who conferred on him his status as an artist or the muse he hears when he creates? Because if the people who supported this artist with their attention do not support his future efforts, then there is no living artist. What there is is the flash of a person forever encased in the sticky tar of the expectations in which they have been dipped, so that they will never change. They will only continue to provide slight variations of the very thing that brought them to our attention in the first place.

We all have a responsibility to the artists among us, whomever they may be, whatever form their art may take. That duty is to allow them the room to breathe, to grow, to experiment-to live. And in so doing, we will go a long way to guaranteeing our own vitality and growth. To nurturing the artist within us. To aspire to anything less would be unacceptable. Actually, it would be worse-it would be artless, which is definitely Greek to me.