A Quote by William Butler Yeats
The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
If I were related to Monet, I don't know if I would be comfortable becoming an artist because it's too much, the comparison. If I wrote a book and put it out, the comparison to my great-grandfather, the comparison would be hilarious. Every critic, it would be their dream, they'd tear me apart.
The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer.
In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style.
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.
I was part of a hip-hop group called Fly Style. I was one of two white girls, and I was part of the younger company, which was called Touch of Style. And it was amazing. It gave me a different perception of dance and beauty because the other girls were mostly African-American and Latina.
The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.
To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer.
I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the 'economic means' for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the 'political means'.
What about precarious labor? It's actually not the most efficient form of labor at all. They were much more efficient when they had loyalty to their workers and people were allowed to be creative and contribute - you know that what precarious labor does is that it's the best weapon ever made to depoliticize labor. They're always putting the political in front of the economic.
It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.
Labor has been severely undermined, but that's happened before. In the 1920s, the labor movement was virtually crushed, in large part by Wilson's Red Scare, but it dramatically revived in the 1930s. It spearheaded the social-democratic New-Deal style changes which were beneficial to the country - not sufficient, but beneficial. That could happen again.
In Shakespeare's day it was women who were being burned at the stake as witches... not men. The men were thought of as alchemists. But women doing the same thing would be a witch and would be burned.
I'm definitely a big believer in the notion that a heightened style can get you closer to an authentic human experience than so-called realism on film. There are films I love that have kind of a muted or realistic style, but for me on any given day I have more moments during the course of a day that feel like a Fellini movie than I do a Cassavettes movie.
Any change in my style depends on many things, but it's whatever fits the project. It's important to me to make style changes from time to time; it makes me feel alive as an artist. For instance, with 'Moonshine,' I'm doing all my own coloring. That's a new development!
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
Related Authors
Alexander Pope Quotes
English
Poet
Emily Dickinson Quotes
American
Poet
George Herbert Quotes
British
Poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
American
Poet
Homer Quotes
Greek
Poet
Horace Quotes
Roman
Poet
John Milton Quotes
English
Poet
Khalil Gibran Quotes
Lebanese
Poet
Lord Byron Quotes
British
Poet
Maya Angelou Quotes
American
Poet
Oscar Wilde Quotes
Irish
Poet
Ovid Quotes
Roman
Poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes
English
Poet
T. S. Eliot Quotes
American
Poet
Walt Whitman Quotes
American
Poet