The Role of Art.

 

 

``

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. ... Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.” Pessoa

Two opinions of the role of art in our lives. One by Shaw the Irish playwright and the other by a Portuguese poet.

I don't know  what I think of art--creativity--for me that is writing poems and plays and of course, this blog. Does it help me to bear the crudeness of reality? Or  does it help me to ignore life?

As I have gotten older, my usual robust good health has  left me, and I  have had my first serious medical issues. I am not in unbearable pain, but I am in constant pain. So that  has perhaps made me turn to the creative projects that I have had in my mind, but  too often  delayed starting because of my activities of work and travel. 

 Now all I can still do is write and read and talk and think, and so those are the things that I do much more. That has caused me to explore my creativity more and to publish poems and have some of my plays produced. 

With the example and encouragement of another blogger, John Tew on Filiopietism Prism, I have had my entire blog turned into a book. Why? John convinced me that the  facts of the quick invention of new technologies  has made  such  things as  floppy discs outmoded.  What happens to material we have stored on old floppy discs?  He raised questions about what will happen to old blogs when the blogger is gone.  Then he mentioned an earlier  way to reserve our words and thoughts,

  WAIT FOR IT -A  BOOK.

HE HAD HIS OWN BLOG TRANSFORMED INTO A BOOK AND HE USED TWO DIFFFERENT  SERVICES TO ACCOMPLISH THIS.  HE RECOMMENDED ONE OVER ANOTHER.

I followed his  advice and  got in touch with the  group he had been happiest with.

Books may wane in popularity, but we will always be able to access them--to open the covers and read them. So after a few weeks, the people that are in the Netherlands sent back a lovely  hardback book.  It is set beautifully and has ten years of  my blog in it.

I did this for my grand daughter. 

 How often I wish that I had asked my grandfather Oscar Jenckes, when he was alive and living with us, to tell me about his father who was wounded in the Civil War, Ferdinand Jenckes. Or  ask him to tell me about his wife and my grandmother Ida Mowry, who died in the Spanish Flu scourge of 1919. I did not know enough to ask. I was too young.

Neither does my lovely grand daughter Rowan.  

But when I am gone, perhaps, she will take up this book and find some of the answers to questions she might be pondering about my life and my  time growing up in Pawtucket.