Samuel Johnson said: “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”

This is true only up to a certain point in the life of an artist.

After a certain point, it is no longer true, because the real and true artist stops caring (eventually) what the public reaction is, or is not, to his, her or “their” works.

But that is not true either. The real artist never really stops caring. (When I say “artist” here, I intend “literary artist,” but any kind of artist can also be substituted, including an artist of life.)

The artist does stop caring about the reaction to their works in the sense that she or he, after a certain point, is going to keep right on doing it anyway with immense rewards to none other than The Self no matter what the public does, or does not, say. And the real artist always has her or his eye on the future far more than the present, because the real artist is creating the next step in human artistic evolution and he or she has no choice but to aim for the future in order to do what she or he needs to do. “Fail again. Fail better,” said Samuel Beckett, regarding the “success” and inevitable failure of such near-superhuman trials and endeavors that can be envisioned by internally picturing the statue of David by Michelangelo. It all sounds grandiose and ridiculous to the average modern ear (which is most writers) and that is why real artists now are so often seen as some kind of holy fools by the rest of society. (See The Idiot by Dostoevsky, especially the first hundred pages.)

The artist does not stop caring in the sense that there always needs to be some sort of living dialogue going on to create the work.

In other words, ONE Good Reader is far more valuable than a trillion shallow, crap readers who don’t understand, can’t understand, won’t understand, will never understand, and what’s more, don’t want to understand!

The first one will feed your art (and therefore your soul), while the second category will turn you into one of THEM (or worse) (if worse is possible).

Because all of this is also about the Soul of the Individual Human vs. The Machine, which is the most important World War of our time. (Everything else important falls under this category.)

And it begins NOW.

Everything before this was only preparation.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

And a cool tune…