“And it would take a time machine

To fulfill all of my fantasies

’Cause a hidden dream can be embarrassing

And the only thing that’s sacred ’til the end.”

– Conor Oberst

“…and the number of the beast is 666.” – John

“Everybody must get stoned.” – Bob Dylan

As insane as it sounds at first (but it will not sound insane after first blush), there are a million writers (and more) who hate Tolstoy’s guts.

They sit there staring at that behemoth of a novel, War and Peace, which is two thirds as long as the Bible and Shakespeare’s complete works, and every single episodic, philosophic, dramatic word of which is brilliant, a novel whose teeming amounts of characters (both humans and animals, and even furniture, rooms, machines, weather, rocks, plants, planets) are as alive as the greatest characters in Shakespeare, and they (these writers) sit there staring at this MONUMENT of writing, and the writing life, and they hate its guts.

They hate it because they are violating the Tenth Commandment, and coveting the achievement and talent of War and Peace’s author.

But don’t worry. Tolstoy himself HATED SHAKESPEARE’S GUTS. He wrote many thousands of ridiculous words about why Shakespeare is so pathetic. Indeed, it is a literary marvel to think that a writer of Tolstoy’s talents and intelligence was unable, completely unable, to appreciate Shakespeare. Dickens and Dostoevsky, for example, considered Shakespeare to be a kind of god, literally. Dickens named all of his magazines after Shakespeare, and he sometimes wondered if he himself was Shakespeare, in his manic explosions. Tolstoy hated Shakespeare because Tolstoy envied (and coveted) Shakespeare’s talent and unmatchable achievement.

And there are many artists who can’t stand Michelangelo. They look at his statues, which have presented the human form in a more beautiful artistic way than probably anything else on Planet Earth (see his statues of Mary, Jesus, David, and Moses for starters; looking at pictures of these is more than good enough), and they look at that most gigantic of all gigantic paintings, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and they can’t believe just one man did it all. They forget that he had ZERO social life (zero = 0!) as an adult, that he never did ANYTHING but work on his art, that he crippled himself by working so hard at his art, that most people who knew him hated his guts because he wouldn’t even say hi to them because he didn’t have time to get involved in pointless conversations that didn’t involve his art, and that he did all this and more (like rarely bathe, eat or sleep, and when he did sleep, he slept in his clothes, and when he did eat, he ate while he was working) all because he never did anything else but WORK ON HIS ART AND THEN WORK ON HIS ART SOME MORE. In his downtime, he fervently read Dante and the Bible with an intensity that fed straight back into his art. Everything for him was ART, and ONLY ART. He could NEVER have done the nearly-superhuman things he did if this wasn’t the case. He lived to be 88 in an age when that was like 110 now because he was always too busy working on his art to die, literally. (In certain ways (but only in certain ways), perhaps not even Shakespeare can match him.)

If you want to be your own kind of Michelangelo, you can’t spend ANY time just lounging around feelin’ good, except what you need to keep you going again as soon as you can – as soon as possible. (But proper rest is essential in order to survive and thrive, too.)

And there are many musicians who hate Bob Dylan and his music and lyrics. Many writers (especially in academia) started hating his guts even more than they already did AFTER he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

They look at those hundreds and hundreds of songs (close to a thousand when you count unreleased/later-released material), so many of which are both literary AND musical masterpieces, they look at the forty studio albums all of which are at least partly great (and therefore great), they look at the uncountable numbers of demos, bootlegs, and live recordings, and videos, that are just as good as anything on the studio albums, and they want to throw rotten eggs and rotten fruit at Dylan.

ALL writers, artists, and musicians have these kinds of feelings sometimes. Because if you didn’t have them, you wouldn’t be spurred on to compete, which means create.

Contemplating a transcendent work (Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Melville, Dickens, Dickinson, Van Gogh, Dylan, and Rimbaud, always Rimbaud), and absorbing it, and returning to it, is not always a matter of abject worship, or utter hatred, either, for the real artist (and only for the real artist, not the pretenders).

Sometimes you sit there trying to figure out what you can possibly do that’s better than this, or that can be in the same room with this without having to hang its head and exit in utter shame and infamy.

The boundaries of human writing are still being pushed forward (especially in the personal essay, the short story, and new forms of the novel and poetry).

As the Machines continue to take over more, and more (for now, until humanity wins, or goes down in flames trying), including many writing jobs, the importance of truly creative HUMAN WRITING gains ground every single second that ticks by.

As long as there are humans, there will be RARE humans who look for this. In ways we can’t scientifically pinpoint (which is the beauty of it all), they are (and will be) very, VERY, very much helping to keep the flame (of the human spirit) alive (more than anyone else, YES, more than anyone else, whether they be politician, technologist, or scientist, etc.). It has nothing to do with making a splash now. (It is too pure.) It has nothing to do with whether you “believe” in what everyone else calls “God.” It has all to do with making something individualistically and universally, relatably HUMAN that will survive its own time (and it will look strange at first, maybe even like hieroglyphics, “before” its time; OR it will not be ahead of its time). No less, and no more.

When you live for something larger than yourself (no matter what the actual results are, in truth), you stop caring about what the rest of them call “dying.” (Also, since we all go, does it really matter when?)

Final Note: ALL great writing is AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, ESPECIALLY Shakespeare, the greatest user of sources who ever existed (after Jesus).

Dale the Drifter (images provided by the Drifter; song selected by The Drifter)