Monroe Hunting Horse (1904-1937)
Monroe Tsa To Kee (Tsatoke) was a Kiowa Indian painter. His father was Hunting Horse, the Kiowa scout to General George Armstrong Custer.
A place I used to go and have visions.
Because all of you have special talents and abilities, I urge you to seek out "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde, which combines anthropological studies of gift-exchange cultures with a discussion of fairy tales in order to develop and elaborate on his ideas about the place of the Artist in society -- and that description does not begin to do justice to what the book really is or why you should read it, which is probably why I had such a hard time finding my way into the subject this morning. I wanted to do something about American Indians, because of our friend Gary Galante who worked for the Museum of the American Indian before it moved to Washington, and I woke up this morning thinking of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 -2001) who married Charles (1902-1974) and who not only attended The Chapin School but wrote an inspirational book about being a woman called "A Gift From the Sea" which my mother owned and kept on her nightstand and which is pretty much an entirely different kind of book from Lewis Hyde's.
The point being, I have picked up or been recommended plenty of inspirational books over the years, many of them having to do with being an artist and/or a writer and I have discovered that they may, if you are a woman or the sensitive and artistic child of one, make you appreciate what it might be like to paint or write, but they will not paint or write for you. They will not make any kind of art for you, if you want to know the truth. They will not even necessarily convert that feeling of wanting to into the actual doing, necessarily. I'm just saying.
My mother once clipped an article from the town's paper entitled "The Challenge of the Artistic Child," something an editor must have picked up off the wire service and reproduced for local consumption, and she sent it off to me when I was in school with a note saying it was a perfect description of what I was like. The article was, in fact, a discussion of a recently published study, the correct title of which was "The Challenge of the Autistic Child," which may have been as far as my mother was concerned and when it came to me, the same thing.
I used to stand around in a place called The Eagle a long time ago in a neighborhood called Chelsea and lean against the wall opposite the dj's booth and think about the stories I would one day write and sell the film rights to. I would imagine myself guiding the camera as the scenes unfolded. This might be a description of the squandering of a gilft. Or not. I am not finished with The Gift yet. But so far I have the impression that if you have a special ability, it is not yours to hide under a bushel, as they say, or dawdle over, or not share. The book is not "inspirational" in the way some others have been or might be, but more "instructional" in terms of why you are doing (or not doing) what you should be or could be doing, if that makes sense. And I think it was Hyde coming to terms with being a writer but also needing to pay the rent, which led him to wonder about what you could also call The Creative Dilemma, which is how you balance your Desire to Make Art with your Need to Make a Living.
I am sure we can all think of examples of how you do that. Or not do that. And that is today's story, which I am sharing with you. Sort of like a badly wrapped gift, but I hope you get the idea.
A place I used to go and have visions.
Because all of you have special talents and abilities, I urge you to seek out "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde, which combines anthropological studies of gift-exchange cultures with a discussion of fairy tales in order to develop and elaborate on his ideas about the place of the Artist in society -- and that description does not begin to do justice to what the book really is or why you should read it, which is probably why I had such a hard time finding my way into the subject this morning. I wanted to do something about American Indians, because of our friend Gary Galante who worked for the Museum of the American Indian before it moved to Washington, and I woke up this morning thinking of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 -2001) who married Charles (1902-1974) and who not only attended The Chapin School but wrote an inspirational book about being a woman called "A Gift From the Sea" which my mother owned and kept on her nightstand and which is pretty much an entirely different kind of book from Lewis Hyde's.
The point being, I have picked up or been recommended plenty of inspirational books over the years, many of them having to do with being an artist and/or a writer and I have discovered that they may, if you are a woman or the sensitive and artistic child of one, make you appreciate what it might be like to paint or write, but they will not paint or write for you. They will not make any kind of art for you, if you want to know the truth. They will not even necessarily convert that feeling of wanting to into the actual doing, necessarily. I'm just saying.
My mother once clipped an article from the town's paper entitled "The Challenge of the Artistic Child," something an editor must have picked up off the wire service and reproduced for local consumption, and she sent it off to me when I was in school with a note saying it was a perfect description of what I was like. The article was, in fact, a discussion of a recently published study, the correct title of which was "The Challenge of the Autistic Child," which may have been as far as my mother was concerned and when it came to me, the same thing.
I used to stand around in a place called The Eagle a long time ago in a neighborhood called Chelsea and lean against the wall opposite the dj's booth and think about the stories I would one day write and sell the film rights to. I would imagine myself guiding the camera as the scenes unfolded. This might be a description of the squandering of a gilft. Or not. I am not finished with The Gift yet. But so far I have the impression that if you have a special ability, it is not yours to hide under a bushel, as they say, or dawdle over, or not share. The book is not "inspirational" in the way some others have been or might be, but more "instructional" in terms of why you are doing (or not doing) what you should be or could be doing, if that makes sense. And I think it was Hyde coming to terms with being a writer but also needing to pay the rent, which led him to wonder about what you could also call The Creative Dilemma, which is how you balance your Desire to Make Art with your Need to Make a Living.
I am sure we can all think of examples of how you do that. Or not do that. And that is today's story, which I am sharing with you. Sort of like a badly wrapped gift, but I hope you get the idea.
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