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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (31290)	2/20/1999 11:28:00 AM
From: Rick Julian	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Interesting post nihil. He cannot be existentially brave, or give his life to art or music. I deny absolutely that a married purely heterosexual person can become a great painter or sculptor, or novelist, or leader of people. A musician friend and I had a similar discussion yesterday. Aspiring to and/or achieving greatness in any field, requires a certain monomania--particularly with art. With rare exception, I doubt a man can be a truly "good" husband and father when art is his mistress. Perhaps, later in his life, once his creative flame has begun to dim some, and the call of his muse becomes less seductive, he can become less selfish with his energies, but until then, he and society (in terms of artistic/cultural evolution) are better served by his devotion to creativity. One of my collaborators had the potential to be a truly great composer. His natural gifts were, and still are stunning, yet his marriage and fatherhood will preclude his realizing his fullest artistic potential. Too many times when late night sessions would have been required to elevate good musical ideas to great ones, he became anxious about not being at home with his family (a lovely wife and two beautiful children) and had to "bail out" prematurely, and consequently our work suffered. When he was single, we could work until early in the morning with no regard for others, and produced some seminal works. As an artist, you can't serve two masters. I disagree though about the exclusion of "pure heterosexuals" from the "great artists club". I believe an artist can be in touch with his feminine, creative aspect,have the capacity for an agape love of other men, and create great work without having a sexual arousal response to men. I don't know about the private sexual proclivities of all my artist friends, but on a superficial level, the most talented of my friends appear to be highly sensitive straight males. But that's just among my circle of friends--there are many circles.

To: nihil who wrote (31290)	2/20/1999 12:43:00 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Um- I would have to say that MOST generals I am familiar with, through the history books, have been heterosexual. The machismo and arrogance necessary to be an aggressive military leader dovetails neatly with the aggressive super male- but I would say they probably don't make great family men in terms of their fidelity. Now, on to art. Some of the greatest artists I am familiar with were heterosexual- Picasso loved women, lots of them, lots and lots of them- and so did many other absolute geniuses of art- they probably could not have done so well had they not loved women and the female form so much (randy Mozart? a great lover of female flesh by all accounts). I think one can see in many of the nude paintings of women from the Rennaissance an erotic and passionate love of women on the part of the sculptors and painters. And many of the great landscape painters were good heterosexual family men- I know the same is true for many of the great Dutch masters. Brueghal, for example, had a very happy marriage by all accounts- and I consider him a genius. A supportive loving muse can be a great asset to a great man- perhaps muses are hard to find today, but in the past history has been replete with them. Better to say that genius can spring from anywhere- it is not bounded by race or sex or sexual proclivity. It is silly to try to assign genius to any particular well spring, or to go about mining the past for geniuses that fit one's particular exegesis- because exceptions will always be found because genius IS perverse.

To: nihil who wrote (31290)	2/20/1999 10:42:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

<<I deny absolutely that a married purely heterosexual person can become a great painter or sculptor, or novelist, or leader of people. >> nihil, please say you're kidding, or at least engaging in hyperbole... Dickens? Joyce? Tolstoy? Chekov?(I know he didn't write actual novels, but it's the same thing. Hardy? Gissing?) Rodin? Chamberlain? De Kooning? Picasso? Franklin D. Roosevelt, unless you know something I don't? Churchill? This is a silly proposition anyway. What does "exclusively" mean? That we can prove there was never any adolescent homosexual event? How could one know that? If you can prove that every married apparently hetero great artist or statesman was, in fact, gay, or partly gay, you've got a book there, dude. I'd love to see your archives. But I think you've said something pretty notional here. It's silly of me to argue about this. I don't care about it. It just seemed so... odd an assertion! <<Nature does not need much of our reproductive powers. It needs people who can love each other.>> Hey, I thought you watched the Discovery Channel! 'Nature' doesn't have needs, does it? Isn't just... nature? Whatever is, is nature. The impact of events on Nature may be better for us or worse for us (or our descendants), and accordingly as we assess that situation, we call it what Nature 'needs,' or doesn't. I think this is almost tautologically true.