is the greatest rebellion in existence.”
--Osho
As a poet and writer, I am naturally concerned about my freedom to write and to organize my work on the page as I see it. I am always interested in knowing who has their thumbs on art both nationally and internationally. I believe that artists who have been denied the ability to express themselves freely are hobbled to their soul. Their creative life is muted. Art is suffocated. What is left is cardboard, not this living, breathing need to create an artistic moment.
I believe my need to create art came with my DNA. Through my walk on this life's path, I've encountered family and others who told me that the need to create art was a useless activity. It would not bring a living. When I reflect on this unrequested advice, I sometimes laugh but mostly I want to shout into the dark night where those who do not know the need to create exist. They are in their self-built safe room. I am out here walking, listening for inspiration, and waiting for the next moment of creation. I am not going to allow institutions to dictate to me what I create or how I do it, all without committing license, of course--license meaning in this context harming a fellow human. And, there's the only line that I draw.
Too many individuals, organizations, belief systems, media providers, art arbiters, and governments prefer to interfere, to control the creative process. They lay down rules that hobble, that impede, alter, that deny and punish. They look backward rather than forward. I sometimes see their efforts as medieval, with similar ranking and judging. One would think that in this century these institutions would have left us, but they haven't.
One of my least favorite English words is kowtow. I will face down these entities to the end and not bow to them. I hope you as an artist or supporter of the arts will too.
--e. smith sleigh
FROM the NEW YORKER April 10,2013
by Jon Lee Anderson:
"It’s curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the
same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late,
great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic “Twenty Love Poems
and a Song of Despair” and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature,
Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve
days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief
Augusto Pinochet against the country’s elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende.
Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out,
but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro
as Pinochet’s goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend
and supporter of Allende’s; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country
for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed
in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.
At his funeral, a large crowd of mourners marched through the streets of
Santiago—a grim city that was otherwise empty except for military vehicles. At
his gravesite, in one of the only known acts of public defiance in the wake of
the coup, the mourners sang the “Internationale” and saluted Neruda and also
Allende. As they did, the regime’s men were going around the city, burning the
books of authors it didn’t like, while hunting down those it could find to
torture or kill.
A couple of years ago, Neruda’s former driver came forth to express his
suspicion that Neruda had been poisoned, saying that he’d heard from the poet
that doctors gave him an injection and that, immediately afterward, Neruda’s
condition had worsened drastically. There are other tidbits of evidence that
bolster his theory, but nothing conclusive. Forensic science, in the end, may
provide the answer to a nagging historic question."
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/neruda-pinochet-thatcher-chile-murder-exhumed.html