Dreams in The Irresistible Urge to Write

Lyon: …I’m still an entertainer and always will be… and I’ve persuaded myself I do at least as much good as tranquilisers. Everyone can go where their mind takes them. You can live in imaginary places without feeling the real terror or the real pain. I make the images. I open the door. I can inflame… and I can heal… and comfort… and get people to understand… and for God’s sake don’t remember a word of this. I’ve just made it up to entertain you.

~~Dick Francis, Wild Horses

To be an entertainer– to be a mere storyteller– is not a job for those fragile of ego; for such people, they armour themselves by defining themselves as artists.

Because art is different.

Art, being incomprehensible, becomes judgeable only by technique and aesthetics, and thus, by making of yourself an artist, you insulate yourself from judgement by anyone except experts– experts that you choose for yourself on the basis of how alike you all think.

But to be an entertainer… that means anyone gets a word in.

And I’ll tell you what I believe:

All things make sense to us, only in the sense of a story. To tell a story is to be an entertainer; to choose story over art is to choose to be it, first and foremost.

Don’t believe me? Let’s try some photography.

Fig 1

Not all images contain power; some are merely beautiful.

But all images that have power haunt us afterwards

Fig 2

Not with ghosts and apparitions, but with all the untold stories

Fig 3

hovering around them

Fig 4

almost palpable

Fig 5

in their implicit existence

Fig 6

Stories don’t like to lie unfinished; once exposed to them, we yearn for their completion. And if the image has power, if it opens the door, then the stories will complete themselves in our minds, over and over, multiple potential might-have-beens that we can’t stop pondering.

Fig 7

They don’t need to be complex stories; stories need not have layer upon layer of deep and subtle meaning, uncoverable only by experts who strip mine it down to the mantle.

But they exist. Even if they are single one-note stories.

Fig 8
Of companionship.

Of aloofness

Fig 9

Fig 10

Love.

Fig 11

Fig 12

Will.

Fig 13

And happiness.

An entertainer opens these doors to another person’s world.

An entertainer too insecure to be a mere entertainer slams them shut.

All images except the first from my 2014 street photography album

First image from the event NOT called the Jojofest

Last updated January 07, 2015