young orthodoxies
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Sat, 18 Jul 1998 19:40:59 +0000
`... that knows to value what young people do. And on this list
and in Salinger's writing, if we don't learn to value the insights
and experiences of youth, we may be wasting our time..'
I'm sure that PLAY is an essential component of all artistic
endeavour. And that when Goethe suggested that artists were
people who, among other things, managed to perpetuate childhood,
or at least adolescence, into adult life it was another way of
saying the same thing.
Yet - though I realise I'll win no popularity contest for saying so
- young people themselves are surprisingly unoriginal. In youth,
we tend to be terribly conventional in our thinking. It may have
the spurious look of rebellion & defiance to our elders but it
usually stays well within the confines of the current peer group
fashion.
Even in the case of genuine child prodigies - the Mozarts or
the Picassos - the early work looks tremendously cautious & staid,
compared with the innovations that don't usually start to arrive
until the late twenties or thirties. I concede that poets - as
opposed to novelists - flower quite early in the game but even
with them, the wonder is usually the technical mastery rather
than the newness of the soil being broken.
Scottie B.