Catch a Falling Plum

The plums are ripening on our tree, so its branches grow heavy and droop. Every day, I anticipate the first few to drop. Multiple times a day, when I'm around, I go out there and stand under it, hoping to catch one of the fruits before they crash below and split open.

It's a hopeless mission, but writers often specialize in hopeless missions. It's one of the ways we preserve our hope.

I may never catch a falling plum, but I'll know that I tried.

***

The nature of life and work are changing around San Francisco, and across the world, though here they are perhaps the most pronounced.

Now people are meeting, finding little jobs, and creating new businesses on their iPhones. I get to find out about these initiatives in my role as a blogger, here at the epicenter of the technology boom.

That's fairly cool. But that's not what I feel like writing about tonight.

***

Tonight I feel like writing about writers and artists of all types. In contrast with the wonders of technology and how it is altering, even transforming our lives, is the serious havoc many forces are playing with our collective creative spirit.

If there could be one, and only one definition of art, I seriously doubt "commercially successful" would make the final cut.

Art is presumed to come from some other part of our soul.

It's also apparent that art is not logical, it is not data-driven, it will never satisfy an engineer's desire for control and result.

Art is messy. It involves more emotion than cerebral/logical/math and metrics.

You don't know you are successful as an artist because someone buys your work. You only know when your work has touched someone's heart.

Then again, fans can be fickle. So how does the artist react when one who claimed to be affected deeply by your work changes her mind and no longer cares to be?

***

There are many kinds of violence in this world. This is a post about many kinds of violence -- nature's violence, allowing fruits to swell and ripen only to crash below to a dirty and bitter end.

Never truly tasted. Of course, after they rot, the seed can split and multiply and reproduce, so a bigger (p)art of nature's plan is met, we may presume?

Or human violence, emotionally, on artists. About how a human can offer the connection that's equivalent to standing under that bending fruit tree, hoping to catch your words, only to blow away with the wind, as if none of this ever really happened.

What is fiction and what is not? Is this nature's plan as well?

And does any of it matter?

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