Girls and Goblins and Gardens

 

The Rosebud Garden of Girls, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868, albumen print. 

"People often believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined." 

For years now, I have been working toward a goal, to paint some pictures, compose a few bad sonnets, and write The Ambitious Fairy Project. Ten long years of reading, waiting, studying, and some suffering. Ten years of anxiety that I would never arrive at this moment, that I would never be able to do what Julia Margaret Cameron described in this simple quote. 

Many of my posts, previously to this one, have been an assemblage of things that went through my mind as I faced this reality. It has been daunting at times to push forward toward a life I wanted, a life that might have escaped me. I had thought to delete all the posts here, and I will be deleting old posts as time passes, keeping only those relevant, because I have finally arrived at a good place and I want to remain here and focus only on my current work, to specifically imagine what is in my head and heart. Some of my goals are very simple, a return to a kind of Romanticism, to the hallmarks of sincerity, to the folk and fairy tale, to the crowded, rambling work of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, where plot and character mingle, to the love of the narrative form and structure represented by the Pre-Raphaelites, to find all that in the post-postmodern world and recreate it as something valid today.

Postmodernism is over. It's been over for years, and yet many cling to it. It brought us many wonderful things, but it also did some harm, and we are struggling through a complicated time. I first saw that struggle clearly (though it had been happening my entire life) around 2000, a change, or maybe just a realization of a reality in flux. Time is a long arc in history. It's hard to see what is happening when you are standing in the middle of the happening. One just catches glimpses. 

All art really reacts against what came before it. It evolves. It struggles. It shifts. Some of us are living under the weight of futures that have been imagined for us, some of us are living under the weight of futures that may never exist. What is clear to me is that we all live under the weight of history, whether we like it or not. The modernists did not know what to do with Time. The postmodernists hated Time and did not believe it existed. 

But Time is real. (Though complex.)