Words can heal or spread like a virus, infecting both the unsuspecting user and receiver.

I have seen the phrase “flawed masterpiece” used by critics to describe various artworks, especially films. Either it’s a masterpiece or not.

There is no such thing as a flawed masterpiece—which is a contradiction in terms.

If a critic means to say that a film had its moments, but was unsatisfying as a whole, then let him say that instead of flawed masterpiece, which admittedly has a catchy ring to it—unfortunately, the phrase is empty and no one is home.

The following account is about writing; the point is vividly relevant for all artists.

“In 1969 Steps, a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, won the National Book Award. Six years later a freelance writer named Chuck Ross, to test the old theory that a novel by an unknown writer doesn’t have a chance, typed the first twenty-one pages of Steps and sent them out to four publishers as the work of ‘Erik Demos.’ All four rejected the manuscript. Two years after that he typed out the whole book and sent it, again credited to Erik Demos, to more publishers, including the original publisher of the Kosinski book, Random House. Again, all rejected it with unhelpful comments—Random House used a form letter. Altogether, fourteen publishers (and thirteen literary agents) failed to recognize a book that had already been published and had won an important prize.”

—Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections

Although Bowles, composer, author, and inveterate traveler, is writing about the Sahara and going native to some degree in the excerpt below, his descriptive imagery applies equally to one discovering art for himself.

From Baptism of Solitude:

“You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out into the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call ‘le bapteme de la solitude.’ It is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory.

“Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaing the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for awhile is quite the same as when he came.”

—Paul Bowles

Poet Robert Bly has translated the work of numerous South American poets, including Pablo Neruda of Chile who liked to fly kites on the beach. Bly is also the author of a number of nonfiction books; I highly recommend his allegorical work Iron John: A Book about Men (1990).

For more about Robert Bly, visit Questia —the online library for research.

Here is an excerpt from The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly

by Victoria Frenkel Harris

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"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

—Ayn Rand, Novelist-Philosopher

I like Ayn Rand’s vision and steadfastness. She was a remarkable individual and proponent of Objectivism.

Her philosophy is unfettered by nonsense. She avoids the trap of second guessing existence by realizing that there is only one reality—which is limitless and in a state of perpetual creation.

See The Ayn Rand Institute for more about her and Objectivism.