Find Your Own Voice

Front Porch Republic had a great post by Katherine Dalton The Roots of Originality on Wendell's newest book of essays titled Imagination In Place which I haven't read yet.

I'm sure I'll get to it by next year when I'm done slogging through the rest of his writings.  Dalton said something that struck me as profound. 

...there is humility as well as rootedness in the kind of originality Mr. Berry loves, a humility that will not be found in the work of those who use their past, their current city, or their color-gathering trips abroad as veins of ore to be mined in order to further a career or to enable themselves to “find their own voice” (a phrase Mr. Berry clearly dislikes). Art, for him, is an attempt at wholeness of expression that must come from a desire for wholeness and haleness in the life the artist is living, and cannot be separated from it. In some way—through imagination and (for the fortunate) inspiration–a writer becomes a medium for his own piece of ground and the people who are, like him, bound to it.

This statement brings to mind my post on The Way We Think.  In that post I commented on how we look at people in terms of defining our reality but now I think it runs much deeper than that.  On the other side of that original equation was the question of how we look at language.  Is our language precise and rooted in the place and people we are connected to?  Now I'm asked how do we look at art?  The purpose of art is not self expression, self discovery, or self renewal.  It's not "finding your voice."  And the purpose of thinking?  Can this rootedness affect us even to the basic function of our existence.  When I asked the question, how do I go about being in this world then I changed even that to be focused on place.  Good art, good language and good thinking finds its fuel in the place and people of the artist.  This is anti-intuitive to the way I function.  I have to admit that even the genesis of this blog was to attain some sort of self-(Fill in the Blank).  It may have been freedom, revelation, purpose, good living, or the plain, old hubris of writing and being read.  So now I'm challenged again by Wendell to explore the basic assumptions of even my art to which I say... Touche old poet, Touche.