putterings 462 < 463 > 464 index
puttering around gassiest dreams in his smallish hand
I learned as a result of my far-out public exhibition, and the manhandling that followed, to distrust the definitions of crude social authority as they pertained to myself and my friends, who share a generally akin point of view and are all either professionals or semi-professionals in the arts and intellectual life. We can not be skimmed off the top and bracketed as thinly as I had been diagnosed at Bellevue; and the psychiatrists who impatiently felt for the bumps within my head, while presumably competent at a human-machine level, are not as a group sensitive, informed or sympathetic enough with my purposes in life to be of help. In fact, in a basic way they must be my defining opposition in history (daily life) while my friends beyond time (the ideal) — if that doesn’t read too pretentiously. It was a sharp revelation for me to learn this as a result of my on-your-hands-and-knees, boy! defeat with authority. As I confessed before, like so many confused young Americans puttering around in the arts, I had phonily pumped into my serious intentions the gassiest dreams of what the struggle for ideas truly is, of false and sentimentalized views of authority (both bowing before it and blowhard defiance), and in general acted more like a [128] Hollywood caricature of a “genius” than a person with the ballbreaking desire to uphold the immortal flame of art in his smallish hand.
ex Seymour Krim. “The Insanity Bit.”
(originally appeared in the periodical Exodus, 1959); here in Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (“new enlarged edition,” 1968) : 112-129 (127)
borrowable at archive.org : link
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Seymour Krim (1922-1989), writer, editor, literary critic
wikipedia : link