The particular privacy of exile

The last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally - instinctively - is themselves, their own judgment. It is the result, I think, of an early training away from imagination, imagination being the means by which we think of a thing unconventionally - outside the norm. Those who raise us want the best for us - they hope to protect us from exclusion. But exclusion, at some level, is required in the making of the artist - art begins in the particular privacy of exile. What is required to be an authentically original artist is an inability to think conventionally - this, coupled with a for-the-most-part unconscious unawareness that one is thinking differently in the first place. It helps to have a sense of nothing left to lose, nothing therefore in the way of our speaking honestly; what's to fear, if no one is listening anyway, or if we believe that no one is listening? Or if we believe that the listeners can't hear, ever, what it is that we hear? - Carl Phillips