lived,

a quality of art and artificia: a term of praise as well as a description of method, what we invoke when e.g. personal diaries or correspondence — of minor skill and scope, scribbled with little regard for posterity — valuate as high or higher poetically (regardless of any historical merit) as the contemporaneous literature and fine arts. Lived is not simply worked, thought, loved: all that and more, it’s a synonym for meaningfully complex — “strange,” extropic, aformulaic yet anti-random, “better than feelery.” Livedness is not lifelikeness, it can’t be faked nor bought by sweat alone: the gift of life we worship is “a new name for talent” — one’s knack for distilling the bulks of life into a sfumato veneer of lived. In the end, creative serendipity is held inferior to the honest “work of life” — the tireless recasting of fleeting and spontaneous into universal, the quiet growth of worldscale complexity and deep-time continuity, the infra-bass line of the music; we even see the latter in the former: what once was “a stroke of genius” — imagining, in a flash, worlds that take lesser authors years to imitate — has never been a free lunch because a great deal of lived comes inherited from your languages and lores, from your and your culture’s historic stock.  ■    Lived, “the new thrill,” isn’t too new; it’s what gives value to antiques, collectibles, authentic originals (curiously negated when a bonus is placed on rarity where it means dysfunction, as in botched prints). New value derives from authenticity of a less symbolic sort: literally lived-through art dominates now that the traditional division of labor — “you do stuff and I write books about it” — is gone. Personal, family, fandom art is a staple, no longer second-rate only because cislorean and substrate-dependent; the best worldscale art — evolved by generations, with childhoods and loves (forever the jewels of any story) lived fully in-world — amplifies, not averages, the lores it has been collaborated from. There’s no “shared mundanity” any more, little gap between realism and fantasy; you can’t assume a “common reality background” with your readers — living your story is therefore the only way to render it believable, to ensure the fabric is never stiff or forced but drapes naturally. ■    Art remains in unprecedented demand, both quality and quantity wise; lifespans unlocked, minds freed for creativity, intellectual life frantically fanned — none of which satiates, masterpieces remain in scarce supply. Modernity gave the only response it could — kilotons of slack: ridden with then-and-there concerns, shamelessly combinatoric, near-zero in strangeness — as discardable as most things in those days; morbid seriality posed as vitality, hollow fictional personalities carried standardized social and psychological markers for consumers to identify with.  ■    Lived is not swelled: a later — by definition more lived — rendition of a piece tends to be leaner, plainer, lucider; still, critics (e.g. the nature art movement) reject “soiling,” condemn “infatuation with lived” as a fatal disbalance in the yingyang of sophistication vs. drive. Shouldn’t the “death of genius” have reduced art to indigestible overdetailed lumps? What if clunkiness sores the eye worse than ever, only (much like in life) we’ve self-trained to blindspot it out? Isn’t this yet another sign of senescence — eliminated from human biology but returning with a vengeance in the fadeout of culture?

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