Two Painters in the Ring

[In this series of posts, I want to introduce you to a certain idea, metaphor, and reality: The International Bohemian Highway. Millions of people who do not fit comfortably into a conventional life are fellow travelers on this highway. I hope that this series of posts paints a picture that resonates for you. If you’d like to meet some of your fellow travelers, please come join my new Eric Maisel Community.]

A while back I knew two painters, an older painter and a painter my age. The older painter lived with his wife and his mistress and painted mainly in blue. The younger painter lived with his wife, until she had a breakdown and fled, and his young daughter. It is the relationship between the older painter and the younger painter that interests me at the moment. To the older painter, the younger painter was “a hack.”

They had a working relationship, where the younger painter produced prints for the older painter. When together, they appeared cordial, even conspiratorial. But whenever the younger painter would leave the room, the older painter would shake his head and murmur, “What a hack.” This never got disclosed. This was never said out loud or to his face. But it was always present in the room: the older painter as genius, the younger painter as hack.

In the real world of relationships, this goes on all the time, this pecking order of who is better than whom. With men, there is regularly a macho element as well, some unwritten law or felt sense that the “better” one is also the “more masculine” one—that somehow to paint less well is also to be emasculated. There is a kind of boxing ring of the mind present at such times, Mike Tyson facing some poor stiff from Newark who just wants a pay day and not to die in the ring.

The great conductor and the not great conductor. The famous pop singer and the nobody-knows-her-name singer. Picasso and a second-rate cubist. A real poet and an imposter. In short, the winners and the losers. The winners feel this, and the losers feel this. And if its two men, some boxing metaphor applies, the champ and the chump, competing on a completely unequal footing, the one with a great right hook, the other just a punching bag.

If we were to look for one giant pothole along the International Bohemian Highway, this would be one of them: our species’ probably-impossible-to-eradicate pecking order mentality, who is winning and who is losing, and how the winner gets to lord it over all those losers. It is easy to say, “Winning isn’t everything.” But we may need a very powerful species-wide exorcism to turn that lovely, compassionate sentiment into anything close to real.

I hope that we can do a bit of exorcising in the new Eric Maisel Community that I’m creating. Come take a look. Not only won’t you hear anything about winning and losing there, that dynamic will not exist ever as subtext. Won’t that feel good?

Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt: A Toolkit for Thriving in a Chaotic World (Personal Growth, Self Development)

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Questions that help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life

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