Brian Williams was an active contributor to "exoteric-l," an online community of Tarot and
Exoterica fans.
On March 10, 2002, one of the posters there asked Brian:
"What do you suppose your big lesson for this life was? Did you learn it?
What do you take with you?"
Brian responded:
Instead I have had to contend with the equal-and-opposite lesson: slow down
and smell the flowers, live in the moment, enjoy the company of friends,
consume culture rather than make it. It is possible to do both, and in my
stunning laziness I have somehow produced five decks and five books, and
assorted artistic odds and ends. My amateur art historian gig has been such a
pleasure, I am so proud to have turned myself into an Italy expert. You could
drop me blindfolded in any town in the country and I could art-history my way
into reading you the history and culture of the place. But this expertise was
accumulated by a contradictory process of passive study and active goofing
off, and unfortunately it came into conflict with my artworking, as I drifted
away from my youthful habit of keeping journals filled with sketches.
My life lesson: follow your own lazy-ass contradictory bliss.
love you everybody,
That's the bummer of it, I don't have any deep insight about it all. On the one
hand this has brought into focus the need to go for one's greatest dreams, to
follow one's Joseph Campbell bliss. But I've had at least twenty years to
feel this urgently, as first all my beautiful and brilliant friends and
lovers fell ill and died around me in the first generation of the AIDS
epidemic, and then again ten years ago, when cancer sent me its first
warnings. Even so I've never been able to turn myself into the happily
workaholic artist type that I admire so much, like our Elizabeth Owen, who
artworks all the time; or our Alexandra Genetti, who has often told me: if I
don't do some artwork each day, I go nuts; or like Michael Goepferd, who
created the artwork for Light & Shadow in a yearlong blast of creativity when
he realized that his time was growing short.
Brian
