Manifesto:

This post is raw.

There is no fluff, no filler, nothing extraneous.  This post is as near a piece of my own heart as I can make it.  Something plucked tender and fragile from my chest and placed, still beating, on the altar.

I offer it up to you…

I don’t do what I do for money.  I don’t do it for the dice-roll or the rattle and shake.  I don’t do it because I harbor some sideways mile-high delusion of grandeour.  I don’t do it for hyperbole, from hubris, or to mitigate an ever-vacant black hole.  These type of things have never really appealed.  In truth, they are not even in the vicinity of my prime mover.

The real reason is much, much simpler.

I do what I do because I feel that I have something to say.  I feel, in my heart, that there are people who need to hear it.  And I know that: if I do not get it together, no one else will.

My grandfather part raised me.  He taught me music, poetry, philosophy and chess.  He died when I was thirteen years old.  I saw the black-wing skull-eye claw-toothed raven with my own eyes and, as simply as that, my childhood was over.

I understood that this was a finite deal.  That: there would be an end, there would be a reckoning and, at some point, I would be lying on my own deathbed.  And, at that moment, I would either be: filled with some measure of satisfaction, or harboring a spirit screaming; being torn apart, relentless vicious and all pain by a sky-high black tidal wave of regret.  That there was a choice that I could make that would mean the difference between: enjoying a degree of peace in my passing, or spending my last moments on this earth facing down an unstoppable, inexorable, world-tide of pain-absolute, set in motion from the crack splinter and fail of the countless false dams I had been forced to construct in order to warp and twist my heart around a barbed wire path that was not my own.

Everything became very clear.  And that choice (the choice of what to do with the time and energy of my life) seemed, in the best possible way, like no choice at all.

Because, at the root, I do what I do for a kind of love.  At least, my idea of what a real love is.  Something so deep and far reaching that is almost a kind of madness.  A devotion, religious in it’s fervor, epic in it’s scope, and fathomless in it’s depth.  Something to be fetished, day after day, month after month, and year after year, purely for the act of the worship itself.  A love that forms a sacrificial altar upon which all the inconsequential distractions and minutiae of life can be blood-let and transmuted into something which shines as truly your own; unique, perfect and timeless.

And ever since the day that I truly understood that the meat of my body was ultimately destined for the worms or the flame, I have known that: as long as I extend the maximal amount of effort, as long as I try my hardest and work as truly as I can in this field, in this calling, in the relentless fray of my love, that I will come to the end my life free from the cloying stench of regret no matter how long it’s duration.

This is a knowing which is worth any price, any hardship, any sufferance.

This, is why I do what I do.

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My name is James Radcliffe and I am a 100% audience supported independent artist.  If you like what I do (and can afford it) then please consider buying some of my music.  Each purchase really makes a big difference to me and 10% of every sale goes to a charity which: houses, feeds, clothes, and educates orphaned children in Nepal.

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