On An Artist

How Can I Survive Failure As The Artist? — Morning Papers XI

In The Beginning And Thence Forth, An Artist’s Life Is Never Stable — Regardless of The Hopes you have been Told.

I had this come across me when I was rummaging and routing around my library of toves.

An old note fell out from a book, well dusted and firm on the shelf, from whence I opened — the icon I use is a slight code to a friend, if she ever comes across it, in nearing or further-away days — the gangly piece read:

How does one survive the awful hours or rather moments after failure? How does one survive the trifling speed, all other pieces of creation come to you, after the baffling failure? How does the artist survive; keeping true to their integrity? How Can I Survive Failure As The Artist?

This never happened by the way — though a primer to a piece in the Goodness And Wellness soon coming to you — but it does give me the leveraging space to expand and confer with you all.

A space not involving barreling flares of light or awful constructed shops that bend each time you turn the corner until one is so mad in the face, the literal blood vessels under the tardy skin start to skate and steal your dignity away!

But how does anyone survive failure by any means? That is too vivid and daunting of a thing to quickly tap dance on over here, but in days thither I shall mention it all the further; So let us focus our barrel and blinding vision upon just one aspect, and that is surviving as an artist through failure.

The act of Creation is as beautiful as the act of Destruction — though the principle may be entwining and altogether the same, it is the response we have to it, I believe where diffidence belies.

Diffidence in our manner when we cannot face the other while facing the one of our choosing; our desired one, if you will — though, not all of the times do we have that choice — All things end, and all things begin again; never in the same form but from the energies of the destroyed — unless we are speaking on the terms of the total collapse of this Universe, then, all things end and there isn’t a magnet to reject the polar opposite and squawk its complaints, is there!

But comes the retarding dullness, whence the beauty of an idea, so beholden and seemingly true to ourselves becomes disparaged and dismantled by the revealing light after the eve of our passions — we sink, or the ones concerned here do.

I’m generalizing here, but all react in a way kin to them and their narrative — if we’re bruised terribly, let us say, pushing for the grossest of effects, then we will recoil, like a slinky spring that is set in motion by the childhood innocence, once it finishes it’s boogie down the stairwell, it ricochets, and condenses up, and if all momentum is then lost, it remains in this newly snapped form.

Coming all depressed in this form; becoming blinkard to any travel of converse and ideas around them — all this being poised on the worst of failures — to remind themselves that there is no perfect form in such a state, belies a true difficulty, few could ever make you realize that, you must otherwise the sinking asunder will become the totality of you — no matter how eager their intentions in pitching such a form-perfect in their beholding eyes and hearts, they must know that — perfection only deludes the heart in believing that it ever was, and such a trail could be found and harked upon, naught exists beyond that, that hope in the human heart is the most supple and dangerous thing around; hope always can be toyed as such by shaping forces.

I remind myself also of the hope, so many artists begin with, and how quickly or ever slowly, it is pitched out of there — hereto remains the hope, and what a burden that is; it’s too hard to resist;

— Reminding one’s self of that worth you contain whilst in the maelstrom of opinions being speared into you like an unkind rhapsody of some contested battle — is the forfeit of being the inscrutable scrutinized and publically whipped and thus shown —

Hope, perhaps the blinkard’s motive to create — as tho’ some divination has taken place over them; That may be, even in just their eyes, so be it, but the realization all must fail before true refinement and enlightenment — in the terms of being revealed naked to the world, in a purely self-centered sense — and that all must be destroyed eagerly, as much is created; if such equality is true, which I doubt, knowing my witnessed events, then where can an artist hope to keep their hope, when all falls down — perhaps that is too large of a question to truly answer here; perhaps elsewhere an eager journeying soul is keeping eyes on that question that bides you so.

Impermanence is at the respect of us all — even the immortal ones; seeing all else vanish before them, and they somehow remain, acted to the world as they must unless they choose no longer to be.

To see a painting in the natural light; to see it weathered, and the paint flaking — it under hail and sheet ice; to see it as it is, a jumbling of elements to crosshair the divine into the humane scope — perhaps that is art: for a present moment till the next, and those that remain, maybe the gift that endures, even just for a little longer than the rest; settled here with us, just for a moment’s clinging breath, of this endless running universe, it so seems.

The question bespoke; a question often rebuked severely — as we converse, though very one-sidely, I am in the midst of destroying a few old pieces of mine; my, how things caught once, do not hold true or firm to the crux and pillage of time.

And I’m glad, earnestly glad to get rid of what hasn’t sat well in me at all; Perhaps in dark, conjuring natures — it is a relief that we can cast some destruction on our creations, in jest to what will be and has been taken away from us; O, touchy farce and deadly silence, rebuke’s us all, in this tidy dance.

Peeking over the quilts with outlandishly large eyes, in terror of some envisioned fright — The relief may be there, to foolishly combat it away with board and canvas — the specks of the deeply rich paint trickling down your sides, as you, the wounded pug dishes out a good ol’ one-two to the universe. Good on ya Mate — you’re gonna need it, keep those tears for the years when you ought not to.

Like stern oatmeal for the Wising farmer that rises so well yet torn in aches by the morn, you must spring yourself unsundered in the breezy revealings of first light so opaque; like a New York’s sun over the Alps/funnels of Switzerland — regardless of cramps and aching pains of the heart and stout face — you must! we must!; Contend you, we will, big ol’ time smiley — you brilliant thing you. Or so be it, at our timeless deaths.

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