purgatorio

I have nothing particulary profound to pontificate upon today - only a bit of news: I am leaving my happy little artsy fartsy world tommorow and descending, rapidly, through all the levels of hell until I crash-bang-boom on the lowest of lows, which any Dante scholar will tell you is reserved exclusively for traitors and tree planters.

It isn't really all that horrible, it's just a different world, full of stress and tension and ridiculously long hours, which will indubidably leave me too brain dead on my days off to actually write something. Don't give up on me entirely, though, cause sometimes my hellish suffering inspires me to loftier heights than heretofore imagined. Last summer, for instance, I wrote a poem about a cat who ate only fried ham. Stellar

arting

If you have faith - something eternal to believe in - then you can know the relief of realizing, as an artist, that you really have nothing new to say. When you acknowledge that your writing, or painting, or dance must merely re-create, in this moment, what has been going on for aeons, you become free to enter into something that is bigger than yourself. You dialog with eternity in a way that does not demand the death of mystery. You become still and small in the before the awesome Bigness.

Strangely, though, it is just this humility that makes your art-making worthwhile. For by humility, you put yourself in right relation to who you really are - an itsy-bitsy speck of dust. Oh, to be a speck of dust AND to matter! Such a thing makes you want to sing! or dance! or paint!

why, bother

Is it... is it all just an excuse for laziness - this writing and scratching and penning and repeating and such? For I write, but without the completion and release of publication - eschewing even the quick fix of the journalistic propaganda wars for the entertainment of the masses (who do not listen, but rather FEEL and then ATTACK). But it wouldn't be fair to say that I'm blah blah blahing away just to gratify myself. Why would I? I don't even enjoy it all that much.

What I need, really, is a cause, and "The High and Exalted Cause of Fame, Power and Wealth" doesn't seem to be giving me the sort of Motive Force, if you will (or "oomph", if you won't), to really follow through with something. It's the same with painting. I'm doing it - but only a little. I got no finish.

I end up wondering why I keep writing, and if anything will really come of these words. But why do I need some sort of purpose? Can't this be merely cathartic? Isn't that enough?

Or am I that needy - that desperate for people to notice me and affirm that I matter and that I've something to say? And if I am - then why? I've got a desperately loving wife (and puppy), a smashing family, and any number of friends who both love and appreciate me.

If the answer is that I've just been pulling the age old trick of trying to plug an infinite hole with some piffling ly finite affirmation then why? I know such a thing is an idiocy, but I suppose I can be forgiven, seeing as how I am - how does Agent Smith put it? - only human.


For further illumination on this topic, read the April 9th entry on www.beninrio.blogspot.com. Then think about it. Then pop on over to www.joshgarrels.com, and prepare for further growth.