Another note on art

I think that I would be completely different if I had beautiful hair. Long, but not too long hair that can easily be mussed, and pinned up haphazardly with the intentionally messy artistic look. I just don’t have the great hair thing going on.

I put up my hair, put on make-up, and wore a red dress to go food shopping this evening. Often, the trip to the supermarket is the big outing of my day, and sometimes even the week.

The heaviness lifts a bit around sunset, pre-twilight, when the clouds are pooling themselves into finely colored waves and shapes. How can I not feel glorious for at least five minutes when the sky is such brights pinks and purples, and so many blues? And orange…always the orange that I forget, but that adds that final little touch. It’s almost impossible to write about sunsets without sounding completely trite and overused. Some things really don’t need to be directly translated into words.

I’ve had to begin separating creation from creativity. Creation implies that something is, or is being created, whereas creativity is a focus of energy, a flow of the possibility of breing things into existence, drawing them down or in or through the ether and into something tangible, whether it is physical, or emotional, or anything. Creativity is possibility, unproven. Such a vague word, but vagueness can sometimes be helpful when the ongoing attempt at reaching some concrete knowledge or question is unsuitable or too confusing or demanding.

I’ve yet to be able to understand how it is possible to hold both utter hopeful wonder and complete despairing grief in the same body at the same time. With fluctuations and moments of one overtaking the other, but intense emotions, even the positive ones can be paralyzing.

I am all over the place tonight. Restless and distracted, that searching sense turned up high, all shaky and just this side of kind of desperate. I’m circling around something, but I’m not sure what.

I’m thinking about tortured/tormented artist archetypes, and the modern conception of teenage angst, and where indivuals’ experiences of emotional and mental anguish actually fit. No matter how many lectures I get on “respecting the craft, respecting art”, I still believe that art and creativity are emotional outlets, are contained spaces in which to reveal and explore our pains and sufferings, our joys and hopes. The person must come before the art, as the art is only there to present or explain something about the world, and those of us in it. To submerge the emotional and intellectual and transcendent qualities of good ro even great art is to relegate it to complete uselessness. And I have no time nor desire to be useless.

Do we create at the expense of living? Isn’t giving in to creative impules and desires a deep form of living? Isn’t engaging with a project a form of relationship, a form of deepening one’s relationship to oneself and exploring one’s place in the world? Yes we need to consider audience when we’re working, but if we put ourselves too much into the hands of other’s expectations, then we are no longer creating something true, but creating to appease those who are expecting certain things. If playwrights continue to follow Aristotle’s theories of playwriting, then they are not following their own impulses, they are not creating work that is imperative and necessary to the world that we live in. A world on the brink of something, but who knows what because we’re all stuck in our little boxes and containers, so afraid to actually make anything that says something true about ourselves.

Because I deeply believe that if we are able to tap into something that feels fundamentally, deeply, right and NECESSARY in its creation, then other people will respond to that. We don’t need audiences of millions to say something. We don’t have to say anything unique, we just have to say it true and clearly, and it can take so many years, and so much glorious and painful work to get there. There is no finished project, there is no perfection, because everything is just a continuous building on the previous project, on the previous experience.

Maybe I’m not writing my play right now, maybe I’m not even convinced that it is a play, but I am writing what I need to write. This writing is not done to get through to some more important point, to hone my skills, to make me into a fiercer writer, although that happens along the way. I don’t want to take classes to teach me to be better at something, to teach me how I should be writing, what I should be making, and exactly how I should be going about it. I want to take classes to learn from the wisdom of others, to take part in their expansive and extraordinary creative energy, in their trueness. To learn how to be truer to myself and be able to find my gifts.

The artist in me has always been at odds with the teachers I’ve had, that, even in their kindest and most expansive moments, they were trying to shape me into an already predefined and predetermined role of artist. I have no idea what it means to be an artist. All I know is that my fingers twitch, and ache to be involved in some act of creativity when I see or hear the word artist. Not the word art-art seems to stagnant and stable, ad I think of cool white galleries, with all the paintings hanging just right, no jumple, no hope all askew and blissful.

I am askew, naturally. Just a little off, undetermined and off balance. Never quite getting my footing, even when I sink lightly in mud.

And since I’m being honest and forthright, I hate pretension. Experimental art is not intrinsically pretentious-it is the manner of the artist who created the art that is pretentious, or the manner of the audience receiving the art that is creating the atmosphere of pretension. Exclusivity causes pretension. Pretending that people don’t understand what’s going on is pretension.People understand unless they choose not to, and most of us have chosen not to even reach for understanding before we even understand what the word art means.

Simplicity in art does not mean making redundant and cliched work. It means straying close to the bone and tearing through that metaphorical skin to make it all a little bit clearer and brighter. I’m not talking about ripping ourselves apart, although some good introspective revamping is good for anybody. Most of the time, we aren’t even consciously aware of our biases, of what our minds and emotions are bringing into a room to meet something, whether it is a work of art, or another person.

I find this whole social act of ignoring and covering up what we’re really thinking and feeling to be the most destructive thing we do to ourselves, and to our creativity. Each and every person is an artist at heart, the human spirit, the animal spirit, plant spirit, every cell, every ounce of air or airless space is creativity, and needs to be let alone to become what it will become. But we’re too busy shaping and being shaped by each other to let things grow in time.