Linguistic Geography of Nothing
Difficult describing future in artistic terms, a restless mode of non-being, an indentured crawl through time to reach a destination few are willing to preserve. Before too long life sucks your marrow away and vultures sit outside your door ever evening, waiting for a little morsel of flesh, a slice of skin, a toenail to lodge in their throats. There’s a darkness that arrives with the declaration “I shall write today,” a heaviness on my soul, a grieving for all the times I have not, in fact, written.Failures of measured time, maybe if I throw away every clock in my house and refuse the sun, I too can achieve true enlightenment. Empire collapse anxiety perpetuated, non-productivity is immovability, misdirection is a last stand on a cultural crevice before the machine eats your heart and weakens your ability to love.
I have done nothing and I am tired. Back and forth I fight myself, what use is art but for friends I cannot keep myself tethered to, what capacity for beauty can I bring while struggling with my senses.
I can hear my mother calling my name as a child, fee myself running through the hallway to the kitchen, my memory unreliable afterwards.
No school would ever prepare you for the anguish you would feel doing nothing, no mentor would ever plead with you to not force yourself forward, to be carried along with life down the cosmic stream of everything, always. The method prescribed is to capture life, place three air holes in the lid jar and keep it by your bedside, watching it flicker softly as you fall asleep at night. To be idle is a sin, to prepare yourself for a reconstitution of how things work. Marriages, partnerships, collaborations in the great sphere, everything must be re-negotiated when material frustrations meet their conveyed limits.
I did not consider myself an artist until relatively recently, and just as quickly it might be so that I reevaluate such a title. Artist, writer, filmmaker, poet, terms I use to describe myself when I do the things writers, filmmakers, poets do. Is that art, because I say it is? Am I an artist simply for putting word to pen to keyboard, for convincing everyone I am those things? Is it even convincing in the first place? If I carry myself as the artist I wish I was, does that indeed make me that?
I allowed art and its spirituality to sweep me along, wash my eyes and hands, only to find empty crypts, hollow rooms of cold air in a labyrinth I was not aware I was already in. Life pushes me along all the same, mysteries only just beyond my reach.
Perhaps I’ll keep grasping at their meaning forever. Perhaps one day I’ll think I’ve revealed them.
What else could I do in the meantime, but cry?