You sit bolt upright in the dark and ransack your mind for evidence from the world that you are in it. You haven’t yet paid for your life with any currency that’s made you worth bearing. Days and years of living to no effect suddenly pile up to panic, and stack against your door.
Artists are sometimes slow to start. There’s a natural resistance to doing your work. It must be counter balanced by some other emotional force to set you rolling. Fear is one force, even existential fear. You fight or you fly, the mind races to think of something. Inspiration becomes functional to pay the piper.
Arrogance is functional too. It is a prerequisite in order to believe that something you might make could contribute to the world. If you’re careful, you can preserve that tenuous illusion just long enough to finish a thing, a tent-peg against acid rain. Your best chance comes when you simply do what it is that is you. That is arrogant as well, throwing out all the world’s perspective for the sake of only your own. Yet without it, you’ll never generate value from the difference. Your thoughts need to be different because all the old truths have already been applied.
So you make something new. The illusion, then, has served its purpose. It kept your head above water long enough for you to wash ashore on the island of beautiful, rich geniuses. At which point you spot your own reflection and wonder how long before they see you and stone you to death. How tiny, uninspired, unoriginal, shallow and meaningless your work seems now to be. Your state of mind when you started seems laughable, unbelievable. You feel sick. You’re certain that no one will ever the see the rare moments when you did tell clear, definite, new truth. They will never hear the questions which they might ask themselves, because of the sheer volume of your own mediocre, artless plowing ahead.
And yet...and yet, even so, there it sits. And after all, a creator is the only one who knows exactly how far short the actual work falls from the vision which inspired it. Whatever little it may really be, it is this much real. It sIts, a physical manifestation of your spirit, your intention, your will. Being that, it has a little magic to it. For all other utility it may be worthless, but you made it with your life-time, and it earns you your heartbeat.
It is a shock, in a way, finding evidence of yourself outside the body. Suddenly your being isn’t so much an abstraction when the stuff of it is sitting there on the table in front of you, as though the impetus to create was essentially the inner doubt that you exist at all, looking for reassurance from the world. ‘Art’ say the theorists, ‘is a protest against death.’ Maybe it’s the chant of a newborn’s first voice, first cry, a declaration of self. I am here. I am. I will not go back to nonbeing. I-will-not.
Not settling for protest, Hemingway said he was in active rebellion. Papa begs a question. You have to wonder if the sport killing of animals doesn’t spring from the same source as some art. There is an element in the foundation of some consciousnesses that makes us take offense to nature’s indifference. As a child you remember laughing, running into the park, forcing whole flocks of birds into the sky with only your voice, your waiving arms. There is affirmation and defiance in both creation and destruction, you make a change in reality, converting mind to matter, and so, insist that you will not be ignored by it. It is a desperate act of spiritual self-defense. How soon, after all, would you simply cease to be, without testimony from the world that you are here, that your presence makes a difference? So, Papa shot straight and smooth.
But meat stands mute. It is enough for some. unlike destruction, though, an act of creation speaks more from the self, says more about you in particular, the song in your own voice. Anyone can break a thing. Besides, the world can respond and further reassure. (Or it may not, even Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave.) If you are very, very fortunate, a work goes out into the world and a compound interest can accrue.
It won’t for this one. But if you keep doing it, maybe, eventually, you’ll be able to narrow the gap between intention and resolution just enough that it will for one.
So here is a beginning, a baby’s cry. You have made something real. You are a very little bit more real. There is something to show for those days, that year. You don’t especially like the outcome. It’s not right nor nearly enough but much more than you might have had. You can do better, something louder, clearer which will carry farther. You will start again, just as soon as you can con yourself, one more time, into thinking that your mind may mint the coin to pay the passage. In the meantime there are so many other things to occupy yourself with which aren’t worth remembering, so many things which will again inspire the fear that you’re not really here.
