The Joy Menu #66: Lack
Perhaps there was comfort in the constriction, a perverse safety in the pressure. Perhaps the door served as a weighted blanket – protection from failure, from fear.
Dear Creators,
The messages are persistent: if you’re struggling, try this; if you’re stuck, do this; if you’re blocked, make this…
Younger, I remember the rooms filled with aspiring artists, each consumed by some level of anxiety: is my poem working? Have I connected with the right mentors? Will the success of my peers encroach upon mine? Will I be accepted, read, shared? Do I matter?
It was a community, of sorts, but one mired in lack. In fear. In grasping. It made for stuffy rooms on off-season college campuses, nervous laughter and loose connections based on all having read the same “It” authors, the same strained belief in our individual exceptionality, the same asses stiff on hard benches, under the same bare summer trees, the same surreptitious glances toward the more successful, the published, the invited guests, at their social media streams, their tired eyes, their creased dress shirts, the same sheepish waits in line for signed books (“Yeah, make it out to… well, I just really loved…”), and subdued walks through quiet libraries filled with tomes written by and for the dead.
I’m not complaining. It’s a privilege to play any role where you can sit at a table as an artist, where you can take off your Means of Production hat and take your craft seriously. But these spaces – essentially space you buy access to (with cash) or win access to (with a scholarship) – are conditional, and thus precarious, and thus laced with uncertainty, insecurity, as temporal (and temporary) as a heavy desert shower.
So it’s no wonder then, that so much of how we relate to art and art-making is at the nexus of difficulty and desperation, breaking through and breaking down, magic and plywood, illusion and delusion, cash-on-hand and hand-out.
I get it. (See: Joy Menu #1-35).
I grieve for it. (See: Joy Menu #36-65).
I understand how hard it is to push against the conditioning, and material necessities, of the system we live under – art as hobby, art as commercial subsidiary, art as side-hustle, art as job.
But also: I’m tired of it.
Sometimes a toothbrush can hold the weight of a boulder. And yet we brush. Or our breath stinks and our teeth rot out.
I’m tired of being tired. I want to write from abundance. From silliness. For good cheer. From Sunday coffees and hot showers and messy hair and a piece of flaxseed in your tooth that you worry and worry and then finally push free.
The living room is covered in art supplies. I look to my father to understand – I watch his pencil strokes. Each is a tic-tac, as thin as an eyelash, and as evenly spaced; how a line is imbued with confidence, I have no idea. But they stand like that, with good posture, even when ever-so-slightly bent. Strong imperfection as purposeful perfection. Like a slightly bent nose giving a perfect face sex appeal; or a single chipped tooth making a smile sing.
His pants are on (rare), but his denim shirt is unbuttoned (normal); he’s shoeless, which is just as well since we’re in the living room and the wood floor is as smooth as a ballroom. (We put this floor in after a school friend of mine, sliding across the original wood flooring, jammed a shard of wood the size of bear claw into the nail his big toe). I stand at the kitchen counter – I am in the room, held between the memory of Mike’s toe and the present of my father making art – and I watch.
Six plastic cups (which once held protein shakes) are stuffed with colored pencils. Next to them, spread out like a hand of only thumbs, his oil pastels sit in a spectrum of like-colors, waiting. After fifteen minutes of persistent line-drawing, the check-check-check of eyelashes spreads across an entire 22 by 30 inch page, each a differently hued shade of gray, each in response to a stroke as singular and purposeful as a a nod, a wink, a grin. He looks up and smiles, puts the pencil down, and walks over to me in the kitchen.
“Tea?” he says. I nod.
“Done?” I ask.
“For now.”
For years I felt a heaviness when it came to writing, to art-making. Like there was a steel door on my chest. (I don’t know why it was a door; where did it come from? Why was it not a pillow, or a window?)
To open it, I had to exert incredible force. Which I often did – and then, freed, I’d gulp in a series of exhilarating breaths: I am an artist! I did it! Let’s create!
Yet after each brief triumph, all my energy spent and my fatigued arms shaking, I’d let the door fall – and hard. Crushing my sore chest, pushing out whatever oxygen I’d been able to pull in, whatever bite of artistic joy I’d been able to rip from the world. I’d find myself back under the same weight. A tire squeezed flat; my ambition just a hiss of leaking air.
Perhaps there was comfort in the constriction, a perverse safety in the pressure. Perhaps the door served as a weighted blanket – protection from failure, from fear.
“Well, I can’t move – so what can be expected of me anyway?”
“I hate it here; but I at least I don’t have to carry the anxieties of being free.”
I no longer feel that energy where art is concerned. (Or as much).
Now I feel it where home is concerned, where connection is concerned. Where hope is concerned. (How do you make a home? How do you settle? And does settle always have the connotations of a let down, of a loss, of a relinquishment?)
But those questions are for another day.
Today, at least, I want to make little checks on a large, empty canvas – form a ring of eyelashes to frame an eye which sees forward, and backwards, and side to side. And I want to watch him in his element, making lines and not wearing shoes.
And I want him to see me in mine.
Nothing weighty, nothing heavy, no windows, no doors. Just a thing to do.
Like breathing. Or blushing. Or being.
Or making some art.
Onward toward creative joy,
Joey
"These spaces – essentially space you buy access to (with cash) or win access to (with a scholarship) – are conditional, and thus precarious, and thus laced with uncertainty, insecurity, as temporal (and temporary) as a heavy desert shower."
"I’m tired of being tired. I want to write from abundance. From silliness. For good cheer. From Sunday coffees and hot showers and messy hair and a piece of flaxseed in your tooth that you worry and worry and then finally push free."