Echoes in a Hollow Space

There’s a lot going on in my life right now that’s consuming my energy. The phrase I say most often to myself, and not just in the context of blogging, is “You don’t have time for that.” I’ve managed to carve out niches for writing sessions and some critiquing (because the critiquing is important to the writing, too), but so many other things seem to elude me. Sometimes on the weekends I just collapse in a heap. My body demands it. This has been one of those weekends.

If things would just calm down at work…if things would just settle down in life…Ifs and might have beens.

I’ve also tried to carve out moments for myself when I don’t have to do anything, when I can sit and listen to the silence, or the song of the universe, where I can just exist. When life is pressing, it’s difficult to push that imminent sense of Things To Do away, but it’s necessary, even if only for fifteen minute chunks at a time. It all adds to the well of replenishment.

I accomplished this yesterday evening sitting in the garden for about twenty minutes reading, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller. It’s his 1957 portrait of Big Sur, California, where he lived for fifteen years, and it sounded like a wild and marvelous place back then, both by its unspoiled nature, and in attracting a hardy breed of artists and dreamers. I found myself longing to go there—but that place he wrote about doesn’t exist anymore, not really. There’s still a great deal of impressive nature in the California central coast and it’s not nearly as populated as some parts of the state, but I can’t help thinking he’d shudder to see what it is now. Although maybe not. He predicted as much in the book, that it would be “discovered” and irrevocably changed. He thought they would be lucky to make it to the next millennium (2000) and keep it as wild as it was, and he was right.

So as I’m sitting there, longing for a place that doesn’t exist, feeling a little sorry for myself, I read this passage which really resonated:

In addition to all the other problems he has to cope with, the artist has to wage a perpetual struggle to fight free. I mean, find a way out of the senseless grind which daily threatens to annihilate all incentive. Even more than other mortals, he has need of harmonious surroundings. As writer or painter, he can do his work most anywhere. The rub is that wherever living is cheap, wherever nature is inviting, it is almost impossible to find the means of acquiring the bare modicum which is needed to keep body and soul together. A man with talent has to make his living on the side or do his creative work on the side. A difficult choice!

Now, I’m not much of a subscriber to the Artist as Special Creature Ordained by the Cosmos, but it was very much in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, so Miller is writing inside his own time here. Rereading these passages today when I’m feeling a little less exhausted, they seem a bit over the top. And yet…and yet…when I think of all the artists I know—writers, painters, designers, whatever—this is the single biggest problem for most of them: how to make a living, how to spend one’s time, how to focus one’s life, trying to keep themselves together financially while they pursue that one thing that makes them feel most alive. Almost all of us work at some job to keep ourselves together, squeezing in time for creative work. Very few of us have the luxury of either existing in decorative impoverishment or living off our art. And yes, decorative impoverishment, the whole artist in a garret thing, is definitely a luxury. Anyone with a modicum of responsibility in life can’t afford to do that. Most of us have to slog away at it as best we can. There’s no nobility in it, it’s just doing what you have to do to keep body and soul together. For most of my life I, and almost every artist I know, has accepted that reality and gotten on with it.

It’s just at times like this, when I’m tired, when my art seems to be going through one of its periodic and chaotic phases of “redefinition,” when Real Life crowds, that it gets to me. The Artists’ Life may not be an Ordainment, but it is a calling, and for those of us stuck with it, it’s something of an imperative. It is that Thing That Must Be Done, regardless of what else is going on in life, because to not do it is to betray something fundamental in ourselves. To not do it is courting an impoverishment of the soul, the ashes of dreams which eventually choke off the life force altogether.

So. Fifteen minutes for myself here and there, a inviolable carved out chunk of time to do art, are not selfish things. They are necessary things, even if the world doesn’t always recognize that. Henry Miller was right about that, too, even if he did get a little carried away about the whole Artist as Noble Creature bit.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.