Imperfections are the beauty of life.
The whisper of a fragmented shell, the uneven receding of the ocean and the glimpse of a half-moon, neither crescent nor full, while the sun begins to rise.
A quiet dawn, absent of the flaming colors of super-saturated images on an “artist’s” computer.
The fact that, as a writer, I am now ******* the rules of grammar and the fragmented, half-beauty of an imperfect sentence is the only result.
Beauty doesn’t come from using big words or even perfect words. It comes from being halfway there, half the joy of our sight fulfilled, half the excitement and mystery and sorrow of not knowing, of not seeing, of not understanding.
Beauty isn’t meant to be understood – or even appreciated.
It is meant to be.
As long as it exists – without the passion, the ****** struggle of the artist’s search for meaning, without the human condition of imperfections and rectifications, art is.
Art doesn’t need you, the artist, to exist.
But you need art.
Beauty that mirrors your own imperfections.
Your own incompletion.
You are not finished yet – you are not an artist yet – you never will be.
You are not creating. You have never made anything original in your life. You can only transpose that which is already in you. And as you are completed, you can begin to know completion, fullness, consummation –
But not quite. It is something that you will never reach. Not on this earth, in this body, with this bound and sleeping soul. A flicker of a spark in the darkness is not enough to truly wake your spirit; death alone can rend the iron chains and throw you out beyond your body.
Enough
Never enough.
You are never enough.
Art is never enough – always maddeningly imperfect, broken. What does art do? What do you do? Beyond the existence of the dripping seconds, absorbed by deserts of the poor, the tired, the embittered – they act. They do.
They are always doing.
But what is it to be?
Complete in yourself and in all? To be I am, the one condition by which anything can be anything or have anything, and to be enough?
I am lost, and blind, and cold, in the echoing halls of time.
Alone.
Barren.
What am I?
If I am not an artist, not enough, not – somehow – alone?
What can I be?
You – all of you – this human experiment that has reached new heights of love and joy and passion, ceaseless, peaceless, senseless and hollow.
Look at the world. Look and believe.
Death devours all; never satisfied, even with Shakespeare, with Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander the Great.
Even with you, and me.
It will never cease consuming as long as a single breath stirs the air.
Why are we? Why do we keep striving for that fragmented beauty, the misty song of another way to be?
Is there anything but the carnal, the voracious appetite of Death and Man for blood?
Or is humanity nothing but animals who have deluded themselves, told themselves that they can see what others cannot, that justice reigns and that this world is something other than what we see?
And I, caught amidst the whirlwind of all the nothing new, caught and spinning, pretending that I can see what others cannot, that I have something to offer through these black and white and formless words.
Nothing new.
The world never changes its axis; it spins and moves but never really goes anywhere, year after year, in the blinding plummet of galaxies around their black-hole hearts.
Is that all a heart is?
Is lightning only the fire flashing through black clouds that illuminates and kills?
Is poetry only syllables and words we cannot know?
Is the world only what we make of it?
Because then, well, ****.
I guess this is the story of my life, guys.
An arrogant, blind ******* who hates herself and draws away in silence. I drift in the vast reaches of space, unreachable, unlovable, with the rest of humanity spinning around until we get too dizzy to bear the tide and surge of life any longer.
And then we keel over and die.