The ever-glorious now, the ever-present now
07 April 2011 11:55 AM Categories: The struggle
This morning I added to my dream adult life. In it I am alone by necessity. I am alone, though I don't know where I stand, because I keep on moving, relentless in my escape. I want to return to the earlier vision, my feet flat against the noir kitchen linoleum, stockinged knees bumping against yellowed cabinets, the clean lines of a sensible outfit obscuring my curves, but I know too much to go down that road.
So. I am alone. I eat alone. I sleep alone. I wake to the sunrise and I hold out my hand to block the sun. I make appointments to not be alone, to talk to others. I walk my dog and am not alone. I talk on the phone and am only partially alone. And all around me is art, the making of it, thinking about it, the creation of an alternate reality. Is it delusional to imagine that the safest thing in the world is to create your own life, your own reality, to live for something like art, and let the rest of it, the rest of humanity, just flow along outside of you?
For years I've had a project in mind, taking a glass-paned door or window and building a framework behind it, creating little scenes for each of the panes, something along the lines of Joseph Cornell's boxes on a larger scale. I have the window, a huge oak multi-paned frame that we dragged here with us from Washington, DC. This is part of my dream life, the small steps toward the creation of something useless and idiosyncratic and beautiful and quirky, a mirror world that is more real that the actual one. Because that's what art should be, or some kinds of art should be: useless and true, an illumination of reality.
I make the box, I create lives behind each pane, lives with back stories that form the backbone of a book. For years I've also wanted to write a series of stories based on the inhabitants an apartment building in Washington, DC, like the one I lived in my last year of college where everyone is on the skids, damaged and battered, where the neighborhood around is all business and the homeless, where the city is bleeding out the last of its crack cocaine angst.
Being alone is simple. Easy. I may invite you in for a cup of tea, for a tryst on the couch, for a moment against the wall. Don't judge for my risk-taking or lack thereof, for my finely tuned sense of responsibility. To be human is to be fucked up in one way or another. I want to embrace my subtle scars and gut reactions, embrace the things that make me who I am. I don't want to hold the feelings at bay. I can't hold the feelings at bay (thank goodness: after days of stoicism, today I cry). I want to live for art, for my son, sometimes for other people. I want to be let alone. I want the ability to make questionable decisions. I want to let go of all of my assumptions. I want no future, just the ever-glorious now, the ever-present now.
I want. I want. I want.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that I wrote this after spending five days home alone. The post title comes from Sharks, a Morphine song, but I almost called the post Garboesque.
Image of Joseph Cornell's 1948 box Untitled (Medici princess) from Digital Arts New Media wiki.
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