Vulnerable Paradise

My room is softly silent. Listening, the layers of biology, body functions, from digestion to cyclical desire for procreation, make their presence known. The first step for civilization is to fulfill these body needs, health, nutrition, and sexual satisfaction. But next is the vacuums void that creates intellectual hunger, a need to create.

But create what?

When we are hungry we end up in the kitchen and our palette screams out descriptors, mapping a plan for which foods to prepare. Drawing from pantry and fridge we create our transient pleasure palace, mounds of our favorite food gobbled down to satiety. Sex, mapped by social ritual of phone calls and rendezvous or some automated variation involving the internet, too is fulfilled via proactive pursuit.

But art, and our need to create it, is far more allusive. The intellectual whore house of television, printed media, and on-line consumption does not ever fully deter the desire to make something special. Of course one can damper and self-delude by massive doses of intellectual stimulation and experiential entertainment. Yet, in the end, only creation, full-fledge materialization of a vision, can stop the angst of an artist.

And for better or worse, I have always been, more often than not, an artless artisan... a needy man staring through the picture window of a world rich in expression. I must reenergize that self-definition of artist that once was hard-wired into my psyche. Yet I keep dissipating my fiery creative-juices by down time in the pursuits of pleasure. Vision must include decadence and deprivation in the final work, or I must streamline out distractions with a monk-like dedication. Whatever the methodology, a functioning studio and a stone chiseled conviction is as utilitarian as kitchen cutlery and boudoir bravado.

Initiate the creative process, and hope that art will come of it.