Overmuch, and the discipline of writing for clarity.

I feel on the brink of something– oh, but don’t I always?
[Pardon the sarcasm, but it’s difficult to escape, especially with 2 beers in my belly and the onset of Autumn.] Wistful, dear Autumn– most emotional of times. It may be on account of my birthing at this time of year–

Dunno. Don’t much care. It’s coming on a time that feels heavy and inescapably long– Thirty-Nine. With any luck I’ll have a laugh if I ever chance to read this in ten years’ time! (One hopes anyway).

Distracted, disjointed, disconnected, and visited upon by nightmares over the past weekend– involving family members– ghastly and unsettling, despite the first one involving an imaginary and unfamiliar family bearing no relation to my real one. The second one was worse.

Writing, writing and thinking– taking up so much time. Finishing projects that have no place for obvious secretion in the world; needing to purge and begin and create– more. Needing to feel dashing and daring and slightly dangerous– and yet easily overwhelmed in the sorest and silliest of ways.

A spasm in the change of the season; the shortening of light, lengthening of shadow– How to reconcile the need for space and simultaneous craving for coziness? How does one reconcile the desire to be good, and to be great? Always I have rejected the notion, the dichotomy of ONE or OTHER. Ever into the greys I’ve wandered. Yet now I find myself unable to balance what I ought and what I ought– two arenas, two media, two sides of one coin. Age old and dried up, these questions, yet new and insistent for each who comes upon the starkness of the dilemma.
But it is not a dilemma. It is do or not do. That is all.
(One cannot do all, but one can do a lot.) Need one sacrifice? Yes. May one choose what is to be sacrificed? Yes.
There it is.

So much of what I need is in this City, and yet I feel a pull to find some way for time away from the city– if To Art is To Hermit, can it not be in a setting more befitting of hermitude? To return joyously after much toil and good progress! Ha! Twin lives required not easily attained.

WHAT MUST I BE DOING NOW RATHER THAN TYPING AWAY MISERABLY?  (Yet somehow helpfully, perhaps– but typing does not further the dream unless the dream is to write, to type–

[Maybe is it. November, now the stomping ground of writing, comes again in a few short weeks– time enough to decide whether to finish what I began last year or to begin anew– with fresh energy and possibly invective– Ben’s suggestion at attacking a novel for the adult mind rather than my Young Adult fiction, but that was (and is I think still) a dream as well. Too many dreams, perhaps.]

Meantime, Calendria 2010 is finished and soon to print. A six month journey and labor of love– to what fruition? Another of my lukewarm projects, too quirky and staid and wholesome to make a goddamned ripple? Too much a thing which has no discernible place in the world? A finished product into which I’ve poured half a year of my life– which has a built-in EXPIRATION DATE?! (Folly does at times appear to be my tour guide on this journey.)

(That was a poor prologue to its impending release, But don’t listen to my rant– it’s just that.)

To what do I owe these flights of fancy that mark so little? Perhaps I am the classic self-saboteur, seemingly aching for some success but building failure into every project. Look at the Mythologicals– too abstruse to appeal widely, perhaps too romantic or frivolous for these Modern times. Who knows. Another project I bled for come to nothing. Even the third (whopping third!) person to desire a print-in-frame has yet to pay the balance, and so Medusa languishes still in the dark corner of a restaurant in Brooklyn.

I want to trade all that I created these past two decades (too quickly expired!) to have a fresh start. I desire the destruction or recycling of it all– to tear it to bits and fit it all piece by piece into some great tome– a Book of the Dead for my life as an artist thus far– a sacrificial lamb to be put at the altar of tomorrow– no, of Now. Of whatever remains that can be made real or whole or at the very least believable.

Bart said recently that had he to do over, he’d have found some focus that had a guarantee of capital success, and allowed the art to be a pleasure, an aside– to be enjoyed in the way life can be done with money. I see his point and I can’t help but feel at least a part of me concur. But neither can I give up. After all, it’s rather late for me to find some capitalistic endeavor that would satisfy me in the least outside of the making of some kind of images. Yet the world is full of images, mostly free for the seeing and taking, and every citizen finds himself overloaded and overburdened by same. It is rather a challenge. (But all such in-one’s-head nonsense. It’s quite what they’ve always said to expect of the Artist’s Temperment, though, isn’t it? Insert another sarcastic chuckle–)

What a distress it all feels sometimes, this life.

While I dare not wish for simplicity, I do long for it at times.