Being around artists and in artmaking spaces makes me think about the impulses behind my desires to make, do, and express things in general. I have language to explain it and different vocabularies to define it with, like the stars and their imprint on the soul, or God, the Creator of co-creatives, or class distinction and its many corollary affordances. But all these are just words to make sense (♒︎) of a nagging feeling I don’t actually understand (♋︎).
It’s the gnawing dissatisfaction I felt while flipping through craft books as a kid, desiring to make things without knowing why; it’s the satisfying *click* of an inner eye seeing when some-thing’s been made, without knowing how.
It’s a generative feeling; it’s what keeps me generating things even when no one’s looking. But the feeling can leave me as quickly and as mysteriously as it arrives. That’s the devil’s wager with this thing that takes hold of me, that I try to define with unsatisfactory words, but which exceeds them all.
The feeling can spark incredible drive and focus, but when it goes AWOL, its desertion feels permanent.
Permanent and painful.
I can’t explain the switch that flips sometimes. That might be what’s happening with @inconjunct, for example — something that clicked so neatly at one point has gone askew and my insides are refusing to align, like a focus wheel that just won’t grab the thing in sight.
I don’t like giving up on things, but I have done it many times, and with great drama and spectacle too. I have language and vocabulary to explain it all too, but they’re just words chasing a deeper essence I don’t really know.
The other day, I heard a folk story about Saint Lazarus spending his later years in Cyprus, mostly in silence; one day, he watched a child running while carrying an earthen vessel. The boy fell and it shattered, and Lazarus erupted in laughter, declaring: “the pot has dropped the pot!”
We are meant to be containers and our contents will come and go.
“There’s more inside of me
than skin and bones
There’s more inside of me
than skin and bones
I am born again today
and all my sins are washed away
There’s more inside of me
than skin and bones.”
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