What Difference Does It Make? Does your mind ever ask you this?
Do you look down at your art and hear this phrase ping ponging through the corridors of thought?
Poor little piece of art, are you really asking it to solve the world’s problems in order to justify its existence?
Are you asking it to solve all of your problems to justify its existence?
That is not what it is for!
What a heavy load to put on a humble impulse.
Would you ask an egg to support a skyscraper?
The Difference is this: did you jump off a balcony? Did you break all your plates? Did you ruin a friendship? No? That’s the difference. Life is hard and art is necessary to make it bearable.
A little pleasure, a little hope, a little alchemy to transform the ugly to beauty.
An outcome does not have to be concrete and permanent. It can merely be the lack of defeat.
My husband and I had our dumbest fight ever. It was about whether or not to include pinenuts in a pasta dish. I didn’t care and he wanted them. That is totally AOK. No issues at all. I like pine nuts. But I wanted him to understand my perspective and after explaining it for quite a while, he said he no longer wanted pinenuts. That was not at all what I was trying to achieve. I wanted understanding. He wanted release from being made to understand. What to do?!
A few days later I wrote the following paragraph as advice to myself. It’s very useful and necessary for me, maybe less so for people who don’t talk so much or who don’t have an obsessive need to communicate their every inner rumination.
Try to swallow your complaints, your perspective, your need to be understood on your own terms. Try not having terms. Your terms are as a sandcastle to the surf of other. Try to enjoy merging with the ocean. It’s going to happen regardless of your compliant.
On another note, these are a few recent abstracts from my current little book. I plan to write about them soon. I’ve been doing theme and variation on the idea of grid.
A seesaw appears to be a binary. Either you’re up or down. Emotionally it’s easiest to imagine this as you’re happy or you’re unhappy. Stressed or not stressed. I am often stressed by responsibility so naturally I dream of relief. How wonderful it would be to roll the backpack of anxiety off my weary shoulders and shove it deep into the closet, not to be hoisted again until next season. I wish for this so often. I am delusionally imaging a world of equilibrium. I think if I am not stressed about too much to do, I will be in a stasis of happiness.
No. Stasis does not exist, it is merely the briefest moment of passing through the fulcrum from one state of anxiety to the next.
I noticed this last night. I was taking stock and feeling pretty darn good about my week’s accomplishments. I had managed to do so much! And the future was looking a little less hectic. It’s as if I had been stuck in the up position of the seesaw for a month by an elephant of labor who either refused to pump his thick legs up and down or who was just too large for it to be effective. But miraculously, he had shrunk in size and I was slowly floating down. Happiness is just on the other side! Here I come!
I felt total bliss as the board evened out, me and the now skinny elephant smiling across from each other, perfectly aligned, our eyes meeting in joyous anticipation.
How brief was that joy, how fleeting that sense of ease. The skinny elephant suddenly transformed into an emaciated rodent who flew up in the air as my terrified butt whacked the ground. Thrown from the game he scurried away, leaving me unable to go up again. What if I don’t get any more work? What if all the jobs dry up? What if I have nothing to do? All the anxiety was back, just a mirror image.
Too much or too little. Those are always the main course. The hoped-for sense of ease is a momentary movement in between.
I am glad I could see it so clearly. And the metaphor helps. Possibly the thing to do is get off the damn seesaw.
Illustrations by my brilliant husband, Andy Norman.
Sidewalk Face 