or: on eating the pages.
im thinking about the way our work becomes us. the ink on the writers fingers, the smear of paint on the artist’s cheek, constructing narratives in the shower or writing poems while walking the dog. our work seeps into the very core of our being. becoming creatures that unconsciously seek out little treasures like the crows impulse to collect anything shiny. half-finished poems on café napkins, a quick sketch in the pocket-notebook to be expanded at home, a sentence stuck in the back of the head, written down to use later.
joan didion have already written about this artistic compulsion, this need keepers of private notebooks have, us lonely and resistant rearrangers of things. her essay is mandatory reading for every person with the demanding habit of carrying around a journal wherever they go — but what im angling at here is this soul-sick need of the artistic compulsion, this demand to write or paint or sculpt: to simply get the thing out. this urgent force every creative has and desperately wants to obey.
and i think it begins with passion. i think it can only ever begin with a life-consuming passion.
im thinking of van gogh, equally consumed by his art as his art was consumed by him. anne carson, hiding in her room as a child eating the pages of her favourite book, desperately wanting the glorious words inside of her. this passion of want — this need to become the things we love. is passion, the love we have for art and literature, poetry or prose, the same as becoming what we work with — a fusing of the body and the thing we worship? a glorification of the self as the vehicle in which both the passion and the subject is stored.
i keep thinking about the skeleton of the medieval woman found with the precious lapis lazuli in her teeth. was she an artist painting with her favourite blue pigment, wetting the brush in between strokes and accidentally consuming it? or simply a monk scribing beautiful aquamarine manuscripts? a medicine woman’s secret ingredient for health? devotional kissing of a decorated text? or simply, an 11th century van gogh — eating the wonderful blue?
we dont know. but what i do know is that i want to love something so much it gets stuck in my teeth. i want to consume my passion and in turn be consumed too. the body a visible proof of my devotion. the love becoming the self, amalgamating into one. so much so it can be found within the bone a thousand years later by eager scientists. the most miniscule parts of my cells becoming physical icons from my attention. attention is the beginning of devotion, mary oliver wrote. i want devotion to become my beginning, the path to getting my god stuck in my teeth.
after im gone and the flames of passion have died down — i want to have loved so much it is embedded in my bones.
