The Pain of Art

I am a firm believer in pain.  Not in its content but in it's potential value.  I think I am a masochist.

It could be because of my early years of Catholic schooling or the fact that I have had to find a way to excuse and forgive my own encounters with pain.  But in my special, warped way, I have chosen to view adversity as a necessary evil as well as a necessary good, insofar as the crucible it provides us to hone and refine the base components of our humanity.

I bought all those sayings, "No pain, no gain." and "Good things never come easily."  I have been cowed by the guilt factor which argues that unless something is labored over and suffered for; unless blood is drawn and courage is required, it will always be substandard.

Is anyone buying this?

I've found I must.  If I do not, I may have to do away with my entire family.  And if not that, then most certainly, I will have to leave home.

But as long as I stick to my theory that abrasive conditions and contentious attitudes are an asset to me and actually improve my artwork and my writing, then I can remain legally free and keep my backpack in the attic.

What is it about husbands and offspring that challenge the soul and require the patience of Job to survive?

Outwardly, they seem harmless and friendly enough.   Husbands can be invaluable on garbage pick-up day and once they learn how to boil water, there are a myriad of foodstuffs they can concoct when you are unable to start supper on time.

And the kids?  Well, they're just cute as buttons at birth, aren't they?  After that, we learn to see the good in them; and during their teens, well...we just stand by and pray a lot.

But I've found after long years of being heavily vested in the livelihood of both that they are truly at their very best when you are taking care of them.  As long as their individual needs are met, the love really flows.

I've also learned that when attention is diverted away from them, there is not a human alive who can withstand the petulant onslaught of familial umbrage that results.

Over the years I have been able to imbibe the precious nectar of creative self-indulgence sporadically.  I had time to myself during school and work hours and there was always the refuge of deep night in which to secrete whatever creative juices from my cerebral container onto a page or canvass.  It was manageable.

Right now I have only one remaining child still roosting in our cozy coop of clan dysfunction, but she is a tough one.  She is the baby of the three, and it is obvious that in her ranking as caboose, she has become the bloodhound of familial deficits.  She notices them all and has no qualms alerting you to her findings.

In the two weeks that I have been salivating over my discovery of O.S. and slaving to insert myself into this heady mix of word sculptors, I have heard from her only that I am wasting my time, that "Trust me, Mom.  No one is interested in hearing about your life." and my personal favorite, "Oh my God, Mom!  You are just SO overly-attached to your laptop!"  This, mind you, is coming from a nineteen year old who goes into apoplectic shock if she is separated from her Blackberry for more than sixty seconds.

In a couple of weeks I am doing a three-day road trip with the child as I drive with her in her little Nissan from Kansas City, Missouri to Scottsdale, Arizona where she will attend culinary school.  Please pray for me.

As for my husband, I think his long years of chronic sports watching and participation have rendered him completely unable to comprehend any life circumstance that does not involve some sort of ball and a jock strap.  He resents the time I've recently dedicated to writing and when he sees me tickling away at these computer keys, he'll holler out to our daughter, "Uh-oh.  Mom's BLOGGGING again." in a way that converts the word into a close-sounding facsimile of the fog horn in the harbor on Hudson Bay.

I've tried to share some of my blogs with him, naively thinking that it will somehow enable him to become supportive of my efforts, but to no avail.  I don't think he's gotten more than two paragraphs into one before he intones, "Look, I know you're a good writer because I don't understand it.  But can I read it some other time?  I'm missing the game."

If my theory is correct, one thing is certain:  I've definitely suffered enough for publication.

I figure another four or five years and I'm good for The Pulitzer.  Perhaps Poet Laureate?  (Hardships spawn a tendency to aim high.)

However, I'm keeping my options open..... and my backpack ready, just in case. 

Observation Platform of O.S.- What We Don't Know

I wasn't going to post anything today.  I've spent the past week heavily mired in the subjectively complex work of adapting to this new writing venue at Open Salon; and for someone whose general preference is to remain as sheltered from potential ridicule as possible, standing on the platform of this deluxe literary station was no small step.

For one thing, there are some impressive, erudite trains rolling down these tracks, which is intimidating enough; and although no one has yet ridiculed my initial efforts, I have read some pretty vitriolic comments about blog content on the pages of others.  Comments with the potential to turn a fragile, tentative train passenger into a jumper.

I know that freedom of expression is a necessary component for the success of any open dialogue and I realize that dissenting opinions are indispensable tools to hone one's discernment; but I am also aware that we don't really know each other here and it's what we don't know that could cause harm if the brakes of bitter judgement are not applied in time.

I'm not advocating coddling.  I don't believe that we should all receive ratings and be decorated with smiley-faced icons just for showing up.  I'm not even suggesting that criticisms should be entirely withheld.

But there are ways to critique and disagree that come significantly closer to respectful than some of the eviscerating, mean-spirited and wholly unnecessary diatribes of contentious slander that I've come across in these unfortunate comments.

I find it confounding and, obviously, disturbing enough to mention right now after only a week of train watching; even though it places me so close to the edge of the platform I can curl my toes around the tile.

There may be some among you now who are thinking that if I don't like it, why don't I hop on a bus instead or take a pleasant little compositional ferryboat to Storytelling Land where everything is light, everyone is supportive and every story has a happy ending?    Odds are you might be the very people I'm addressing.

Look, I'm just saying that this is a relatively new medium for all of us.  Never before have we had such vast exposure to the out there; to the other, particularly with such incredible immediacy or intimacy.  We live all over the world and come from every variety of circumstance imaginable, and what has become evident to me in startling dimensions after reading through a significant number of posts this past week is that many of us carry burdens of incomprehensible weight.  Burdens of pain, loneliness, addiction, recovery, abuse, loss, tragedy, failure or with a brokenness so weighted by darkness that its nature can only be implied.

But we all come here to write.

Some write about how their lives fell apart, some, about how they are patching them together or how they are surviving the daily slaughter.  Some write about anything but their troubles.  And for still others, this may be the only refuge, respite or moment of joy in their whole, oppressive existence.   How many  sets of toes are curled around the unsteady edge of the platform tiles as they write their insides out or as they retrieve the comments left on their blogs?

The answer to this is:  We don't really know.

Like many I am not unfamiliar with the rabid toxin of despair and self-loathing.  It has taken me most of my life to reach this point of clean comprehension when the sodden cloud of insecurity has finally lifted and my life is no longer compromised by inadequate perception.  I can see clearly and I now recognize the craven silhouette of the enemy.  I know when to run and when to fight.

At this moment I am fighting.  Not for myself, but for those who come here to find themselves, to reach out to others and to find a place on the platform where they can wait in safety but who, for whatever reasons, are temporarily drawn toward the edge.

They shouldn't have to fear us.  Offer them a place to stand.

There is room for everyone here.  Be kind.  You never know......

Bulimic Touch Seething between sin and scorn I swallow all I cannot mourn and smother what is scarred or torn THEN TRACE THE FACE I'M LEFT WITH I excavate and then remove This womb of rage no one can soothe A tacit gesture to improve AND TRACE THE face I'm left with These fingers are my anodyne Five tools that craft and realign the shadows all my fears define THEY TRACE the face I'm left with And hone this practice to deceive to suffocate what I perceive I guarantee you will believe the trace of face i'm left with I've been there.  Just sayin.......

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GAUNTLET

Today has been both ridiculously exceptional as well as filled with abject desolation.  

The heady exception came in the other-worldly conduction of sublime inspiration and pragmatic execution that seamlessly unfolded during the course of the afternoon as I was preparing a post in answer to the friendly challenge J.D. Smith set before me yesterday.  The challenge mandated that I reflect my thoughts in poetry versus prose and was one I was, at first, reluctant to accept given the deeply personal content of most of my poetry.

But after a fair amount of time and some reasonable consideration, I decided, "What the hell!  Why not?"

And so I gathered up a handful of some of the poems I had written over the years, ordered them in a way that seemed most appealing and logical, and then proceeded to preface them with an explanation as to why I was posting them and, particularly, why I had been so reluctant to share them in the past.

Being the obsessive curator of words that I am, it took me several hours as I labored over both the content as well as having to troll the bottom-most layers of my soul to figure out, even for myself, why this poetic receptacle has been so vital and so dangerously personal to me for most of my life.

It was good.  I mean, it was really, really, really good!  Possibly the best writing I have done ever. Ever. Ever, ever, ever.....

At this point, most of you veteran bloggers (of which I am not) are feeling a slight gnawing in your abdomen and a tightening in the back of your throat because you know where I am going with this having likely experienced it yourselves; and if your reaction to it was as layered with black thoughts as was mine, there is a good chance you might still be in therapy right now questioning the seeming lack of justice in the universe.

About an hour ago my brilliant, exquisite, intelligent post was complete and my brilliant, exquisite, intelligent ego had come out of seclusion and was heavily imbibing in a large carafe of  AM I F***in' AWESOME, OR WHAT?

The preface was profound.  It was candid and salted with just enough grains of humor as to not be maudlin or affected.  It was rounded out to the nearest whole qualifier of perfection with the deft execution of God.

But there was something not quite settled about it.  Something that lacked the fluent grace of heaven and needed an ever-so-slight adjustment.   One poem just did not fit the mix, and so I made the executive decision to delete it.

If I had any questions as to the nature of and emotions in hell before that move, I need question no more.  With the exception of the last three lines of the final poem, I had inadvertently deleted my entire draft.  The whole thing.  Gone. Voided.  Eradicated.  Eviscerated.  Expunged.  Destroyed.  Decimated.
O-Fucking-bliterated!!!!!!

Pardon my use of such a raw expletive but nothing leaner than a fat, crude, street-invective can adequately convey the radical implosion of my sanity at that moment.

After an hour or so of frantically searching the net and every blogger help site and post available in the English-speaking world,  I realized that it was hopeless.  My words were gone and now no one would ever know the mind-blowing spark of pure, unadulterated brilliance housed between my ears because there was no possible way I could mine that particular vein of awesome again.

It's time to move to another cavern of promise and get back to digging.

In the meantime, here are those lousy poems and I am definitely keeping the one that triggered today's cyber-psychotic breakdown OFF THE LIST!   Forever!

No preface this time.

And no turning back!

SELF INDULGENCE  Some things are never meant to be Those brittle limbs of misspent dreams Where consequence is always freed From knowing all that sorrow means The sweet allures of 'self' and 'choice' Obliterate the Sacred Mind Denying access to The Voice That speaks of 'fair' and 'truth' and 'kind' Instead we cultivate our plans To counterbalance discontent With lies that fashion and demand More recompense than we have spent We stake our pride in vapid ground To circumnavigate our trials And when no solace can be found We counteract by swift denials For every choice a price is paid A judgement, fair, for every hand But once the soul has been betrayed There is no Truth on which to stand Yet if we knew the somber cost Of trying to outwit our pain We gamely suffer any loss To earn the grace that it contained THE MARITAL BED Extracted from my sleep I disavow The conjugal mystique behind his bliss What alabaster prayer can stop it now; that trace of rage unfurled within my kiss? This life, with dreaming dormant through the day, has sanctuary sacred in the night Its funding of forgiveness strips away the rancor I exhibit as delight. But now redemptive pleasure takes me in and holds tomorrow as I hold my breath Recovering the mask beneath my sin I dance with silence like I'd dance with death.  THE LANGUAGE OF HIGH SCHOOL We were so vocal then  Bold and Fly-high-ing Marking with world with a language We invented Fast and incisive Taking corners on two syllables Carving our initials with loud vowels or invectives Deep into the commitment of unspoken trust Each one of us Rounding out words in those spaces between thoughts Fresh verbs that carried to resonance Codified lingo we lived by or folded into memory Our sentences Fully varnished In the common care Of friendship. Surviving The Plan Recovering a carefully labeled midlife My hours committed to blanching displeasure Preventing the truth from revealing the strife In language whose texture’s too common to measure The play of good conscience restores as it’s able The loss of our substantive need for each other It buries the facts of this misguided fable Dismembering dreams we will never recover Survival increases my lien on deception The debt of the hollow and human design It alters by count all the fractured perceptions That challenge my plan to perfect and refine It weathers this shallow, truncated devotion As need resurrects my expandable sinning By polishing myths that I set into motion With the lies that I spoke from the very beginning  Dead Ahead At seventeen we were mystics; peace reapers Posed in The Lotus on hardwood upstairs Walled in by paper columbines, sun-faded and fraying Gilting our innocence in Kansas with transcendental leaves Culled from Siddartha and Shiva Sung out with Hendrix, Jimi or Dead, Grateful The Blissfully OM Our language became a cathedral, fabled and fertile Expandable deities shingled with prayers Not anchored but hinged to forgiveness Funding forbearance with decorous chaplets Sounded out, poised In dead silence Religiously OM Choking on souls swallowed whole we would sing Strapped into denim, hip-high, urban-wide Aching to break from that Midwestern amble And stride toward nirvana..or at least The Coast Strung out on hope Not Dead. Holy. Supposedly OM Now as midlife bears down on light-seeking, we pray For a lightness to aging; rewinding the distance from then to deliverance As routine supplants revelation; and sanctity, Desperate and thin, is shameless like voices Screaming out in fear Of dead endings Repeatedly OM DARBY'S STAR Darby O'Shea longed to live on the star he saw in the distance while driving his car. His mind often wandered when traveling at night A salesman by trade is a pretty dull life. Though how we would get there was not very clear he somehow could sense that the answer was near. And as he gazed up at that beautiful sight, his car veered off left but the road angled right. Darby O'Shea now resides on that star, and he knows he arrived, indirectly, by car.

HELLO, MY NAME IS SUSAN, AND I AM A WORD-AHOLIC.

Hello.  My name is Susan, and I have a confession to make.  I am a Word-aholic.


I don't know how it happened.  One word at a time, I guess.  But now my life is a mess; littered with split infinitives and dangling participles, raw vowel sounds and harsh invectives secretly stashed behind every tentative idea.  I want to stop, but I can't.

For years I had it under control; or so I thought.  I could sit for a brief stint at my journal then walk a way  without thinking much more about it.  But as time passed, I saw myself slipping into obscurity after a long, suppressed life of manageable, moderately recorded, verbal sobriety;  and I began to feel invisible.  Even to myself.

Oh, I had my family, my dogs, my artwork; but they were not enough.  Nothing was ever enough.  So, when I reached that point when my life appeared to be on the wane rather than full of promise, and my bouts with dissatisfaction came with more frequency and heightened levels of abject despair, I began hitting the words with much more regularity.  In fact, I couldn't go a day without hitting them.  It became an obsession.

Suddenly, I would find myself trolling the internet in search of linguistic content and literary sustenance in which to drown my repressed articulations and frustrations.....in the middle of the afternoon!


I couldn't help myself.

It is not something I am proud of and I feel such shame every time I think about the many journals I have; their pages stuffed with adjectives and verbs and countless run-on sentences, hidden under my bed.  I don't use them much, but I think about them all the time, and it is a comfort knowing they are there just in case I need a fix in the middle of the night.

Until a few months ago I had everything on a manageable frequency, and very few people were even aware I had a problem.  I was able to remain in my studio and work on my paintings or drawings or my mixed media pieces of found objects and copper wire for a few hours everyday before my compulsion to write drew my attention back to my journal or my laptop by early evening.

But that all changed when I decided to create a website for my artwork.  It was supposed to be a selling platform for my creative endeavors and for a few poems ONLY.  I swear!  I had no intention of becoming enslaved by my thirst for words or falling off the wagon any further than I already was inclined to do.

However, it was suggested to me by a few people who seemed to know a good deal about websites and e-commerce that I start a blog right away, before the website was even finished, in order to perhaps create a small following and draw attention to the site when it finally appeared.  I had never really considered blogging or even specifically knew what one consisted of, but I was desperate to hold my life together and attempt to cloak my increasing inner-dependency on words, so I complied.

That was when everything first began to fall apart.  It was the beginning of the end, and in a very short time I realized I had a serious addiction that I could not conquer through willpower alone.

Not being a hugely proficient computer-phile, I found a user-friendly blog site at e-blogger.com.  It seemed innocent enough and I was quickly able to design my homepage and figured out how to upload images of my artwork onto each post, which gave me the false assurance that I was still maintaining a healthy balance and honoring both my passions, the art as well as the writing, since I could justify each post with an appropriate illustration.

I even added a link from my website right to the blog, so that whomever wanted could have access to the entire me and see that I was not concealing anything; therefore, I could not have a problem.  Right?  It was a terrific foil.  I even duped my own conscience.

For a while emptying my words into those blogs was enough, but it wasn't long before it became obvious that readership on this particular site was difficult to attract and sustain and that my 'followers' consisted mainly of my mother, a few of supportive friends (still in ignorance as to my 'problem') and an odd spattering of random strays who found their way to my page by mistake or out of curiosity.  ( And a goodly portion of those came from other countries leaving me wondering if they even could even read English.)

Eventually, I added a statistics counter to the blog so that I could track how many visitors viewed the posts and see which entries they favored or how many times they returned for more views.  Of course,  this strategy only further fueled my addiction and increased my compulsion to share my words with others.  No one wants to write alone.  'Misery loves company,' you know; and as long as a handful of readers showed up to drink in my words, I was compelled to provide them with more.

Soon all of my convoluted schemes at trying to appear in control began to unravel because it wasn't long after initiating the first few posts in this new world of the blogosphere that I began thinking ONLY about what I was going to write next or slaving for an unconscionable length of time in rapt effort carving, culling, expurgating, crafting and parsing every entry I wrote; often spending upwards of six or seven hours just on ONE piece!  You'd think I was in the running for the Pulitzer, my passion was that highly charged!

By the time my art website was operational, it was already too late for me.  I was drowning in a dictionary of words and eagerly bailing them onto the paint-splattered screen of my little macbook as fast as my shaky fingers could scan the keys.  I could have cared less about the website and thought only about he next bundle of creative nouns that could spice up my increasingly abnormal dependency on semantics.

I've already taken much criticism from my husband and my youngest child (the only one remaining at home but within weeks of leaving for culinary school two states away!) who've noticed and become resentful of my chronically distracted state and the frequency with which I tiptoe off to another room or a quiet corner of the house where I feverishly indulge my out-of-control dance with my own internal dialogue as it falls from my mind onto the screen of my trusty macbook.

How many times in the past couple of months have they casually walked into my studio and caught me hunched over my drawing table in a deep, linguistic trance, frantically thumbing my way toward just the right word in my wretchedly overused thesaurus?  All around me are just-begun paintings, half-done illustrations and a work table littered with un-consigned ephemera just waiting for my impaired focus to finally shift and complete the picture of a well-ordered life of bohemian enterprise.

My reaction to their intrusive insertion into my word-funded revelry is immediate denial.  I will nervously slam closed my laptop, concealing my guilty indulgence and when queried as to my actions, I reply only that I was checking my email or tracking an order on Amazon.  Then I casually mop the perspiration from my graying hairline and mechanically begin plotting the next set of fabricated circumstances that will provide me the soonest opportunity to resume my wordy intoxication.

I have even recently invested in a lager purse to accommodate my laptop, which I now cannot be parted from for more than an hour before my normally sedate countenance becomes visibly wracked by the perpetual lusting in my brain to convert basic prose to iambic pentameter at any time of the day or night!

Is it genetic?  Possibly.  My father was an English major at Dartmouth, after all; and my mother has an elegant fluency with language that is obviously above par.  And one of my brothers has had an on-again/off-again collusion with verbosity;  however, when last I heard, he was squarely reformed.  So,  as far as I am aware, no one in my immediate family struggles with this same disproportionate preoccupation and highly-charged, chronic dependency on literary expression.

I am the sole possessor of this unfortunate depravity.

It has taken control of my life.  Even right now, as the morning is only minutes away from becoming afternoon,  I am sitting in front of this cyber template filling the frustratingly small box with my HTML composition and completely putting aside the fact that I have yet to clean the house, workout on that damned elliptical (which, anymore has become merely another conduit for thought, an incubator of words and ideas for future blogs rather than the means to sustain balance between body and soul, as I  frequently dive off into a pool of compositional promise sometimes in excess of two hours!); and my morning shower must necessarily be now deferred to late afternoon once I reconcile the time lost.
Of course, there is still the matter of how to compensate for my afternoon obligations, which now also are at risk of being extracted altogether from today's agenda.

And for what?  All for the sake of WORDS!

Can I stop?  Do I want to?  The answer to both is a resounding NO!  Particularly now that I have fortuitously stumbled onto the Open Salon site and discovered that I am not alone; that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other blessedly obsessed Word-aholics who have both given themselves permission to live life in that state as well as to support one another through the blissful and sometimes torturous process of exorcising their demons of thought and emotion into concise and thoughtful verbiage recorded for all to partake and process.

It is a glorious literary and very real consortium of candid and captivating word-aholics that inspires, consoles, humors and satiates the need of all there to remain visible to and ineffably connected with one another in the highest and best possible sense through the language of their own unique and perfect souls.

It is the Salvation Army for the terminally verbose, and I am saved.

My deep and profound thanks to Scanner and J.D., Catherine, LittleKate, Thoth, CrankyCuss, JustCathy, Fred, and to all those of you only time now prevents me from listing who, in the short space of a few days, have welcomed me into this special circle of essential trust through the rare, genuine and gentle bond we all share in our precious addiction to Words.

I can't think of a more profoundly inspirational substance to abuse.

Cheers!