Wading in the Velvet Sea

A more recent example is Sarah McLachlan, who wrote two of my favorite 90’s albums: ‘Solace’ and ‘Fumbling Towards Ecstasy’. Then she married her drummer, found some happies, and produced ‘Surfacing’ which is one of those most brutal records to sit through EVER. Go on, try to make it through ‘I Love You’ off that record. You’ll as soon slit your eyes out with a Mach 3 than finish that song. (If we air-dropped that song on Syria, we’d find weapons of mass destruction, the location of Saddam Hussein, and Jimmy Hoffa’s body in about 6 hours.)

Does happiness preclude great (or even good) art? Nope. (Give me ‘Hey Baby’ over ‘A Simple Kind of Life’ in the No Doubt catalog anyday.) But there’s this sort of Young Werther illusion around art that dictates, as a general rule, artists cannot be viable unless miserable. I know in college this was the case for me---I wrote tons of sad bastard poetry as my emotional outlet for the utter chaos of my life. Plays such as ‘The Seventh Wave‘ were born out of these verbal outpourings. Originally, I tried to conceive of a theatre piece for my friend Silje consisting of existing poetry. By the end, I simply wrote the narrative gaps myself. The piece as a whole was, on the surface, one woman’s journey out of abuse, but it chronicled my own journey as well.

Later, ‘So Many Shades of Blue’ became a co-opted purgative process betwixt myself and a friend. We couldn’t deal with each other or ourselves terribly well until those emotions became words on a page, and then actions on a stage. Healthy? Hard to say, although we’re better friends now than even then, so I’d like to think that, while having potential for disaster, the process worked wonders. (It also helps that neither of us were consciously trying to accomplish this during the process, I think.)

Neither of us has written much poetry at all since, because, well, both of us have by and large been fairly emotionally content as a general rule. Poetry was a mental enema, to use the vilest metaphor possible. Purgation was the goal. With nothing to purge, the writing bug stopped. Sure, each of our lives had problems, but it’s really difficult to write blank verse about college loans, I find.

Blogging has been my very first excursion into prose expression. It’s also largely been an exercise born from a relative happy mental state. Lately, some people have been picking up on a less-than-happy vibe, even if I by and large have been writing the same ‘so snarky you can eat off it’ style of entries, yesterday’s brief excursion into poetry prose aside. I think I wrote that bit in about 30 seconds---unlike most entries, which are generally a germ of an idea that I riff on for a few paragraphs and then hit ‘Send’, those three paragraphs came to me fully formed. Publishing it perhaps invited some of the email I’ve gotten, but I never thought about not publishing it.

The point is thus---yesterday’s entry was as close as I’d come in about 4 years to having any and all sort of impulse in that direction, and I felt I should indulge rather than suppress it. The problem comes of course from the general dictum of this site: while my thoughts I feel are of value, I myself am not. So, you get the emotion, but not the context. It may be unfair, but it would be likewise unfair (and terribly, terribly dull for the majority of you) to hear the specifics.

That all being said, current content does not imply, I feel, a regression to those college days, which is something I’ve been worried about recently. A sort of backwards spiral. A regression. Falling into old habits and traps. Here’s the thing though---it’s not. I’m not completely different now compared to them, but I am different. Different in ways both better and, occasionally, worse. I could easily relive the golden days of old, what with its pain, angst, immaturity, lies, deception, and a host of other things that would alienate me from friends, loved ones, even myself. Quite easily.

But I won’t, and there’s the difference. I regret many of the things I’ve done in my life, as do us all. However, I don’t regret them in that they each taught me lessons I needed to know. Could I have arrived at similar conclusions via another way? Perhaps, but it’s a moot point. The past is done, but not forgotten. That’s key.

My writing here means a lot to me. Means a lot to some of you too, which is consistently amazing and gratifying to me. (A few Bea Arthur comments aside, of course.) It might get reflective on occasion (see: well, this article), but it’s not ‘The 7th Wave’. It’s not ‘So Many Shades of Blue’. I’m not the sideburned, underweight, oversensitive 21 year old in his dorm linking Yeats to Woolf to Auden for his friend and his sanity. My art may sometimes be born out of pain, but it’s not defined by pain.

It’s defined by me. And that’s the way it will stay.