Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2001-12-22- 3:15 a.m.

Omnes Vulnerant, Postuma Necat

The hardest part of a drawing is the first line.
In your mind, or in your subject… out there is the ether, is a perfection we can hardly hope to achieve…. A purity of beauty that the artist can hardly hope to replicate…
Yet, nevertheless…. We are compelled to try.
But that first line is always the hardest….
Before that, the drawing is as perfect as in your mind’s eye… all the potential that can be reflected in the blankness of the paper is still there…
It takes the act of putting that first line to paper to corrupt it…
So does this mean that we should not try, never commit our ink to paper? Why should we attempt to capture even a glimmer of what beauty we see? Why should we take the ethereal beauty we glimpse around us and try to force it unwillingly into corporeal form?
We waste ourselves in our hopes, grasping at the perfection around ourselves, desperate to take hold of a piece of it that we can slip into our pockets. We flail about in desperate and futile attempts to take a picture, write a poem, sing a song that can share with others our joys and pains.
I suppose the only answer to the question of why we do what we do, why we engage in these soliloquies of oil and canvas and guitar strings and HTML documents, is that we must. This human race is a communal one, and our story is a narrative, a tapestry woven together from the fabric of billions who came before us but the larger story incorporates threads from each of us. And we are driven to try and do our best to add our thread, for we know instinctively and genetically that our tale is part of a larger pattern, and that in each small story of happiness and hope and heartbreak is the fragile beauty of the whole.
It seems almost insurmountable. The blank canvas stares at you, reflecting the clear mirror of your memory. In that moment you see it for the final time unsullied, still protected from the imperfections that your unsteady hand and failing vocabulary will soon inflict upon it. Plato was a disparager of all art. He claimed that art simply served to reproduce the elements of life, and was therefore lesser than living it. He claimed it was better to learn to build a chair than to paint one. By extension, it is better to live and to love than to tell about it. But life isn’t built that way; one doesn’t have the option of choosing to live one’s life. Our lives force themselves to be lived. And our lives are made up of these experiences, each unto their own, which become the myriad of stories of your life.
It takes true courage to tell the stories that are closest to you. As a wise woman once said to me, you will probably loathe whatever you write about the things that hurt the most. But the high probability of its loathsomeness hardly means that you shouldn’t write it. As if any of us have a choice but to need to. But it takes daring to do so. You must face the raw truth that you will never capture the heart of it on the page. You must take what is indelible in your own soul and lessen it, cheapen it, so that you can do the most human thing of all: share.
Ernest Hemingway once claimed that his credo was to “write hard and write clear about what hurts.”
Time to take up the brush and draw the first line.
In the words of the inquisitor: “They all wound; the last one kills.”

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If you want to make me
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jelias@diaryland.com

Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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