lines on the Fall and Art
The quivering Oak outside my window seems to droop today. It may be the rain of a few days ago or the cool gray skies of today that make my tree shiver in place. It may be it’s readiness for fall. In the distance I see leaves turning, slowly turning from green to gold and brown. I hear the shouts and smell the traffic and I even feel the sun trying to warm up the day. Every Fall is something new and something ended and something blue, something chipping away at yesterday and plowing forward to tomorrow.
The path I have walked (or run, or driven, ridden, or even crawled) is slowly coming up behind me, being purged and replaced by Johnny Appleseeds and Susy Marigolds. And up ahead, I use the stones of my past to concretize the future… but maybe a road doesn’t need concrete or even stone. Maybe the urban reality of concrete forests and asphalt jungles is a sad one — the roads are already marked, the maps are already written, and the paths have all been traveled, trodden through and through.
Can you make your own way and blaze your own trail
While riding their trains and holding their rails?
What is it you search for, oh artist in me?
Can you play their games and be totally free?
Can you make your own art each and every day?
When politics and smiles just get in your way?
I refuse to be old and look back all wilted
To then be an artist with a past that’s been jilted.
Why can’t I sing of new found beauty and lost love?
Must I wait like a heavy cloud to cry up above?
“We too feel pain and must be respected!”
Cried the Little Prince upon being dissected.
You think my world is small, you think you know me well,
But this Steppenwolf inside has oh so much to tell…
(But let me save this for the ring, those five minutes of artistic grandeur. The comical conversable laughable criable liable to make every actor scream, those things that get you out of bed in the morning, and those things that keep you up at night: the audition.)
So for now I will leave the stones – the aforementioned stones of the quickly-fleeting past – I will leave them all behind or at least share them with someone else, for you may need but a few to cross a little creek, or you may need quite a lot to slow a raging river. “But I am quite finished with neatness!” cried the little boy to his teacher. And she looked on in horror, and also jealous amazement, as he took his blue crayon and drew all over the lines… All across them and around them with all of his colours. “I don’t want to be messy, or careless, or ‘free’… (that false freedom to act however one pleases, without recompense, remorse, or even thought for your fellow mates) I want to be happy and I want to be me!” So let the waters come and let the rivers rage, I will swim and drown if that be my quest, or I will ford the river in time because EVERYTHING is fordable. Fighting and working hard everyday is an affordable investment, because it inspires me and gives me more energy to deal with every challenge in the road ahead.
And very soon the road will be covered, blanketed over in umber — raw and burnt. But as the leaves change and before they all fall, I will take a lesson from the urgent Oak and steadfast Pine, I will stay in my place and work for a better tomorrow because I know if I plant the roots now, and I mean really plant them, I can survive the winter wherever I am and whatever it is that she may bring.
And through the thick clouds the sun shines on barely, barely letting us know that she is there, through some gray and dull flouresence she shines on in vain. Come fall, come what may.
I will shine as brightly as I can
‘Till I burn your clouds all through,
‘Till I melt her snowy-whitness
And, Master Art, I am with you.
But that time has not yet come
And I’m ahead of myself, I am.
For the morning has left and left us the afternoon,
And before I walk along the birch-lined lyrics of my past
I hear the voice of Sandoz cry out to me at last,
”And now, back to work!”
