Pining

Music: the Cure, "Boys Don't Cry"

I'm lovesick, my friends. It's a tangled story, but my heart just aches with longing for my Muse. She's out there, but far away. Anyway, I'm battening down my heart for the day, so I can get through it!

I go through my day with an ache in my heart for her that brings tears to my eyes. I try to channel the passionate pain into prose, poetry, and pictures, but it stays with me, or only grows at the thought of her -- she is so exquisite, so talented, so gracious.

It's exquisite agony, its own special kind of pain that anybody in love knows so well. I try to make it work for me, and not against me, but it's hard. Love is a wondrous and terrible thing.

She's a most amazing woman, an artist, like me, and what an artist! And that's what I love the most -- she bleeds for the world as much as I do, sees the beauty and the horror both, and doesn't blink, doesn't shut her eyes from it. I respect her so much for that, for enduring artful agony. It's a painful enterprise, that of the artist -- to find the terrible beauty in the world around you and to strive to represent it as best you can, knowing that, in truth, you can never really perfectly match the vision in your head. Technique can bring you close, but as the Zen saying goes, "The finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon." I respect that idea so much; it keeps me humble.

People rip on artists, like it's somehow bad to feel so much -- unbusinesslike, right? In the world of the callow businessman, we're all just supposed to not let our hearts get in the way of anything, just ring things up and sell ourselves and buy crap we don't need.

But only another artist can understand an artist -- I remember seeing the Joffrey Ballet the first year they came to Chicago, and sitting in the theater, I actually cried watching them dance, it was so moving. My eyes are tearing up right now at the memory -- watching them dance, hearing the music, the perfect synergy of the moment, the purity of form and motion -- it was just staggering, left my heart bursting. It was transcendant.

Makes me think of her, the beautiful ache. What's the quote about how the world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel? I always found that quote amusing. What is the world to an artist? It's everything.

And what's my Muse to me? She's everything. I bleed for her with every beat of my heart.