This Risk, Art

When people, call them artists or whatever, invest all the energy they can into one another, into their work, they risk, maybe guarantee, investing the elements of themselves we call love and sexuality. At some intensity the various energies we pour into one another are no longer divided.  Its like the place we usually exist consists of compartments, small spaces where we isolate
 and name the portions of ourselves we're allowed to give to this moment or to that person; but then there come instances of connection within certain relationships that refuse to honor those boundaries.

Its as though we are a house of many rooms and in each room some secrets are kept and feelings are stowed.  But then some truth comes along and its gravity shakes us, breaks us to the ground and all the contents of our house spill into the yard at once.  And quaking in the presence of this truth we cannot stand to divide ourself.  The boundaries are devastated by a truth more pressing.  All energies, no matter their source or nature, are put in play.  Relationships which foster the exchange of such truths, and particular moments within them, compose a strange and wonderful landscape where people fall in love with ideas, with another's art, with human genius and fragility, with nature's muses and of course, with each other. 

It seems tragedy may be, in a strange way, marvelously unavoidable here.  Its a great risk to attempt to pour oneself so deeply into the genius of another that the energy you offer them is indivisible, wholely untattered by any measure of discretion.  They get your love and your sadness, your awe and your pride, seemless and wide open.  It is, by virtue, a place of fleeting control.  Inarticulable majesty such as truths that shake our ground seems often the stuff of heartbreak.  Speechlessness in the few can divide them from the many. But the constant butchering of our gifts into segments for timid distribution is like a ceiling to our experience with each other, the attrition of the soul. 

Yet I don't think it's cause for sorrow.  Its a challenge to our artists.  We can't afford to hold our fellowships back; for all our sakes we should clip the teathers that restrain our communion.  But we need a language powerful enough to include those who aren't there to see when our houses come crashing down.  We have to be the story-tellers for the truths that shatter our homes.

8/20/2010