Art is personal, autobiographical. The depth of one’s experience cannot exceed the height of one’s experience, and vice versa. The depth of one’s pain cannot exceed the height of one’s joy. A life lived vicariously cannot produce art. A life without passion, devotion, adoration, sacrifice, commitment, obsession, pain, and joy cannot create art.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. These virtues, however, make them vulnerable. They are often wounded, sometimes destroyed, but never defeated. In this, they achieve invincibility.
Art begins with risk. Our doubt is our passion; our passion, our belief. With courage, we create something that does not remind us of anything else. Between the realms mystery and identity, the artist plays with concealment and honesty, invention and reality, illumination and shadow. Love lies in the mystery; beauty, the identity. When lies overwhelm, there is art. When the truth is too much to bear, there is art.
Artists stand alone. Their risks are their own; their responsibilities, their own; their failures, their own; their triumphs, their own; their art, their own.
Sometimes I want quiet thunder. Sometimes I want loud silence. To prevent the lulling into complacence, the stupefaction unto oblivion, I deliberately, conscientiously cast my thoughts beyond all reality but my own. When presented with easy and with difficult, I choose difficult. If anyone can have it, I don’t want it. If anyone can do it, I won’t do it. If everyone thinks it, I won’t think it. If everyone wants it, I won’t have it. If I must choose between two evils, I pick the one I have never tried before.
So do I live, approaching rhythms of old circumstance to the perilous margin, moment. Striking the string which breaks at sounding, taking the tremorless note to mouth, and speaking sound’s inversion, like a statue moved with stillness. Fearlessness prevailing since consciousness, all-risk challenged, teased, flirted with, accepted: an I which mine is for the courage no other to be, if not danger itself. Nor did I other become, others, in braving all-risk with hushed step, mind rattling veteran armouries.
As time learns a boredom, loathes the determinate succession, irks with uncalendared event, and brings surprise to be, the natural conscience snapped in me, is ascending still, despite and always – and lo! I was; I am, I will be.
Decades ago, studying in the former Soviet Union, Soviet Theatre and Drama, I had very long hair. I was pretty, in a very feminine way. During the day, I was an effeminate student, alluring, even mesmerising; at night, I was a crossdressing slut, a whore. I did not hide my sexuality. I sucked countless Russian cocks; countless Russian men fucked me. As a student of literature, poetry, art, and theatre, intelligent, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, many men of sophistication treated me like the woman I wanted to be. Little did they know that I was also sucking and getting fucked by every common worker who would have me. Everything was, of course, concealed. It is unfortunate. Had these men been able to reveal their true passions, they would have been much happier, then and still, and I would have spent much longer in Russia than I did.
In life, there are only obsession and mediocrity.
I choose obsession.
À la recherche de licornes. 