The Artist In You Will Never Die.
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The artist in you will never die, even if you lock her away into a prison cell and throw away the key.
Even if you have her exorcised and tied down and silenced.
You can pretend that she’s nothing more but a ridiculous phantom, drowning yourself in paperwork and a whirl of people, but when you run out of distractions — that lonely space at 3 am when you can hear the voice in your head too well — she’ll come back to haunt you.
She won’t violently kick down the door and threaten your life with a dagger, but she will sing from the depths of the earth. She’ll sing a haunting melody that reminds you of the flicker of fire against moonlight, the splash of your childish hand onto a bucket of periwinkle blue paint, the strong even rhythm of blood flowing where it should.
And it will sound like longing, so impossible and far away.
Something in you will hurt. And you will push it away, because it’s not unbearable — it’s not blunt trauma, no shattered bones, nothing so fatal. It’s a soft, tender kind of pain, seeping into the most inconsequential moments.
You’re waiting in a queue at the local supermarket. A little boy comes running to the old man in front of you (his grandfather?) and grabs his hand without reserve. The man looks startled, then smiles, his face creasing like paper: and there’s a poem written on it, your artist murmurs.
You look away, because if you listen a second more, she’ll whisper the first line, and you have no time for this nonsense.
She will never die, but you will. Slowly.
Until you’re down to a couple of years and you realize that you haven’t been swept up in passion for a long, long time now. You swore you’d get there in the ever-moving future, when your hands are empty, when it’s safe. But it never became safe. And so, repentant, slightly bitter and guilty, you call her back.
She’s still alive, of course, and capable, but she’s already emaciated from all those years of neglect, and it will take life and effort to get her back to full conditioning — life you’re not sure you still have enough of.
So don’t you dare abandon her like that.
When she talks to you, listen — or at least set up an appointment with her if you’re too busy, and keep it. Art is a snapshot of the soul, and the soul, complex as it is, changes at the slightest touch, is incapable of staying still.
The art that you create tomorrow will never capture the art that you could have created yesterday.
Every neglect is a permanent loss; every work of art has only one chance at existence, and to let that pass is to consign it forever to nothingness.
She’s not too demanding. She understands that you have a day job, that the kids deserve so much more of your attention, but all that she’s asking for is a small window of time in the 24 hours of your day — a spare minute, the hour that you’ve always devoted to crashing on the couch and flicking through the channels.
To show up: that is her first and most important plea, which wouldn’t be too challenging if it didn’t involve uncertainty.
The slab of stone you’re supposed to shape into something you haven’t wrapped your head around yet, the music sheet cold and blank — it’s terribly intimidating, especially because you have to come to her naked, ready to delve into the terrains of yourself that you may never have acknowledged until then.
There’s so much vulnerability here that it will need much less effort to turn away. But remember regret. Remember the preciousness of this moment, and her song.
Remember that it doesn’t have to be beautiful.
She’ll be happy once you start anywhere.
It’s not the applause or the awards that she cares deeply about, or the very real possibility of rejection, but rather you — whether you’re letting go and having fun and being spontaneous. Whether it is your truth that you are laying out before her, because her duty is to bring you home to the kingdoms and continents of yourself.
In her dance, she entices you to join in. She doesn’t bombard you with instructions: she is the wild spirit in you that runs barefoot through a forest at the crack of dawn, delighting in everything from the potentially meditative standstill of traffic to the thrilling panorama of a city beheld from the peak of a mountain.
What sustains her is the simultaneous ecstasy and despair of being alive.
She swims rather than drowns in those torrents of emotion that are wholly yours and yet not — her voice is distinctively yours, woven from the material of all that you have experienced and all the different persons you have ever been, but it strikes a common human chord with anybody who dares to listen.
And sometimes they will laugh, or weep. Sometimes you will sweep them into disarray, summon questions within them that they have never confronted openly before, and sometimes they will feel as if you have taken fragments of their own soul and rendered it into visible form: your artist resonating with theirs.
Because no matter who you are, creating art is a journey back to home. The process requires effort and has even been described as laborious and painful, involving a slow but steady chipping-away at the resistance inside you that insists that you have nothing worthwhile to say and you should stay on the surface where you belong.
But the more you show up for art — as yourself rather than anyone else — you will be rewarded. You can be as crazy and dysfunctional as you want to be; you can let all of your burdensome masks fall to the floor, but you can also dissect them mercilessly, holding them up to the light.
All manners of censor and punishment are banished here, so that when you breathe, it is like breathing for the very first time — everything is fresh and true, and you are real in your vulnerability, your beauty.
If you let her in enough, the artist in you will love you for your soul.
And if you take risks for her again and again, giving her your time and your devotion, she will take the world by the hand, and make it fall in love with you the way she did.
*****
Ima Ocon is a college student double-majoring in Philosophy and Computer Science. Her whirlwind affair with writing began at around the same time as her voracious appetite for books, and she’s afflicted by a wanderlust of the imagination, devoting her time to interests as diverse as poetry, Buddhism, programming, Yoga, and the violin. She finds comfort in sipping tea and taking long, meandering walks in the evening with iPod at hand. Part of her crazy take on life is the belief that everyone should be free to cry and laugh as much as they want and, in the words of Fr. Pedro Arrupe, we should spend every moment of our lives falling in love.
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