the artist as a state of mind

Does the artist have to produce in order to be defined as such?

"I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning."" - james joyce, portrait as an artist as a young man

I therefore conclude this the most urgent of questions. Is poetry indispensable for life? Could it be that art is the liver of such a world? ——

Unusually pensive for a march evening —

but the rain has just fallen after a long, hot spell — so, allow me this moment — it’s time to lacerate the streets & wash thick summer blood away, I must watch onward for it is so rare and sweet, I look out the front window, little autumn moons - lots of them, lining the street. I am sorry, but you are wrong on many things. I have lost two jobs in one week. I hardly know where I am walking. My body travels faster than the keeping heart. At one point, in the past, I was a surgeon, and I would recite my adulthood while looking for the mitral valve.

The dark blue music of the ocean was so loud that night. We drove to mount gambia. The cliff fell down loose, shallow, you fell with it, you dived into the bitter blue lake, a sophisticated blue, then suddenly everyone was at it, diving off the edge, everyone jumping, like you, playing — like you, then we pitched our tent in the parking lot under a lighthouse, it is quite dark where we are sleeping now and difficult to fall asleep, tomorrow you will buy me a book of Cohen’s poetry, and - blue, hospital blue earrings, & I know this is probably true of our life, forcing away not only the wall but the image of the wall, I’ll admit it, he’s taller, he’s stronger than the trees around me, people walk around like sad grey tablecloths & must I say the streets are bare, unpeopled, feverish unless it’s outside your door? ‘Humankind cannot bear very much unreality’ says Barbara Comyns and she’s right. Who needs only unreality? The frankfurt school have all been snowed in. My heart can bend, o my happy heart can bend so I don’t have to listen to them howling to get out.

I went for a walk with Nick to the ocean, he told me —

I went for a walk with Nick to the ocean, he told me — life is the primary art piece and made it seem as if the artwork itself is a tendril of such. Interesting. Sometimes I do not hear you when you come home even though I am sat by the door and you step over me, like a shoulder moving to let the shirt drop. This is the most important art piece I could ever produce.

You have to travel these streets using the emergency of feet to know. Rilke says, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. The days where I am not writing have an eloquence to them. The denseness of the world this evening, my whole life upset, it’s crying, where are you, the universe is a long & narrow table with empty chairs, the opium is endless, W.C.W says we only write poems for other poets, what can assure me this world is mine? Does my heart only react when it is not used to a sunset? The world in itself is — often, not entirely — unreasonable. It has given me a desert, should I want to suffer, and a city, should I want to shower in a wealth of options, Yes A City - to draw a complete lack of reality from your room, O Yes I can make money, if I like, and lose it. Sadly, I do not think many things are as important as love, so in that sense, I am trapped, by the nape of my neck, like tracing the course of a magnificent childhood river & discovering nothing but a tiny muddy source. And drinking from it. And feeling very, very sick.

a cherry pit in a glass ashtray. the morning sings like a woman left behind. this room, full to the cheeks with noon heat, thick fingers trawling the horizon to move curtains back and forth, creating this kind of effect while we lie side by side, though we should be working, though i asked my mother for a rifle with which to shoot him, and she wouldn’t let me have it. but mother, no one else can blacken the red lips of a horizon like Him, mother he’s got to go, mother — i’m a desk waiting for the child to come home, — i’m watching the land recede in the distance and the stars topple dangerously above me,

—mother i know you eat orchids for breakfast if only so you don’t have to swallow me.

Lately I am not sure if I am still an artist when I am not creating and sitting in a coffin dark corner, or in a cinema, or a thumb blackened photobooth, or if I’m lucky enough to think I’ve gone insane, and these great silver months go by, cutting spheres out of the ocean, let us call it breathing holes, and I don’t write anything, and I forget the purpose for my habits, for why I’m in Australia, for why I’m here, & there are days I wish you were even less solid, perhaps I wish you were mist until you arrive, untoweled & i’m eating a nectarine on the kitchen table.

However, from an absurdist perspective, this contradiction of mine may itself be the essence of ALL artistry. If life is absurd, then so too is the need to create as a means of defining oneself. If ducamp is right, and art is the gap, and I must give it all up to play chess, call a urinal my masterpiece, is my abstinence, or absurd little tears dropping down going to have any meaning? Is the gap a nice view, at least? Besides, it’s always the others who die. I smell cigarettes, manchester blues, which means my love is home, which means it’s time to retire and think things over in the morning. I must flee the nest of casual remarks. He is all fraught because strangers are telling him what to do. I must run to comfort him, he has trapped sunlight in his pocket while I’ve been sat around in my underwear at the typewriter. i must fetch it.

It’s the morning and the coffee is milky. Milk is cheap. When I was living in albania, a dutch man challenged me to a chess game. After he beat me, and we had a cigarette, and I said - look, look dutch man, I just don’t know what to do, well — he told me everyone knows what they’re going to do, and the trees suddenly slipped a little sunlight through, it studded the chess board, for it was getting dark, and I had many hotel sheets to fold, as white as maps, and he said, it’s just whether you’ve accepted the choice or not which determines it. & I suppose all along I did know exactly what I was going to do.

The disproportion between my intention and reality is so immense I often take to the bathtub. My father is the water bill. I write a poem about this called - for example, my father is a water bill && I swear I’ll leave this place spotless when I’m done. How can the sun soak an entire sea, when she is so little, and so far away, and make the sea warm by 2pm? How can it be?

I need solitude to do my writing, so I am not writing, not properly, I am giving up writing to enjoy being with my love, and to work in the city whenever someone will hire me, and this room is the limit of my consciousness, I wonder what kind of vegetable I will buy from the market in the morning &

Futility gets the last word in the universe

Help! Help! I am alone! All subtlety has been lost! I am tired of the human smell. I must wear weeds for shoes. Let men numb my name with their own misuse. Animal throat, eyes beaming sex, and wisdom, and ears aching…

I will be so quiet when I am gone. Sure, I could sink the boat of love. Sure, I could go to Mexico city and write a novel. But what’s stopping me? I know you are trying to get some rest. I’ve just got so many things to say.

We woke in a parking lot under a light house. The haemophiliacs gash above us with the rain black sky stitching the wound. You must have heard me. Later, you will work over cotton, your body will be an empty carnival after swimming in that blue lake & I will number many of the things I say to you, swallowing like a soft tasteless food. Skin is softest in the morning. It can slide over almost anything. He saw clearly his tiny name, how it cut placemats out of the waves, daring us to come eat, & the lazy susan of fish smeared the surface & he watched, & I’ll remember how I had it for a moment. Promise me you will make me leave when I must. You roll over to contemplate.

How I saw you undress every morning, stripping to marble. How I saw it all.

A girl told you something beautiful one morning long ago. That one day she would leave you, in a boat, and sail over the seas.

My mind is my hands. so i sit back in this bruiseless bathtub with a cigarette and a coffee because this is nice, and hedonism knocks on the door, and I let him in, and I have a book of every kind, and a newspaper, and the grocery store pamphlet, and all my nice things, and every kind of music I enjoy plays at once, and everyone I’ve ever loved walks out the door at the same time (How do they fit ?) & my arms are tired from carrying plates around the state library cafe && suddenly what was one very simple, nice thing, has too many, and I can’t enjoy them, can’t appreciate them in their restriction — too many options, too many options.

as if i had to explain why i was in the bar. i turned up, and no one else was there. quiet beer garden. somalian woman, singing, out loud, no instruments. sisyphus. pencil. headache. more wine. like im in my backyard. man with kind eyes when i leave, why such kind eyes? he’s doing a gig and no ones turned up. i can’t watch you. i’ve a book to read. man trips over pavement holding a door of foil. he says, are you happy you son of a bitch, are you? and looks to the sky and i wonder what it would be like if he punched me. and i run a bath. and i have a glass of water. and i wonder if the city makes every moment less significant. and i wonder if i am pure of heart. am i pure of heart? and you are not home yet. and i hear a siren. and i wonder.

Wild rivers teeming and barely a trout in sight. And soon enough, I get out the bath and have a cold shower, it sounds like the music of dominoes, because too much of a nice thing is not good for little girls, & a cigarette, but if I have too many cigarettes it becomes a chore, like the other chores, and I quickly forget I was put on this earth to do some good old fashioned living, documenting it every now and then, and when I begin a painting I make the clouds green and the sky green, and the roses too, and the ocean green, and this is how it goes. If you move, I move. It’s not a choice. Sheets are cold before you get in. Then they get too hot. Sheets are the kettle of comfort.

The kettle should be on the hob. There is a holy smell tonight. Fear wears the white cloak of a priest. My masters face is hurt. He has received his death wound.

I wish to sleep by the hearth of a woman with her small child. His fingers trembled as his undressed himself. God bless my father and my mother, and spare them to me.

Walter benjamin, in his seminal The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, saw the artist’s state of mind threatened by industrial repetition.

I’m worried. I’m worried. I’m worried. An ending to this will stretch its scaly full length into light which shrivels the pearls into matt pavement stones, and that’s how I know it will be the end. That’s how I know it’s time to go to mexico city.