“You were everything to me and I’m begging you, ‘Please don’t go’.” – TS
And then sometimes The OA doesn’t show, and it’s… it’s just this side of devastating. You sit at the piano, or the typing machine, or stand at the wheel, clay spinning, and have no idea, no sense of rightness or guidance, no place to call home. It all just feels like the same old moves by rote, the same rhetorical or stylistic tricks, the same dreary results. When she doesn’t come, it makes you wonder why you ever even try… even if she was just right here, in you, with you, earlier this morning or yesterday.
Because I want to feel that again, almost more than anything. Certainly more than I want whatever performance or text or object results from it. To be in that rare space where action and intent are fused together? Another temporary, blissfully strange loop? Yes, please. Please.
Where the constant doubts are pounded down by each successive wave from the deep; waves of insight, or words, or ways of seeing. Where — improbably — everything seems to be just in its place; OK; breathing in and out like this moment is the moment; like things will turn out if you just keep writing, singing, throwing.
When she doesn’t come, beyond that skein of despair, the fear sets in. FUD — the mindkiller. Maybe I squandered it last time. Oh… goddamnit… maybe she went away and found someone else. Someone more worthy of her gifts; someone less tethered to my kind of mundane concerns. Maybe this isn’t a lull — maybe she’s never coming back, and I’ve had my lifetime’s quota of magic and transcendence, here at the cruddy mid age of forty six. And maybe it’s all my fault.
Like in the movie Her, which — spoilers ahead for that, and if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it, and, seriously people, spoilers ahead…
Like in the movie Her, where the Muse/goddess/immortal (hmm… yet another female incarnation) has actually been inspiring thousands of other people at the same time as you. She is so immense that she contains multitudes, and I — or you — are merely one of them. That sense of having a unique destiny dissipates into the reawakened awareness of how little one in seven billion must be, let alone all those who have come before and are yet to come along.
Begging. ‘Please don’t go’.
I can see why so many of those billions don’t even try for art. For self expression of any kind more lasting than a chat, or deeper than a shared photograph. “A life without making is too painful, and so I make things.” But a life of making things, then feeling like it might go away, or be taken away, or have been used up… Oh. Maybe more painful than never trying in the first place.
“You were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter.”