On Writing

I don't know how to write my memoirs. There are stories, ever stories, pieces of dialogue, the briefest glimpses of brilliant imagery, that peter out before even a chapter may be formed of them. Perhaps if I begin to record the pieces, keep them in the same collection, eventually they will combine like so many mismatched LEGOs discovered in couch cushions and beneath car floor mats and at the bottom of backpacks over the years. Perhaps my memories and thoughts are nothing more than these generic building blocks that were all designed with the coveted clickability of those delightful, colorful plastic blocks.
I fear I lack the creativity to assemble them without the handy, LEGO instructions, walking me through each mediocre click step by step; organizing and pre-packaging the pieces for me; assuring me of the end result with the picture advertised on the colorful (albeit, overpriced) box.

That would make a fun short story, wouldn't it? Sounds right up Stephen King's alley, a story about   a particular character who buys these boxes with all the intent of enjoying the assembly, only to learn that the instructions are quite a bit darker and lead to more disturbing ends... Wanting innocently to pass an afternoon constructing a peaceful LEGO log cabin, the dutiful character instead finds himself constructing the dark, the obscene, the dangerous... and, against better judgement, plagued by agonizing curiosity, he continues to turn the pages, continues the slow completion of the unknown... brick by brick...

I am not an Artist. I cannot seem to wrap my head around that title, to ever feel comfortable gracing  my business card with it... and why? Well, for starters, I'm not even comfortable owning business cards. Artists are other people. Artists have genuine skill and they know it. Artists can present the gifts of their works, into which they've pored time, energy, thought, and only the cash necessary to acquire the materials to create, and rest assured that the recipient is thrilled. They are certain in their skill. They are the others who post their works on ebay and Etsy. How does one get to this stage in life? The skill must be recognized, praised, understood, and even desired by others. What makes an artist is the desire of their patrons to possess or look upon that creative soul's work. Otherwise, Artist, you are not. You may be one who dabbles in paint, or hobbies with the manipulation of the language... as am I... though that hardly sounds as nice on a business card... real Artists have business cards. People are interested in who they are. If a true Artist meets new people, those people are intrigued and desire a method by which to contact said Artist again in the future. I've only been asked once for my card, and it was for a play-date for my daughter. I do not possess the skills nor marketable product to self-define as an Artist. Hell, isn't that the point? It cannot be self-defined. I suppose, in the privacy of my home, I could call myself whatever I want... but it does not make it so, for longer than my parched ego holds the beading vapor of this dream.

What more is there to do than to attempt to harness these small but furiously spinning bits of literary storm swirling and gaining momentum and material in my brain? I feel them daily, they speak to me, they spin out their few phrases of decent diction and I am impressed, I am lifted, I feel that I just may be the creative Artist, the [oh, be still my heart...] author, the writer, I've always dreamed I was... somewhere beneath that cloud of obligation and lack of time.

Is S really so deep as to have ascertained all of this from watching me? Did he know I must begin to collect these small storms, to wrangle them into the uncertain boundaries of an anonymous blog, where they may steadily grow with each passing day and each new companion, into something I was always meant to have written? Truth be told... it's beautifully organized. How many bits and pieces of these orphaned storms, wrangled in ones and twos, exist in varied hard drives, floppy disks, flash drives, writeable CDs, notebooks and journals spanning the past 20+ years of my existence? At least within the blog, they are contained, collected at some address in the sky I may access, presumably, all my life, no matter how many times I upgrade computers, jobs, or storage media.

S is a genius. But we already know this....
Many of my writings were a conglomeration at one time. In an effort at preemptive defense,  I destroyed somewhere between ten and fifteen journals I'd kept and saved over the years. I remember exactly how they looked, lined along the back wall of my bedroom, atop a rickety desk I'd uncovered from some apartment complex dumpster or another. Journals are a great gift in this world... pages of potential... lined... meaningful and beautiful covers. Every journal I own, without even opening the covers, speaks volumes of the possessor. Journals are like great pieces of art to me. I adore them. They are beautiful and alive and reminders of excellent times past, excellent feelings and passions that have otherwise fled my current consciousness. I love choosing journals based on their covers, thickness, quality of pages, whether or not they are lined, whether or not they have that lovely black strap one may stretch across the closed book to keep it secure, whether or not they have magnetic lid-like clasps. It is such a pleasure to open them, to admire the thousands of words' potential, like a fertile womb.That day... years ago... those ten to fifteen journals were a perfect photograph of this writer's life, closed or open. Read or unread. My journals, much like my greeting cards [of which there exists a well-organized and overfilled chest], are sacred relics of this would-be Artist's life.

I did not destroy the covers. I couldn't. I loved them too much and in ways I had neither described nor written nor expressed to anyone, so they, void of their confessional pages, were safe. I tore every page, every piece of paper, covered in the whorls and scrawls of a penmanship honed over the years into my characteristic hand. J would know it, as I see and know her handwriting at a moment's glance, all these years later. And her mother's. And my mother's. How I miss the written word, the hand-written word. The fact that I do not know the signature handwriting of the love of my life, presently, is a sadness to me. For what is written anymore that can so much more easily be typed? As I'm presently demonstrating... the ease of saving these thoughts to blogspot... does that circumvent the need for there to be some sort of physical specimen of my existence? Does it matter at all whether any of this is known or saved or that I am remembered for any of it? Perhaps those are egocentric dreams I must allow to dissipate. Is placing my name beside my art after my death any consolation to a fled soul? What consolation could it possibly be to those I leave behind, other than a desire to categorize all of my work into chapters and headings and analyses that sum up my life's ambitions, dreams and achievements as cleanly and coldly as I may attempt of artists before me? What does any of it matter, except insomuch as it affects me today, as I write it, and the fraction of peace I may find today in doing so?

I must stop caring so much about this "carrying on" concept. I used to print and paste my typed ramblings into my current journal. It's the same reason I pain over deleting S's text messages. I want to hold and cherish the words of the past. This is why humans write, don't you see? To retain. The words that fall across our lips are dead nearly as soon as they are heard, as they are filed, perhaps, into faulty and ever-deteriorating memory, combined with taste, and sight and touch and sound of the moment into some hodge-podge of experience which will probably be better recalled as an emotion than as any deep or meaningful prose. We write to retain the prose, and perhaps to encourage or even recreate the experience anew, through the lens of memory. How fleeting our experiences are otherwise. Our fights, our mistakes, our pains, our hatred and rage... even our passion, how quickly forgotten. Of course this is a biological benefit. Wallowing in the agonies of life is surely to stifle one's creativity and production... growth... happiness. Argh, we're too quickly entering a philosophical question of the purpose of life and life's experiences which I am entirely unqualified to examine.

I ordered a pair of gold earrings for myself the other day on a complete whim, jumping to typing in my credit card number (from memory, I'm an online shopping junkie) before I had time to consider the necessity (there is none) of the purchase or to talk myself out of it. They are lovely little golden pelicans. I doubt I will ever wear them. Someone designed them, these small little golden birds. I bought them because they are beautiful, and because in that moment I wanted them, I had the money, I indulged myself in a piece of creativity from a fellow would-be artist. Actually, an actual Artist, for their art is coveted and purchased by others, thus defining the creator within their art. I bought them off FAB, a delightful website which brings together the works of creative souls across the country who idly hope to be the next praised thing... the next droplet of brilliance in this sea of creative souls' blood, sweat and tears from the onset of human existence.

FAB's trademarked catchphrase is "Smile, you're designed to."

The comma bothers me... that should be two sentences, or, at the very least, a semi-colon. 
Trademarking language also bothers me. 

I would argue that artists seek not fame, but following. At the completion of something beautiful by my own hand, I seek not financial compensation, but emotional confirmation. I long for the eyes and mind of another to take it in, to digest it, to fill my ears with the words I'd formed myself but feared I felt alone. Even God, in the Genesis book of the Bible, creates and, looking back upon  his work at the end of each day, remarks, "It is good."

But that wasn't enough.
He also created witnesses to concur.
Which they did.
Until they disgraced his art.
And were cast away to wander in absence of his art...
sort of...
for a while.
He can't resist coming back to show them what He's come up with every now and again...

It's probably a sin to liken God to an artist disappointed in His ungrateful audience and throwing them from the gallery in a tantrum.

But He made us in His own image, did He not?