(But, Enough of my waxing poetics about… well the same things I usually wax poetics about and lets talk about something… I usually talk about. )

I was reading back and came across this tidbit from my brilliant friend, Daniel, and was amazed as though I had never read it before at his perception of the art making proces in general and specifically about my constant anxiety about creating. I read it again today and thought it was much too insightful not to share:

Do trees have an easy time making leaves? I always imagined that they have as much trouble, angst, anxiety, and doubt about that each spring as we have about love, art, and breathing.

Anyway, who is qualified to judge whether you’ve struggled with your overworked words like an unpolished amateur or spilt onto the page the finest prose like a painter thoughtlessly putting brushstrokes onto canvas, as amazed as any observer that a beautiful form emerges?

This is not a day for museum lovers or the claustrophobic, entrance into each museum includes a growing line and you’re herded through by foot traffic you can barely escape.

What’s best about the museum mile though is the street fair, probably the only one in New York not filled with vendors but fire jugglers, magicians, balloons, jazz and klezmer bands, drawing stations, clowns and sidewalk chalk, lots and lots of sidewalk chalk. I’d never seen so many NY adults and children sitting in the street drawing to their hearts content, I walked from 82nd to 105th and by the time I made my way back down the entire street looked like it had been covered in rainbows.

The street artist De La Vega was out in full effect as well, with chalk drawings accompanied by a long string of “words of wisdom” which sounded more like words of encouragement and curiously appeared near the end of the mile:

• The discipline of emptying your mind is as important as the discipline of filling it up.
• Why does the feeling of emptiness occupy so much space?
• The pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dreams…Hang in there.
• It is better to let go of someone with the truth than to keep them with a lie.
• A man torn between two women will eventually lose them both.

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

…

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

I’m not questioning joy in general. For instance, I’m not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I’m not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world’s sorrows. I’m not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I’m not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I’m not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.