Pissing in a river and watching it rise
“I’m off balance, not sure what’s wrong. —You have misplaced joy, he said without hesitation. Without joy, we are as dead. —How do I find it again? —Find those who have it and bathe in their perfection.”
2021 has been the year of the Ox and Patti Smith. For much of this year I have submerged myself in her written word and listened to her shake her voice at the universe. It echoes around me as, like an Ox, I carry my health, malaise, and misalignment with drawing, while yoked to an out of sync to world that will not stop falling.
Patti’s jagged words smoothed the edges of my misalignment with the world. As doctor appointments piled up, new diagnosis’ crested the horizon, and the outside world wore thinner, I listened to her describe a person who has a magnetic presence, forges deep connections with place and people, visits graves, and as an artist sees what others can not. I felt a spiritual connection I hadn’t felt in a very long time. It is not once you feel that spark that you realize how long you have gone without it.
From April to August, I listened to her every night, and in that 1 hour before bed I felt my anger at the world slip away. Whether it be audiobooks or the 100th listen of Pissing In A River, she was there to validate the anger and deep sadness. I felt so disconnected from the world but her words were a cove of safe haven from the storm. I was also reminded why art is one of the most important things one can dedicate oneself too.
“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artists responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
I was not ready to return to the material world, I needed something mystical, so a portal opened between me and a city I have never been to. Through it came smoke, yellow, and the promise that my art was intrinsic to holding my own universe together. The threads of it were coming loose but that didn’t mean it had to fall apart. I stared at my ceiling envisioning her apartments skylight flooding and I felt every drop land on my head. I watched it inch closer to my face as I rose with the tide which carried my bed away far from the walls of my flat. Where in the world would I end up next?
New Mexico, Frida Kahlo’s house, Paris, Jim Morrison’s grave, Arthur Rimbaud’s grave, The Beach Café, allthe cafés and diners, London, Sylvia Plath’s grave, Japan, Akira Kurosawa’s grave, Osamu Sazai’s grave, Australia, Ayer’s Rock, Guiana, The Dream Inn, New York, The Chelsea, Berlin.
I wondered these places and met far away idols desperate to seek a mirror image and an easy to decipher moral of my life. Being so desperate for permeance I clang onto the images of the things that resonated. I mouth the words with Patti, “Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.”. I’m so wrapped up in my mirror image that when the words stop and it suddenly fades to black, becoming molten like something out of The Matrix, gently Patti reminds me to remember that time moves ever forward.
I find myself back in my room, reminded that there is only so long that I can remain away from reality. It always comes back, bearing its teeth. It is always difficult to return, I find understanding in the words I read and listen to but not in the world around me.
In the last couple of years my childhood obsession, that I or the people around me will leave this world, is set on devouring my heart again. During a global pandemic, when that ever looming knowledge that someone I know could die or enter the kind of life I live is amplified, this fear and I have fumbled at the blackened muscular organ in my chest, waiting for glimpses of the beating red coal within.
To process my childhood fear of death I have had to completely embrace that, as organic matter, I will return to the ground one day. Becoming chronically ill I have had no choice but to embrace it and understand what living like this, in an inaccessible and ableist world, does to someone. But while my own impermanence is understood, the fact that this happens to other people is still something my brain cannot and will not accept as fact. It seems fair for it to happen to me, it does not seem fair for anyone else to go through it too.
Listening to the music and words of Patti I’m confronted with this fear, the experience of loving deeply and seeing those go before their time. Having to live with the imprints they leave while still making your own.
“My last image was as the first. A sleeping youth, cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger”.
I can now no longer proudly proclaim that a book has never made me cry. I don’t know why it was a prideful thing to say, why have pride in the fact you can be moved and not show it. Why pretend that a line of text doesn’t stoke a fire within the coal of my chest. I circled the lines of Patti’s grief and melded with them.
With her reassurance I know I will have to handle the uncertainty no matter how difficult it is. Things are changing, I think it is cruel for things to change before you’ve even had a chance to understand them, but that seems to be the way of life. The years ahead will be tough, but I will have to seek out the joy where I can and take the time to bathe in it. I think it’s time to try to find it again. I sit at my keyboard, pick up a pencil, open up my drawing pad, and return to the labour of creation.
“Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permeance is”. With these words I’m soothed to see those ghosts of the past, present shifting relationships, and the ineffable future are simultaneously still yet mailable, interweaving and separating, over and over and over. Misalignment happens, but eventually I have to be willing to see the X up ahead.