Category Archives: Writing

It is much effort to complete a work. For that work to represent a life’s effort, it’s even more. As it’s not merely the time spent on the piece, a single starry night captured in oil, it’s the suffering, delusions, and tortures of a van Goghian life that becomes The Starry Night. For works to take on the character and quality of a masterwork (and imagining you’re not keen on wondering through the number of monkeys, years, and typewriters it would take to write the entire Library of Congress) works are the sum of their histories. So to work is to be working on one’s masterwork, even before the medium has been selected. To live is to be doing this as well. Intensity, practice, and collisions with other people’s working & living are crucial, but not in their type. Volume is the name of the painting, poetry, company-building, and relationship partnering game. Again, not necessarily volume of paintings, etc. Volume of intensities (of any kind), practice, and collisions. Intensities are defined by the level of zooming into one’s life that happens during these exceptional times. A personal catastrophe, a deep ego-wound, a broken leg, natural disasters, and house fires are among a panoply of intensities, some which are absolutely likely to be intensities for any person, while others depend almost entirely on the situation, the personal context of the person living through them. Practice – spelled like it sounds. Do it, do it again, do it again for good measure, and then do it a thousand, a hundred thousand times more. Practice builds the grooves in the landscape as rain gathering into streams and rivers builds canyons. Practice happens in an area, a category. Practicing is not playing one note on the piano, skiing for ten minutes, and then shooting a crossbow at a target (unless you’re practicing for a hipper version of the biathlon). It’s writing ten poems a day, every day, for all the days in a row. It’s paying attention to the way your toes spread out when you’re on the tenth mile of your hundredth run of the year, on the hundred and first day of the year. Collisions are not always as violent as they sound. Comparing notes on stanza development or the level of living room light that thyme likes to grow most herbaceously or writing an email to the author of a book that lays out the intricacies of ownership in a way that gels with the way you’ve been thinking about it. It’s going to a bar and talking to the random person sitting next to you about the philosophical question that has been haunting you. It’s being in a rough-tumble organizational fray, where too much complexity is being condensed into an incomprehensible package and too few people who know too little about each others’ specialties are kicking their duck legs as fast as they can underwater, pretending everything is fine while sending around memes about how it’s not fine. All these layers show up in whatever the master work is. And the master work may have been inadvertently created as an early work, whose layers are added contextually by all the elements of that work’s future. So, what’s a “painter” to do? Collide. Practice. Accept intensities, but not so much as to steal their intensity.