hey all.
an unfortunate side effect of all of the deletions i mentioned in my last post is that i was very bad at archiving stuff that i’ve written. most of it is gone, including a lot of poetry/prose posts under the tag “hypercolor”. lesson learned: always back up your stuff, kids.
however, i am slowly uncovering/rediscovering stuff that i wrote through other peoples’ blogs/links/etc, and here’s one that i still like. it’s called “inspiration”, and was part of a series of prose/poetry i did under the tag “hypercolor”.
merry christmas, and enjoy:
I told a friend of mine recently that I was ecstatic to be writing songs, and songs I believed in—and he remarked, “well, you can always write songs”, as if writing were as natural as breathing. Breathing’s a poor analogy for the creation of art. It’s far too dependable, far too mundane. Art is as natural as laughing; art is as natural as grieving. It absorbs and expresses the overflow, the wine that sloshes off the edges of your glass from the shaky beautiful catastrophe of trying at life, with all of the euphoria and enervation that comes along with it. You can’t do it when you’re just letting yourself be swept along. I can’t just write a song without feeling like there’s something demanding to exist. I’m not making something as much as capturing it—trying to catch the spill of living before it hits the ground and then distill it into something with a bittersweet taste and a full body. There’s practice, skill, and intention involved, but without that overflow, there’s nothing to use any skill on. To me, art is not valuable—on a personal basis—because it “makes me feel alive”. It’s not a thing to switch up the doldrums—at least not primarily. Art is valuable to me because it reminds me that I am living, and tries to give that overflow away to someone else.
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