This pain — ting never dries…
is a favorite Elliott Smith lyric of mine from Stupidity Tries.
Whether due to humidity or stupidity — applying too much paint because you didn’t know when to stop — or mixing media that should never have been mixed… the objective is not met. You can’t touch it without messing it up — might as well scrape the canvas, because an image doesn’t matter if it won’t set. It’s never finished. It’s a nightmare.
Being a painter and a musician, I often question my own vision of reality and nightmares. I can make things up by blending hues to achieve just the right shade to evoke shadow and light and form… I can shape what I want everyone else to see. It’s just paint —- an accepted convention — the transference of perspective. I think — If I can do this, anyone can. Sure, why not?
The same for music — especially singing — words and sound — I shape and form them, and I suspect everybody else can, too. Manipulation of a medium is just… that.
When you really want to communicate, the only direct conduit to the heart of another human is truth. Few choose to take the direct path of personal truth. It resonates with a psyche like a tuning fork… it’s an unmistakable tone. You can’t cover it with paint.
Artists take out their interpretations and frustrations on their chosen medium. Some view the world affected, and some effect their world. It can get confusing when the catharsis is a story told through abstract imagery, and not necessarily representational narrative…art is a
L I f E.
Doesn’t everyone “know” what it feels like to be misinterpreted? Sure, but I’m not so sure that everyone does on a grand scale — where mythic proportions threaten the content or context of a legacy. Black and white can prove apocalyptic when the betwixt is ignored. Creating art is a way of creating balance. I include the — “in between” — the grey areas that most miss, as a means of validating reality for myself.
Artist or not, if you come from a life of much strife and adversity, but have come out of it with your soul intact, chances are you will have a more developed sense of greyscale — justice — balance — the realization that things are not always what they seem makes for a struggle with reality and mental equilibrium — a dab of paint here, a dab there — we try to set up our lives with as much control and symmetry as possible, to keep things in perspective…within scale.
But, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a random pummeling, you might question the plausibility of there ever being reason to strive for balance and fairness, or if it is reasonable to get back up to turn the other cheek just to get socked again for speaking the truth as you see it. For some of us, that inevitability only strengthens our resolve. Still, one never feels quite as alone in a crowd as when no one steps up to yank a bully off your back. It’s a loneliness I’d wish on no one, and some of us will go out of our way to make certain it doesn’t happen to anyone else on our watch. It’s the consequence and curse of empathy and not every media manipulator suffers from it.
Personally, I was always one of those types who stepped into the path of a swinging fist when I saw it directed at someone smaller than the body attached to the arm. No one who takes a cursory glance at me would consider me much of the scrapper sort. That assessment holds, for me, the element of surprise — as much for myself as for the antagonist. My nature does not consider my best interests. It pushes me to react according to how I might feel if I was suddenly transported into someone else’s body — like the guy on the ground getting the s__ kicked out of him.
Unfortunately, in those situations, there’s more force behind a weapon that misses its intended target and ends up, instead, focused on whatever came between it and the object of its wrath: The Frustration Principle. I learned to try to talk my way out of it. If that didn’t work — I’d wear it out. But, tenacity can infuriate a bully. Bullies never learned to take out their frustrations on an inanimate medium. They choose, instead, to manipulate the vulnerable.
And yet, people can fail to notice the consequences of someone else’s actions on the vulnerable unless it has bearing upon their own well-being — on a paycheck, friendships, family, standing in the community — Why risk a broken nose sticking it where it doesn’t belong? Maybe a life has to be at stake to shake some people out of complacency. Still, they might wonder if it was prudent to fight a particular battle if it would involve an all out revelation of reality as it is and not as one wishes it to be perceived. How can justice prevail in an instance of a collective lapse in judgment?
Justice is said to be blind. Maybe in so much that she doesn’t discriminate between the recipients of reward and consequence. But, she isn’t blind. Blindfolded, she listens without preconceptions. She hears every detail… every color applied…every brush stroke meeting the canvas. Justice, on her game, hears true tone — the difference between the inauthentic and the revelation of truth. But, she can’t come to the point of resolution without support. Justice must be brought.
You can become a pariah for tenaciously investing passion in a lost cause — personal or universal. Focusing wholly on an injustice done — obsessively applying paint to the canvas — you keep singing about it…. writing about it. I don’t know if it’s bothersome to folks because it reminds them of how easy it is for them to give up, or because it makes society aware of a rogue gene in its midst. There is safety in numbers. When you lack numbers, you’re just asking for a beating. Nature is mean. Leave it alone. Grow up. Stop bleeding. You’re wasting time better invested in tending something that has the ability to grow… until that flower, too, in the cracks of the sidewalk, is cut down by the willy-nilly, random blade of a lawn mower…poor flower. Someone should have painted a beautiful picture of it or written a lovely lyric… paintings and songs last forever.
Thank the artists for abs
orbing the brunt of the wallop empathy can pack. They get to feel everything most people have learned to block. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, displaced energy is transferred. Someone has to be the medium. The most sensitive, the most vulnerable, get hit hardest because they never learned to duck.
orbing the brunt of the wallop empathy can pack. They get to feel everything most people have learned to block. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, displaced energy is transferred. Someone has to be the medium. The most sensitive, the most vulnerable, get hit hardest because they never learned to duck.
Art allows an escape hatch for those who struggle with everything that makes us human. Artists might paint them as The Last Leaf*…or… strum our pain with their fingers**… and when we want to live it, we listen to the music… and when we don’t, we take off the headphones, we leave the theatre… we move away from the painting.
For Elliott Smith. Kerpow.
*O. Henry
**Killing Me Softly With His Song — Charles Fox & Norman Gimbel