Peripatetic Life Paths

Art need not be a conundrum if you do not concern yourself with audience. Stability is a comfort that you do not need if you keep your eye, and your thoughts, on the next exploration. Stay a year or two ahead of yourself, and you don’t have to worry about uncertainty. The only problem – SNAP! – is that you can’t live in 2007 or 2008. Abstract time is as non-material as dreams are.
There are no bass lines in the future. In the future there is no early morning clarity that comes the moment when you wake up before the alarm clock and say to the world – when I rise I shine – and mean it. There is really not much of anything in the future, because it doesn’t hold steady and keep its constituent parts close. So go ahead and table art, and table the next exploration, and enjoy it all as much as you can right here, before it fades away. There is dignity in crouching behind a patch of juniper for fifteen minutes watching five mule deer nudge small patches of grass with their liquid mouths and look at you without seeing you every thirty seconds or so. There is dignity in being patient and listening to a classroom of teenagers with elementary reading levels work through a short story you read when you were 12, and sharing with them enough of what’s going on in the lines of black type to make three or four get big eyes of recognition and perhaps, if you’re lucky, follow up with a question that takes the discussion further down the road. There is dignity in not being lucky. There is dignity in driving down gravel roads with Wu Tang blaring out the open windows, watching magpies rise from the rabbit carcass on the side of the road and chatter at you with as much inspiration as U-God ever summoned. But then again, comparisons are odious. U-God is U-god, and magpies are magpies. If you can’t tell the difference, you didn’t grow up SoDa with aspirations toward urban sophistication that mutated into visions of valleys encircled in mountain ranges that breed herds of cumulous clouds stretching into the horizon. So be it.