“You know you are an artist if you have to do art — it’s like breathing and you have no choice. Nothing should be able to stop you.” – Marina Abramovic
“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” – Jorge Luis Borges
Thissssss is the truth of my existence… and why I quote Nietzsche and Frida Kahlo, Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Jimi Hendrix, artists who have created themselves out of the dark material they have suffered from. That is not to give credence to the suffering or even say, “oh, do not take my circumstances from me because I would not be who I am today!” One would be a fool to suggest that human genius can only be wrought from abuse!
Human genius will take the material of LIFE in all of its gory ecstatic suffering. JOY and LOVE and HATE and ABUSE and work that material like dough into the bread of LIFE, into the art of self creation… to survive and thrive. Reclaim the energy caught in the abuse, the suffering. Seize back the life that is mine so it no longer rotates around it as my identity. No, I am not an addict any more. Nor will I continue to see myself as such.
I do ART and have my entire Life to survive. I have to. Just to deal with the preponderance of my SHADOW let alone the misshapened hyper nervous system. It is because the function of creation which Nature gave us in itself is a healer. That’s why the big Mamma chose to give it to us. No, I may never totally heal my nervous system until we have the technology to do such a thing, but I can soothe it and unwind the system that binds it, me, by painting writing giving voice, singing, pounding on those black and white keys, expressing the energy in something other than self destructivity, founded on the lies of what my abusers did to me.
Within the function of creation is the intelligence of allll who have created before. The Gene of ART! the collective reservoir which includes a Frida Kahlo and Virginia Woolf, an Ella Fitzgerald an O’Keefe, Mary Oliver and. We access the whole of human Nature’s intelligence when we put our pen to paper our brush to canvas our body to gesture.
These functions and abilities are not owned by the talented, by the famous (though these are who I have named here), by those who are ‘special’. It only has to do with being HUMAN. HUMAN BEING. And
Nature gave us these creative drives to LIVE! to heal, to grow, to change the world.
All who I am this day is due to these acts of creation which have shaped my intelligence my heart my spirit my body!
May you play like a child with your crayons, your voicings, your skip and whirl… and reclaim your genius. By so doing, we reclaim our world.