I'm so lonely I could spit - last night I watched Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro. When young one of my dear friends, turned passing acquaintance who swore up and down the movie was from a conversation he had had with Scorsese while my friend had been driving cabs in New York. Amongst the credits and fluff that is now included with each passing iconic image was the idea of taxi driving as a metaphor for loneliness which according to Scorsese was the key to this film, also included in the commentary was my friend's dismay that it became so popular, and he without credit.
Yet here I sit talking to a computer screen, as though someone might care about what I'm feeling. There are people who care, just as I care about others. What's of concern to me is the diminished occasion for mitigating those feelings as I age. I will shortly be moving into a home in which I have planned long for. It will be my studio and hopefully the seat of much good work. Sitting here in a windblown trailer waiting for escrow to close I'm having a hard time just putting pencil to paper. There is no ideal occasion where all the flags line up and the signals are a "go"; it is that certainty which distresses me.
The doubt which becomes so paralyzing is not always assuaged by the exertion of running; the cold claw of depression grapples with my determination to be an affront to all the hatred and fear in the world today. Yet awareness of the percentage of humans eking out a living selling art sits like a parent - cajoling, sometimes gently - sometimes with guffaws. I can only go by feeling at this turn, so I write to no one, I load my phone's updates because it grants me the illusion of forward progress and I peer at the face of the sweet Swiss woman who graciously allowed me to draw her.
It cannot matter whether what I make sales, what must matter is that the lifestyle I've chosen corresponds with someplace in the future where sanity has been reinstated and the forces of hate and fear have been relegated to the uninterrupted soothing which responsible parents provide loved children. I would no more abandon my path than I would commence a way of living that doesn't account for and accommodate the weakest, most fragile amongst us. It is not for purely selfless reasons I feel this way, for every excellent feeling I've ever enjoyed has in some way owed part of its savor to the ability to share with one other, preferably those i care about, but that is because i am weak. So logically, if I do not make every effort to secure freedom and hope for as many humans as I can conceive, then what good is all of the personal striving in the world if there is no one to share it with?
This pertains to moved and moving because like the metaphor for loneliness, the illusion of changing much by altering one's location depends entirely on the reasons for the transition. In my case, the hope is to become more efficient - streamline, eliminate and focus on the core mission. Funny that martial tone; it is a welcome remnant of having been raised by a WWII bomber pilot who chose to pursue poetry with the life he gained in the struggle. How he would feel about seeing his legacy systematically dismantled by self serving agents of greed may be the only real upside of his absence. And again with the ironies of my existence, for his absence simply shifts the onus for responsible living squarely into my lap. So I will continue to adjust my living arrangement to produce what I can with the freedom he and my mother beat into me - not the freedom to seize as much swag as can be had, but the kind of freedom it takes to look out into our collective future and throw something useful to posterity as far as can be done by one alone.
more @ http://stoneartist.com
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