In Like a Lion (III)

ISSUE #142

"What is it?"
"A piece that I love"
"Is it merry?"
"Not merry, but it is lively. It's about a coming storm. The insects sense it. They become agitated. Then the storm breaks with lightning and the wind."

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

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A storm is a manner of Earth's self-expression. Colliding pressures tear down barriers between potential and kinetic energies. Feelings caught turning themselves inside-out. A great storm has the same effect on me as a great piece of music—a mirror held up to my billowing feelings and thundering thoughts.

I live an entirely different life than the one I carry through the actions of my body; even further removed is the life I live online. If I have too often been doleful in my essays, it was partially my intention, an unfortunate holdover from my theory of art—that when I find someone expressing what I, too, have felt, it brings me closer to solace than I’ve ever achieved trying to push my way through the thorns of interaction.

Too focused are we on solutions. I find no one who, rather than give a “Yeah, but…” hand wave, will instead offer what I find most healing: an “I have felt that very thing” (outside therapy, I suppose—but the sequestering of emotion to a profit model is another essay entirely). For this, I have only art.

Van Gogh didn’t paint until nine years before death, and he made over 2,000 works. The vivid colors and wild brush strokes we know him for today did not emerge until five years after that. People thought that he was a failure. He drank too much and ate almost nothing. He suffered delusions and saw cracks in reality.

I know we now think of him as some ideal, tortured artist, but that childish myth is the farthest thing from my interest. I find myself, instead, feeling close to his brain, and questioning our definition of madness—I don’t mean to say he was secretly sane, but I’m crushed at how those words build prisons around people.

Though, part of the loneliness of madness is the lack of those willing to understand. If I feel different, and one doesn’t want to get it, I am singularly alone. Further sink me into the spiral, the swirling eddies of mental traffic, until I’m only safe to behold as a picture in a frame. I know that this is teenage stuff. Sometimes, I feel like a towering child.

It’s more my speculating than concrete evidence, but I have to believe that his posthumous fame was because he did offer something familiar, some glimpse at what it is like to be inside us all. I don’t doubt that some of it was bourgeois fashion—but behold, for a second, his “Wheatfield with Crows,” and you see flashes of our inner lightning.

I woke up this week the bluest I’ve ever felt. One problem with perception is the trick of every tunnel—you largely forget the darkness until you’re passing through another. This particular morning, I found ghosts in every song, sinking deeper into murk with every brain-rattling note. That is, until I put on For the first time by Black Country, New Road. Dissonance was the only thing that actually helped; the sound was fraying like the corners of my brain. This matched the friction of my thoughts against my skull.

For the third year now, I give you my “squall songs.” At the beginning of March, I like to gather this music, the kind that’s not pretty, the kind that is loud. Music at its typical—euphonic and melodic—often brings us, like angels, a glimpse at perfection. But we are still beings of imperfection; we are creatures of the storm, scrambled signals and pieces strewn. That’s why I value the ugly art. No one will cleanse me except through their own rains.

In representation, there is always distortion. I like to find beauty in the squall.

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“I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.”

— Ezra Pound, Canto CXX