“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
Live in the question.” Rainer Maria Rilke
I love these words.
I try to call them up when
I face uncertainty
I am in the middle of developing
an idea that is slowly forming in
my mind.
I don’t know if it is a play
or a short story
Or something else altogether.
My desk is covered in sketches of artists who have inspired me I am not sure why I drew them.
The images are clues or perhaps threads of a story – slowly weaving itself in the back of mind.
If I stand back and speak to
my images I might say JacksonPollack and Lee Krasner and Andy Warhol–What are you trying to tell me?
Why are you here? What are you pointing me to?
For me drawing opens a door into a deeper
more potent form of imagination.
Something beyond intention and anything
conscious.
Maybe these drawings are part of a search
into my own psyche.
Maybe I am digging, sifting through the layers
of my early romantic ideals-
when my fascination with these famous artists
woke up some kind of young longing in me.
I don’t know. I have to sit with the unknowing.
Here is the thing.
There is a relationship somewhere
between the drawings and the writing I am doing
and my own life right now.
It’s not always immediately evident.
I look at the drawings that come out
after a session of writing
and I think ok–
I think that the subject of what
drives someone to create
is the subject I want to explore.
And somehow death is part of the subject
And how the need to be present for life
is part of it. And how creativity
is the way of showing up.
And I think that somehow
spirits– as in the spirits of the
dead artists are alive to all of us who
look at the art they made and left behind.
But I don’t really know.
Maybe drawing the artists
and even writing in this blog
is like playing with a Ouija board,
and I am summoning spirits from within myself–
to help me with my troublesome imagination.
I know the location of whatever I am writing
is somewhere just west of collective unconscious.
And has to do with a place where artists
can meet and converse.
e thing is, with art and with life–
sometimes we have to tolerate
the churning and distracted feelings of uncertainty.
Because on the other side of this unknowing,
is the path to where it all makes sense.
It’s true we must learn to live in the questions–
as Rilke tells us–and just wait–because beyond
the clouds of uncertainty,
is the bright blue sky of knowing.
The story will weave itself together and everything will be revealed.
