The Direction of Intention

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“Criticizing is easy, art is difficult.” Anonymous

What holds you back? What is the wall you bump into that reminds you that, “You are not fulfilling it?” Whatever “it” is. Is it something that holds you back or something you can’t quite reach? The verb is important. Is it the idea that lives just beyond your fingertips, like the word you want to use but can’t quite call up? The play you want to write but you hold only fragments in your hands; the character who wants to speak through you but like a wild animal lurks just beyond the trees. You know it is there but cannot coax it out. Its eyes stare back at you and though you cannot see them you know they are there. You feel it.

You catch a glimpse of ‘it’ every so often, enough to tease you forward, enough to keep you reaching for it or pressing against it or listening for it to call your name. The verb, remember the verb.

Before I go through security for my flight home Patti gives me Just Kids, the book by Patti Smith about her early years in New York and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. All the while reading it I feel “it.” I “feel” it and it makes me uncomfortable and delighted and enticed to open to “it.” Enticed. Open. Delighted. Uncomfortable. I feel it. I am re-minded.

I am reminded that to complain about life is easy. To blame is as easy a falling down. To live it, to act on it, to act in it, to act as it, to dance with it and trip with it; to love it, that is more difficult. It requires standing up. It asks you to choose. To choose it. To participate. That is art. And, if you are present to it, it will always be just beyond your capacity to grasp it. That’s what keeps you moving.

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