Make it Mean Nothing at All

They say there's more snow coming. What a winter.

I miss being able to be outside, walking around the streets. Maybe sitting in Union Square, painting and people watching. Or in Verb Cafe on Bedford-- the main strip of Williamsburg. It's like everyday's a parade.

I love to walk around and just be open to whatever's out there. Whether that's new graffiti on the walls or someone who might say hi, or the new art books lying on the table in the bookstore. Grab a cup of coffee and sit down in a garden with my journal, or my little watercolor set. Or open up my laptop (alas, now crashed) and write pages in my novel when I am not staring out the window at the people passing.

Even talking about it I get nostalgic. Oh... if only...

As if it were a life I couldn't be a part of now.

All right, the wind chill is 25 below. Not much walking around, but I think it's more the being open that is where the inspiration comes from.

I don't really know if I am open, right now. Not for art, anyway. Sometimes I think you have to take care of living, first. Does that make sense?

Someone, a while ago, caught up in the drama and tragedy of being an artist, said that art was life. I suppose that's a beautiful, passionate statement, but I piped up and said, "No it's not!" into their horrified, insulted faces. "Art is NOT life, art is the interpretation of life."

Life happens-- you live it, or it grows, or it dies or whatever, and then we think about it and feel about it and put it on paper or canvas or in song or movement, or film, or so on. We make meaning out of what life has given us. It's possible that without art we would be a lot more confused about life than we are. Even though a good book or movie, even a documentary feels like life, it's still just someone's translation of what it means to live. All of that is just an illusion of life, but it isn't actually life.

For that matter, neither is science or math-- that's more like measuring life. All the other stuff, history, sociology, psychology-- that's making meaning of life, too, while keeping up the illusion that it's science. Don't get mad. If you think that history isn't nearly as made up (sometimes more so) than fiction, take a look at a text book from the forties. Yikes.

It's absolutely why I sarted writing a journal twenty years ago. How anyone makes it through their teens and twenties without some sort of tangible meaning-making is beyond me.

So here I am now, living in this cold winter, trying to make meaning of it???
Am I getting meaning out of it? Are you?

Maybe I'm making it like some sort of hibernation. I don't really need to be making art right now, it's winter. Hey, it was good enough for Persephone. (BTW- myth, religion, also a way to make meaning.)

Maybe I will choose to make it mean nothing at all. Maybe I actually AM making art, and am just being a perfectionist about not doing enough. Maybe my every thought, action and word is actually going into the soup of my novel and I will sit down when I come home from bartending tonight and write fifteen pages before 5a.m.. It could happen, especially if I don't have it in my head that I am NOT making art because I'm hibernating (or lame, or lazy, or blocked, or not good enough, or stupid, or not a real artist/writer at all.[the meaning-making for why I am not doing what I want to do is legion-- and it's also kind of an excuse for why I don't have to do it at all. Hmm...])

Maybe the wind will blow, and the clouds will hurdle in to cover the moon, the snow will fall and blanket the streets. And tomorrow the sun will rise, and then the world will be full of all sorts of possibility for action and thought and experience.

How's that for meaning making?