I.

It is not hard to be connected or plugged in to some sort of source, if you are willing to make a compromise. According to the blues legend, Robert Johnson took his guitar to the Dockery Plantation to have it tuned by the devil and later found that he could channel the truth, could approximate it in music, but that he no longer had access to his soul. Musicians are obsessed with this legend, but what does it mean? Artists often tell this story; that in exchange for creative mastery, they accept a life of inner torment. That the excavation of truth is painful. And art is the excavation of truth. You can hear truth in a song. Obviously Johnson didn't literally trade his soul for his transcendent musical ability, but perhaps he renounced the cries of his personal will, or ego, in order to access some part of him that could be labeled as transcendent. Perhaps the very structures of our lives have to crumble, and be dismantled, in order for us to access this kind of transcendence.

II.

I'm not the biggest Joan Baez fan, but I get it if you are. But I remember this thing that I heard her say once, "The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10000 people. The hardest is with one." It is easier to live in a world of your own projections than to be truly seen in the light; to truly see someone in the light. And artists are sensitive folk; we slip in and out of our own identities. We seek to please. We seek to connect, to be understood, but we also want to be left alone. We often reside comfortably in a world of our creation; a world of gauzy mood lighting. We don't like it when someone turns the fluorescent light bulbs on. Our relationship with truth is elusive at best; we seek it in our work. We struggle with it in life.

III.

The more I write, the more I realize that it's a process of excavation more than an act of creation. I'm not making something new, I'm just trying to unearth something in one piece. And this is a slow, painstaking process. It requires care and love and commitment. So I guess it's not that different from marriage. Married people are always talking about how marriage is challenging and rewarding, and sometimes they look weary, and sometimes they look doubtful and sometimes they look like they know they made the right decision by marrying the person they did.


IV.

Alain de Botton says that writers become our prophets; That we mistake them for oracles. That we let them do our own work. I do this sometimes. I substitute a writer's truth for my own, because I'm not entirely certain of the path that I'm on. Because I want an easy answer. Because I want my reality to correspond with someone else's. Because I am scared. But mostly because I want logical answers and logical solutions to life. The kind that don't really exist. But it's like the legend of the Princess and the Pea. The pea is my own unconscious, my own truth and I can feel it, like a fucking tennis ball, pressed up against the small of my back. No one is my oracle. I am alone. But maybe this is okay.


V.

Male artists often compare an act of creation to taking a shit. Women compare it to childbirth. On a primal level, we know something about the map of our bodies; about the truths they carry. In anthropology classes we were told over and over again, "women are carriers of culture; they carry culture in their bodies." I would roll my eyes at this, but there is something safe about the idea of carrying your history, personal and collective in your bones, in your hips, in your sides. When I find myself being more open to things I have no real control over, I find that my body is more flexible as well. The days when I am accepting of my reality are the days that my whole body is more limber; that yoga poses come easily, that my twists and folds feel like a natural part of me and not something I am struggling against.

VI.

I have had so many of those moments lately: lying on a shag rug and listening to the Velvet Underground. Sitting with N on the carpeted hallway of our office and confiding in one another like family. Telling a story about vomiting on a plane that made someone cry. Not the vomiting part, but the rest of the story, which was amazing and not to be posted over the internets. At least not at this time. Stories, stories, stories, I live by them. I have friend-stalked people for their stories, fallen in love with men for the stories they tell me, savored, saved, remembered, written, noted, held, breathed stories my whole life. If you choose not to see the physical parts of who we are - our legs and arms and mouths and noses and blood and guts and bones, really, we are all a conglomeration of stories and maybe this is the best part of us, because our stories are who we really are in this world.