when sybil drinks merlot
"What if the art you want to make isn't the art that you have in you?" I asked. He's an artist, I thought, he should know.
"Then you become a tortured artist," he replied.
Hmmm. That's not terribly comforting.
I spent a few minutes talking about that novel that I was expecting, the one that never came. If my life's work were a date I would have declared myself stood up by now. It's a good thing I like doing the geek stuff and can make a living at it. (I figure the geek stuff makes me smarter and that becoming smarter can never hurt. This is, of course, utter bullshit as I notice that Norbu is too damn smart for his own good 90% of the time.)
He had a lot of reasonable points to make about art in the conversation, and again he's the artist, so he knows. I'm just the girl with fingers addicted to the click of the keyboard and a mind dedicated to a rhythm that only I can hear in my head, a rhythm that I'll convey to you one day—as soon as I figure out which buttons to push to make it happen.
"Do I even really want to write a novel?" I finally ask. "Maybe I should accept that fact that I am an essayist, or maybe a poet." I slam poetry as art form for no reason other than I've had too much to drink, although Nikki Giovanni dances in the back of my mind. Whatever my complaints are about poetry have nothing to do with what she does. Whatever Nikki does is obviously on some kind of higher plane.
He mentions something to me about how existential I've become over the course of the conversation, but again I've had too much to drink so I can't exactly remember what it is that he said. It's lost, out there somewhere floating in my mindspace, bumping up against my missing novel. Someday it'll all come out. I'll set my fingers in place and I'll turn my mind off and the fingers will just go, clicking in a way that my thinking mind won't have the patience to relate to and the finished product will be some kind of genius that my thinking mind won't understand. And you know what? I won't even try to explain it to her. I'll just tell her to fuck off because if writing a novel were so damn easy she would have done it already without ever having had to turn the fingers loose.
But I don't have anything to write about, the bitch whines. Fucking forget about it already and just write. Writing can be a process rather than serve a purpose, you know. If you could accept that we'd all be a lot better off.