“Is this confusion the price of loving an artist?” she asked me.
Fuck. I hate tending to a woman with a broken heart. It's like being a doctor who has to inform a patient she has AIDS. “Tell me there is some way to make it go away, doctor...”, and all you can say is, “I can help you live with it, but it will never go away. You'll survive, but you'll be slowly dying inside.” Heartache. Some fucking virus your lover gives you that can't be cured, always present, fucking up every relationship to follow, eating away at your life.
“Yeah,” I answered, not what she wanted to hear. “I think confusion is the price of being in love with an artist, and being an artist. There will always be these things you have to work through. But it's certainly cheaper than the price of being alone or being with a Square. ”
Given the choice, I think I would prefer my lover give me AIDS.
Here I sit, on the couch; the cat cozy, clean, and friendly curled up next to me; my lover nearby at his computer, working. We are both taking time to write on an afternoon off from our day jobs. It's sunny outside. I've already had a good meal and a cup of coffee. I have no place to be all day.
All of us are wishing, in a way, that it could be just as simple as this moment. Wishing, though, that we could live an artists' life and have this simplicity. But to have simplicity would be the death of our passion, our inspiration, our art.
Art is not born of order and calm; art is born of chaos and passion, and those fucking hurt people. Country music has the formula right: the harder the life, the sweeter the song. But we can all tell the difference between the real stories and the contrived bullshit, and we don't want to hear the bullshit. We need the art. We need the song this artist will sing about the life that is breaking this woman's heart.
Still, though, it's all so goddamn stupid. Any other animal would surely choose death before putting itself through such torment voluntarily. Only humans are dumb enough to have cultivated the ability to feel emotion-- to have studied it, analyzed it, encouraged it; to the point that we thrive on it, require it for life, live for the shit that we breed from it-- relationships, and art, and ideas.
And everything that human culture loves requires this goddamn shit show of chaos and passion to exist: our celebrities and their art, our preachers and their enlightenment, our teachers and their wisdom. The world is in love with the artists' life, although most couldn't possibly survive in it. I'm pretty sure that most of us living it aren't certain we can survive in it. But we are certain that living any other way is guaranteed death, and we're too stubborn to settle for a simple death. So we make our way through the shit show, and share our goddamn art with a world ignorant of the price.
“Sorry for your pain, dear,” I mumble, as if this will mean anything to her. I guess I'll just offer her another hug and be sure to write her story.
