A month to go...

I've had a tough week, emotionally and otherwise. My work on Fictions has thankfully progressed in some remarkable strides yet my other work has suddenly doubled up on me as I find myself in the centre of an emotional maelstrom.

A recently made friend of mine took the opportunity to post the following message on my Facebook wall.

"I am off to the Writing Workshop today. Soon, I shall become all arrogant and disagreeable just like the authors who have gone before me. Oh, here's a poem that was written about someone else but could probably apply to you. My parting gift.

King of Hearts and Insomnia

That’s why women fall in love with poets.
We imagine that a moment of enlightened clarity
Somehow means the beast can be tamed.
We confuse self-reflection with laying down of arms
Surrendering breastplate and spear for medium toast and blackberry preserves

You, my love, are all things the critics crave
Prickly and sweet
dying and finding salvation every day
There’s nothing hotter than today’s tortured artist, they say
As they head home,
to crisp linens and 8 hours uninterrupted sleep

S.Leid 2008"

One paradox of the artistic life is that art is premised upon a striving for this ideal state of love, society, the universe or whatever; yet the ideal state if ever achieved is antithetical to the existence of the artist. Plato's Republic, for example, is a place from which all artists are exiled.

There is a part of me that yearns for peace, a full night's sleep instead of a haunting of the early morning hours, conformity instead of conflict, a humility in the face of mediocrity simply because that is the way of the world.

But having emerged from the Cave, you find that you cannot return, not even to rescue those you love, nor to hope that your eyes will become once more, in time, accustomed to the darkness. I have a month to go finish my book and it's achievable unless, of course, I stumble greatly.