The Art Must Win

 It’s a kind of madness. My writing is. Could be your garden, your watercolors, the woodworking. We temper it. There’s the Poes, the Van Goghs, the Pressfields that don’t. Pressfield wrote out of a Chevy Van forsaking family. What to do with the gnawing?

Close friends and spouses eye us dubiously. Still, they lend support. Greater success, greater support—till you go over the edge. I started experimenting in high school. Constantly scribbling. Journaling to let the ideas out of my head. To put something down for when fame—and death—found me. Notes to girlfriends and poems about waterbeds (“Lie with me,” it whispers and it sounds funny for you see, it talks without springs.). For an “A” grade I wrote a poem a la Alice in Wonderland about an onion ring. Notebooks full, typewriter pounding then word processer purring.

That girl in the sundress, that man in the pink shirt with the stutter—would they fit into a story? All the while the wheels spin. Like the Roald Dahl poem made famous by Gene Wilder, “Yes, the danger must be growing, for the rowers keep on rowing, and they're certainly not showing, any signs that they are slowing.” If drugs or drinking enhances the writing; is it worth the try? You’ve never gone down that road? Never wanted to abandon it all to bourbon and writing? The monomania grips you. The question is what to do with it?

The art must win. Some suppress, some bury it, deny it, kill it. Never flourishing as artist, never seeing the great gift they can provide their audience. We don’t tamp the art down. In full (‘normal’) lives let the madness motivate us to discipline that the art might shine forth. In the words of Madeleine L’Engle, “A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist…. It is a joy to be allowed to be the servant of the work.”

Photo by Jené Stephaniuk on Unsplash