" Why so late and with such difficulty? Is art a priesthood that demands the pure in heart who must belong to it entirely?" Cezanne

I ask myself, how did it happen that something I told myself was play, just play… like being a child, has become something very different. Oh, it’s still play, but so is Russian roulette. Sky diving with a set of gliding wings you just made and never tested.

On the one hand, this is of no consequence. If I were 22, I’d be dreaming of being a Great Artist… but I did dream that, and it scared the shit out of me. But that doesn’t matter now, because what’s involved there is displaced to the judgment of other. It can’t help but be. Whether it be critics, popular acclaim, the hope for the approbation of posterity—it all lies outside yourself.

If I still believe in that, I could conjure up a rationalization to explain to myself what’s happening. It would be misleading and wrong, but sometimes you can use that kind of fiction to carry you over the rough patches. The thing is, I feel no less driven, and by something I understand less and less. It’s still play—in that I can find no excuse for it, no justification other than—I need to do this. I need to do it sometimes more than I want to…and there is where it cross over into something else.
br /> You see, I face resistance to keeping myself to task, to working on my drawings. Performance anxiety involved, no doubt—but that’s not the whole of it. It’s become something of an inner imperative—and maybe, not one I’ve completely surrendered to yet.

Don’t ask me what I hope to accomplish. I couldn’t tell you. And no one or nothing will be able to offer me confirmation that I’ve done it. Whatever, it’ is. I trust, both that I will know, and no one else, and that I will never arrive, because the confirmation is only of the ‘you’re getting warmer! variety.

Where this leaves me, is that I’m obsessed with something, a challenge I barely understand. I think about it all the time. I dream about it. Would that I could convince myself that all this passion is sure sign that, if I keep at it, something good will come of it—objectively good, a contribution to art, to the world… to something. But even when I entertain that idea, what comes back to me, is that’s all beside the point. Nothing of my concern. Forget it. Nothing happening there.

It also feel cut off from others… that there’s this rhinoceros, not in the room, but in my belly, thundering around with its almost extinct hooves and horns, crushing my organs of sense and sensibility against my bones, and the bones are creaking about to crack… I what can I say?

How have you been, Goby?

Oh, great… you know. Making art. Trying to.

Wag my head. Smile.

What the fuck am I supposed to say?