Another night where I cannot sleep. I’ve just finished reading a biography of Charles Bukowski and as I’ve been accompanying the text with martinis, it’s gotten my brain back onto the subject of artistic integrity. Not so much the drinking side of it that I previously explored, click here to read that, but the whole concept of living being a pre-requisite for good writing. Living, actually living life, taking in as much of it as humanly possible, opening your lungs wide and breathing deep of all that floats around us in its myriad ephemeral forms.

Christ, Bukowski would have hated that last sentence, filled as it is with far too many easily manipulated word choices. And I’ll just borrow a hint from his general attitude and state that I really don’t give a fuck. I’ve been conspicuously trying to define myself as an artist for so many years that I can no longer pick apart my motivations cleanly, I can no longer tell if I do the things that I do because I honestly want to do them, or if I do them because they seem like the kind of things that will make good fodder for nostalgia in those odd moments when I find the requisite motivation to sit down and create.

It’s like this insomnia, I bring it on myself. I know that in less than seven hours I will have to wake up to make my way to class, and yet I decided to pour myself another drink and sit down to write out this post, I decided to spend a good five minutes with my blinds tilted aside, to watch the pervasive nothing that is occurring out on the streets.

It’s going sour here, I can feel it; the tone I was seeking is slipping away while my fingers continue this dance that you are reading.

What is the art that I am sacrificing myself to?

Right now it amounts to little more than life, my life as I continuously choose to define it along the lines laid down by the greats who have come before me. Has it actually made me a better poet to know what it means to wake up after two hours spent passed out in a drunken stupor and go staggering through the world bleary-eyed with a rotten gut?

A strange feeling this, I’ve been doing my best to succumb to every poetic impulse that comes my way this year, and all I’ve really got to show for it are a number of empty bottles and an odd collection of half-finished phrases in ratty notebooks, words that showed up and claimed they could be poems.

The poetry I respect comes from the core of the poet, those people who can claw aside all the pretenses and present, if only for a moment, some deep and terrible truth about themselves. It’s the glaring shock of recognition that draws us closer to these kind of damning disclosures and makes us want to pursue our own demons into the dark recesses of self.

It seems to help if the self is as convoluted as can be, hence this odd side of me, one of the first layers that I filter myself through before presenting myself into reality, my artistic integrity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 1:43 am and is filed under indiscriminate, philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.