To maintain this ecstasy
“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.”
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature (1873)
It is 2025. I’m getting burned out on the marginalia of being a creative publishing into the void. It’s enough of a drain on my constitution that it’s starting to create back-pressure on my actual creative practice… instead of creating things, I find myself alternately bummed that they just accumulate around my house, and then distracted by the idea of creating a new public gallery.
I think there are several afflictions that can drag down my creative spirit… a drop in time and energy is definitely one of them, and the drop in morale that comes from aimlessness. Another one is the affliction of free-floating, frustrated vanity. I don’t want to be famous, but I want to give my products a good life, you know? And that means getting them out into the world, circulating and exposed so they don’t just molder in my studio-office-thing.
There are some dark clouds out there, no matter who or where you are. In here, I am going to clean and reorganize the house a little and create a cozy space for my artwork, poetry, and big-think fragments. If you are reading this, and you are not just a future version of me doing some navel-gazing, then thank you for taking a moment. It is for me, but it is also for you. For us. Let’s be here together.
