Mon Seul Desir

Hanging out in my little French bedroom. It’s pretty cold and windy today, so up here in my loft, under my duvet, is warmest.

I can’t believe I live here. I look around this studio apartment, and try to take apart what’s so wonderful about it. I can’t—it can’t be dissected. My apartment has “je ne sais quoi.”

Is it the rose damask tablecloth? The burgundy fabric panels hanging over the loft, making it look like a medieval castle? The giant crenellated, mirrored, antique armoire? The tile floor? The glass-doored cabinet where I keep my jewelry an perfume and diaries? Is it my little wooden loft, all caramel wood and snuggly comforter and “The Lady and the Unicorn” print?

I don’t know what it is. It isn’t one element, but how they all interact. I remember something I used to call “Bedroomatics”: everything in a room meant something, everything was there for a reason, nothing missing or superfluous. And all the pieces work in harmony to create more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts. Feng shui on acid. I may not have been painting in the late 90s when I thought it up, but I already had the habit of mind to look for and cultivate meaning, to expect essence and truth, to reduce superfluity, and to arrange spaces in harmony and integrity so as to manifest—in poetry, stories, rooms—multidimensional, richly-textured vortexes of supercharged baroque excitement.

Thus, my French flat.

Or maybe it’s that all I’ve done all day is fantasize and write and sleep and drink Bordeaux.

I don’t want to leave. Not France, not my apartment, not even my cozy duvet. I don’t want to stop writing. I want to stay in this place, of dreams and understanding, of fantasies and laughs. I’m feeling rad. What am I doing in France? And yet, I’m here, and it’s so awesome—not because of wine and cheese and accordion players and postcards. Forget the tourist tropes and study-abroad cliches. No, it has to do with something taking place inside me, as if this place, by its very nature, draws it out of me at an accelerated pace.

It’s about me, flying again.I’m back. I’m back. I’m back.

Writer Vs. Artist

Well, I’ve successfully endured/enjoyed my first month in France.

For so long, both here and in the United States, I’ve pursued art like a chimera. I’ve doubted my ability, my perceptions, my value, my very sanity. I lived through the creepy invasiveness of my first host family; and when the second one ripped me off, I wanted to just leave the whole place. I questioned it all— the “art world”, Marchutz, IAU, my “career” as an artist.

I even considered just moving to the Smoky Mountains, living in a cabin and writing a book. I felt excitement at the prospect, more excitement that I feel about making the Big Paintings that I dream of. They’re more like a serious responsibility than a wicked dare. Perhaps, I thought that night, art school was just to give me something to write about. For a little while, the vision was real to me—dropping out of Marchutz and VCU, moving somewhere different, becoming a writer for a living. The thought was cool and green, full of solitude and peacefulness.

I’m glad I snapped out of it. But it left me with a renewed sense of myself as a writer, first and foremost. I’ve never felt good calling myself an artist, not just because I felt like an impostor, but also because I’m not entirely sure I want to be one. I don’t like artists. They’re the bad parts of hippies mixed with yuppie-level ambition.

But “writer”? I can grow to like that.

As an artist, writing was a shameful thing, something that “took me away from my work”. It was a self-indulgence that I felt pressured to grow out of and away from. That’s the sucky thing about art—it forces you away from everything else but art.

I can’t be part of life as an artist. I have to be standing still at an easel, staring at blank white. I don’t feel like I can move through my days with the stealth and slippery ease that I desire, when I have to stare at my life and draw it. It is possible to describe not only people and events in paintings, but also memories, conversations, insights; but how much freaking longer does it take to figure out the way, to set up, to execute? And during that time, more life is slipping away.

I feel I can record a much more immediate, fresh, thorough lifestory in words.

Aiming at art made me renounce all but art. In contrast, being a writer lets me have art, too. It’s hard to resist that choice.