the conceit of the hungry artist is the fevered obsession with the new. look, i’ve done it again. look, i’ve more to offer. look, i still have value.
you can never revel, you can never rest on your laurels. keep scratching. keep clawing. one day it will suddenly click… Enough… i have finally done Enough… the insect in the back of your skull laughs wryly. fat fucking chance! you will never feel comfortable. there’s always more room to fail. even when you succeed it’s right back to failing. nothing worse than failure. nothing worse than Falling off.
fading into irrelevance. plummeting to obscurity. the fall from grace. what a fate worse than death! how dare you stop bleeding for us. how dare you stop giving us what we owe. we paid attention. we fed you. how could you stop? how could you do that to us? we need more. we always need more. do it again. one masterpiece? give me millions. never stop striking gold or all of your sweat is a joke.
you must never be happy… it’s antithetical to your role. sacrifice yourself, give up everything, the more you suffer the more you matter, the deeper it becomes, more profound, wow, gawk, circus act, gaze upon this tortured soul, look what his insanity drove him to, look, look harder, look, the beauty, the beauty in his suffering, look, how pious, look how he suffers for us.
the older i get… the more it occurs to me how many of us have been poisoned. every waking moment, Make, every emotion, Publicize, every anguish, take it, become the Alchemist, if you don’t turn your pain into gold what’s the point of pain. Don’t suffer for nothing. Suffer up. Suffer on. Suffer through. Push. never rest. never heal. never stop. never breathe.
you don’t have to do this… there’s a way to live outside of sigmatic impalement. you can be an artist without bleeding. you don’t have to give everything in your soul up to the world. you can keep some. you can keep as much of it as you want. it’s not your duty to be small and strong and weak. you can just be.
your claws can be dull. you don’t always have to fight. sometimes… yes… but you can stop. you can breathe. it’s okay. it’s fine. you don’t have to be draconic. you can be a rock. you can do nothing. you can never do anything again and still be important. you can do nothing forever if you want. i will still love you. you can just sit like a rock at the bottom of a river. forever. if you want
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
