“She was passionate in a desperate kind of way”
I wrote this poem four years ago about this . . . frenzy that can come with being an artist. Having so many ideas swarming your brain like all the individual dots that make up static, with so little time that working through them one by one feels like trying to dredge an ocean with a teacup. A lot of what I do is sewing and soft sculptures, and I often wonder what will happen to the creetures I’ve made when I’m no longer here to hold and cherish them.
When I heard this song, I thought of her. It took me too long to finally post it here because I had too many photos I thought about using as background images with the text of the poem overlayed on top of them, but I got overwhelmed trying to line everything up, so here we are. Better late than never, right?
“She was passionate in a desperate kind of way;
she created art with shaking hands,
and even when smiling, her brow furrowed in the slightest.
She threw herself into obsession as if it was the last thing anchoring her to this world,
When she created, she cried out,
“I was here! I have brought something into this world! It may not have been what they told me to, but it is something nonetheless!”
And so she spent her life in a frenzy of creation:
drawing, painting, sewing, building, praying that these lifeless children would prove to some unborn generation that she hadn’t just existed, but that she had lived too.
That she, too, had fallen in love, had fallen out of it, had felt the warm embrace of the sun, had felt the cool relief of rain, had laughed and forgotten, had cried and remembered, had been so scared of the future, but continued in spite of it.
She created knowing her creations would outlive her.
She created because her creations would outlive her.
“May it be paint upon a cave wall, not a message scrawled in sand.”
And when she was gone, her creations remembered the desperate love she poured into them, and they used it to kindle their hope. They used it to keep them company in a world that had otherwise forgotten what humanity had once been.
And the goddess of the forgotten cradled them in her enveloping arms and whispered
“Let us remember, because they won’t.”
And in them, she laughed and cried and forgot and remembered and fell in love and watched the sun set and fell out of love and watched the sun rise and enjoyed existence without ever worrying about living.”
