This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.
First: There’s a small handful of new giclee prints available in the shop. A few originals have been taken down (temporarily) so I can submit them to shows – two down, two more submissions to go. Two local, in Tampa, and two in London. Fingers crossed – Spring season is getting up to speed, after the lull of shows for the holidays. Also, I’m working on the matching copper hammered rings to the fine silver ones. No new pens – unless you missed the caligraphy nib holders – I’m working on some major designs, and they’re giving me some trouble.
And off we go.
I scrolled across a song Tuesday night (more or less tonight, at the time of this writing) that brought my heart to its knees.
“What if I run away to Mars?
Would you find me in the stars?
Would you miss me in the end
if I run out of oxygen?”TALK, ‘Run Away To Mars‘
It is now 3am, and I am sitting in the tub, waiting for Tylenol to kick in, and listening to it – over and over – savoring the feelings it brings to the surface.
Savoring. Savoring because this moment is only going to happen once – whatever it is, this moment too shall end. We will stop feeling everything some day. The brilliant flashes, the warm glows, the moments that feel like mushroom clouds rolling inexorably towards us. They are all temporary, and somehow impossibly sharper for that ephemerality.
When you savor something, especially a difficult some-thing, you get to know it. You begin to understand its shape in your body. It becomes familiar, and as you learn that you’ll survive it, it begins to lose its terror-hold over you. Like the hard-edged bite of the cold so sharp it takes your breath away – yet you still lift your face to the wind. We savor the sting, this contrast to our warmth, knowing it will end when we go back inside. Savoring, experiencing fully, all the nuances and shades, down to the tiny details of how it moves through your body, is something we learn to do – with intention at our best, and with a white-knuckled awareness the rest of the time.
The gift of Art – which, for this letter, I’m defining as human expression for purposes other than and beyond meeting rudimentary survival needs – is the ability to give us an experience to savor. Think of the song that always cheers you up, the outfit that you wear to feel powerful and confident, the movies you watch and the stories and poems you read when your heart is broken, your faith is shaken, your hope is faltering, when your courage is failing. Occasionally, an experience to savor is handed to you out of the blue – you find yourself moved, unexpectedly. A photo of injustice that catalyzed a fury you didn’t know you had within you, a story that transported you completely out of your life and into the hero’s, a song that so perfectly encapsulated ache or longing that you wept, wept in empathy rooted in your old heartaches, for the times you hungered, too… and you find yourself sitting in the tub at 3am, savoring.
The thing is…
Actually, have you ever seen that experiment demonstrating Resonance, the one with tuning forks? Here’s a nice video demonstration, but the basic premise is that you put two identical tuning forks near each other (they HAVE to be identical) and hit one, and then the second will start ringing. You can even stop the first, and the second fork will continue to ring out. The vibrations of the first tuning fork cause the air surrounding to move at the same rate as the fork you hit, and the air then transmits the vibrations to the first fork, causing it to vibrate and ring. You can do this with more than one additional fork, as well. It’s WILD. (This is an oversimplified version of how sound perception works: things move, air moves, air moving causes other things to move, we register the movement of the air as sound when it causes the air next to our ear drums to move.)
Art is the air, and we are the tuning forks.
Someone has to vibrate first. Someone has to feel that forceful impact of the hammer and start ringing out first. Someone has to be willing to take the chance that they will be the only fork ringing out. Someone has to have the courage and hope that someone else out there has felt the same vibrations, the same forces, and will ring in resonance.
Artists are the ones who ring first.
However willing you might be to ring first, you cannot ring at a frequency you are unwilling to experience yourself. By nature, you have to be the one to feel the full force of and experience the vibrations at a fuller volume than those who will ring in resonance. You must be willing to fully, deeply savor any frequency you hope for others to respond to in your work. If you want to move people deeply, you have to be willing to experience those depths yourself, or your work will ring hollow.
This is why sometimes I seem to go a little sideways, why I seem so intense, why I let myself be as emotional as I am, even if it means I end up struggling because of it for right now: I want my work to move people, and it won’t do that if I am unwilling to let myself be moved. I want, desperately, for someone to someday stand in front of my work, to savor their experience of it, and, across time and space, hear me ringing out in resonance: You are not alone.
It’s what I want for myself.
A.Markov
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This was originally sent as a newsletter for Of Pens & Paintbrushes. If you’d like to get this directly in your inbox, you can sign up here, at the Newsletter sign up page.