Plugged

Some say the best artists are the ones who have suffered the most because their pain bleeds out into their words or through their paint or music. The anguish drives them into frenzied, masterful expression.

Try as I might to be a best artist, to alchemize on the tumultuous emotions seizing and tossing me about, my anguish has stagnated tight within me. For weeks and months I sat and stared, willing the words to come while I mentally scrolled through images of things that are plugged. Pigs with plugged bums so all their goo doesn’t come out the other end as they roast on a spit. The little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Constipation after a fondue night. Boat bottoms. An inflated pond raft, ours currently sitting in the barn covered with some mysterious poo pellets of small animals congregating nightly upon it to discuss the day’s events, and I guess they just shit where they party. I admire their ability to be so vulnerable and so completely void of ego that they can just go about their biological business while carrying on discussing the good old days of the bubonic plague and what sort of treasures they found in the garden whose tender surrendered when the compost went rogue and turned into Sasquash. I thought of the little twisty knobs at the bottom of a hot tub that holds all the water in. Balloons and giant exercise balls. Me.

I, too, have been plugged. The pain of the last many months - of really, truly coming to the realization that my former life chapter has closed - churned inside of me with nowhere to go, mucking like chum in the water seeking to settle in crevasses between my organs.

Knowing all the while it would feel better if I simply let it out...If I just would sit down to write my feelings or splash paint on the walls or smear colors and dances across the earth, the flow would help my healing. If I could keen enough into some sort of human expression…But instead, I held it all in and I leaked. I leaked all over the car and the bed and the floor. I tucked myself into the bathroom after a meeting, and I leaked. I walked from one building to another, and I leaked. I would see something that reminded me of my past life, and I leaked. What happens to all that wasted expression just dribbling all over the earth? What if when I finally sat down to write, that artistic chum had oozed out in my tears and been soaked up by the pavement, evaporated into the sky, or scooped up by the muses who carry away creative excess to be recycled elsewhere and bequeathed to someone who wouldn’t waste it so frivolously?

That is the risk with staving off expression – with drowning in noise of news and stories and chores – that you leak, or worse, burst when you least expect it. But in doing so, I would contend that the pressure rebuilds itself as within a gurgling, churning stomach, and will not subside until you finally go back and listen. The danger is that by the time you go back, there is nothing left to say. The colors have dulled. All that is left has settled in your organs; the feelings and words have tucked into the fibrous pockets of your bones, and the words won’t come out anymore. They are pulsing through your veins hitching free rides to your blood cells. And to recollect them for the sake of creation – to bring them back from the depths – would be a greater feat than Persephone’s return from Hades because at least she was fully intact. She was a human (or goddess, rather), not an essence, split into countless fragments and ensconced into a host body. How do you collect dust particles from the water or smoke from the air?

Maybe the answer is you don’t. The answer is you simply welcome the chum that has settled within you as part of you. Maybe you just send your words in after and hope that they alchemize this new constitution of your being. But that takes time. Time and words to transform (yet again) from the inside. What else is there left to try?