Fever

Cooking with its therapeutic unbuttoning of tightly drawn days. And art—with its anything but. And art—when understanding fails. And art—for you need a little madness.

A dash, a pinch, a spill.

Madness makes art pure. It can’t be learned. Can’t be taught. It’s a dissolution of everything you never knew. Making art is the what-happens-after-death equivalent of living.

The difference between the essay I have in my head and the one you see here is the same as the difference between your understanding of what it means and what I actually meant (I have no clue). We will only meet over what it means several years from now, to us.

We are losing this madness.

Somewhere along the way, an audience started to make art, instead of the artist. Art became an imitation of madness instead of what it always was: standing in a corner speaking to yourself.

We want now to be the storyteller instead of the person the story happened to. Like looking at a Jackson Pollock and going, I could have done that without turning into an alcoholic.

You don’t go to art looking for fulfillment. You go for the emptiness. Finishing a piece of writing always feels so much better than the beginning. But, like a traveler’s need to go back on the road the first night back home, the reason you return is because you have the emptiness of the page: its mystery, its madness, its myriad freeness.

You return to hear the blank page scream. To see the roads recede.

For a long time, I was trying to perfect writing. Perfection is the STD of change just as permanence is the fake orgasm of existence. I thought writing was a craft. And that, the more I did it, the better I’d get. All of that’s true the same way you should have sex only to procreate is true. It’s a birdbrained belief system we made up to make us feel everything we did need have a higher purpose and the more we did it, the closer we get to greatness. Bollocks.

What makes art beautiful is its unraveling temporality. Its mood swing. A purposeful solitude combined with a purposeless palette of madness.

A touch. A slip. A fall.

A fever.

Of madness. No one can judge it because you can’t judge it.
Of madness. It’s cannot be changed because it cannot be desired.
Of madness. It’s the only space to create from because it is the only space that is undivided.