Art is made in
desolation and in desperate circumstances sometimes. Well, most of the time.
Very few secure, comfortable people think about creating something. What do
they think about? Beats me. I’m not one of them.
I recently broke
my foot, which forced me to sit down and write a book. Maybe I would have
written it anyway but definitely not with such pathos. Pain and pathos seem to
go together.
Last year, a good
friend of mine wrote a book about what was arguably the worst time in his life.
And yet, he wrote a wonderful, funny book—so wonderful, in fact, that he sent
it off to one—I repeat one—publisher
and they accepted it for publication. Do you know how rare that is?
His
book, Loaded South, chronicles his
adventures and misadventures driving a cab in Austin during the height of
Austin’s hippie-dippy, celebrity-ridden, blues-and-country-band-laden period.
It was a lost time in his life but out of it came an endearing tale. He took
something bad and made it something good.
Hailing
from Lubbock, Clay was familiar with that whole process of seeing the funny in
the ridiculous. (My favorite Clay story about Lubbock is that he once had a
history teacher there who told the class that Abraham Lincoln committed
suicide. When Clay objected, he was sent to the principal’s office.) People
say, even songwriters sing, that “you can’t live in Texas unless you’ve got a
lot of soul” and rightly so. It has to do with accepting what you have and
making it something wonderful.
Singer-songwriter
Sarah Jaffe has got a lot of soul. She’s from Denton, Texas, north of Dallas.
If you’ve been there, you know how much soul she has to have. It’s in direct
proportion to the loneliness and downright dreariness of that north Texas town.
But loneliness and dreariness can be advantages. They can be the backdrop to
beautiful thoughts. Sarah’s song, Clementine, is her beautiful thoughts put
to music. As you listen, you know there is a problem but you don’t know what it
is. She longs to be more delicate. She longs to be named Clementine. She isn’t either
of those things. But she is a great artist.
If
you want to see paintings full of longing, look at the paintings of Vincent Van
Gogh. The longing is palpable. He had so much passion and he had nowhere to put
it except the canvas. He became one of the most famous and celebrated artists
who ever lived. But in his life, he had nothing. Nothing but his art. He
accepted that and made it something wonderful.
Kudos
to Clay and all of the other creators who create something from nothing.
My published novels, The Legend of Juan Miguel and The Passion of Juan Miguel, are available on Amazon.com.
