What follows is a Thing I Wrote for an application I still haven't submitted, motivated by a conversation I had with a cool girl who holds
salon de renart, our
highe arte collective, with me. We came up with the prompt together and then wrote our individual responses to it. Some parts of my statement have appeared previously in other
Proving Ground posts. Do please feel free to write up your own responses to the prompt and share them in the comments!
You pursue art as a lifestyle, a practice, or an experience. Given that context, who are you as an artist, what drives you to work with your media, and what do you most demand or desire from your artistic expression?
There are shadows at the crossroads of trauma and healing, and no map through the darkness save what we manage to put down ourselves while we wander. I have gone into combat, a warrior, and returned from battle with wounds long in mending. I discovered myself scattered across an inner landscape suddenly made harsh under the boots of marching armies—fleshy bits of me hung from dead branches, were mixed in with scree under thorny, desiccated scrub. I collected each moldering gobbet from wherever I could find them, made a pile of my own remaining viscera, and began the slow sorting process, sifting through my leftovers to see what could be salvaged.
I am afflicted with a poet's metaphors, Trickster's truths, a storyteller's mythic reality, and Raven's memory of the way things were. From the garbage heap of me I found a worn down fragment of the large chip formerly occupying my shoulder. It could serve as my strong right heel, if I ever stood again. There were all the shiny tracks my tears had made, which I carefully set to new courses carrying on the work of veins. My skin I found in ragged, mismatched strips. I did my best to mend them back, rougher than before, and thicker where I had to double over the material—I'd have to curl in a little to fit again. The body took on an approximate homuncular resemblance, diminutive and only near-finished. It was time again to quicken.
It's verse that enlivens me. Stories bind me into my form while freeing me to wander a dusty spiral track through a thousand new worlds. I have made my way back from death, but I am not who I was at the beginning. If I'm no longer so wounded, I am also not the Warrior I was. That was such a good version of me, though!, and I so enjoyed that life. What's left for me? What life do I lead at the other end of healing?
Thankfully, I tread a Pagan way, and so hold with reincarnation; I just didn't expect it would happen in this lifetime. Warrior-that-was makes a Bard just fine. A Goddess Priest, even better. What a wicked sense of humor Ol' Trickster has. There is art to create, and not all of it to hang on a wall or put down on a page—the art and the spell are the life that are left once the boy dies for the Warrior, who dies for the man, who perforce lays his life for the rest of his days at the altar, an offering of thanks.
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loved
