The Artist's Burden

When is it that we really start to mess up? There is this thing with creative people. They have this very high taste for beauty, and that ends up ruining them sometimes. If you're creative, you got to have courage. You got to go out and explore. You got to search for that experience of beauty that you aspire for in your life. And you need to be practical. You can not expect the people around you to give you that experience. You got to find that on your own - by stepping out, by keeping awake, by obliterating your soul of all the inertia that holds you back. We are born with this itch in our heels. We got to live this way. Because there is no other way. 
When you feel dissatisfied, lonely, lost, confused, it is this itch, waiting to be satisfied. The process of growing up seasons all that is ordinary in us and blinds our senses to our own needs. Do not let this happen to you. Do not forget to express your needs to yourself. Do not chain your soul. You're born with the burden of a thousand worlds waiting to be explored.

Encore

Then, there'll be times when you'll be there. When you'd have done everything you wanted to do when you were ten years old, or twenty, or a few years younger. Then, there will be a moment of calm, an eerie silence, a void in the world of your dreams. Success can be scary. It will be scary. You'll be solitary, you'll be scrutinized and misinterpreted, you'll be loved by many, but not for who you really are. No matter whether you are a writer, an actor, a musician, a dancer, a painter, to the world you're just an entertainer. They wouldn't know where to stop asking you for an encore. There will be times when the noise of encore will transcend from the ears of the entertainer to the ears of the human being who craves for silence. There will be a blurring of the boundary between the entertainer and the person, the beauty that is created and the beauty that really is. You will not be expected to stop. You will not be forgiven failures. That is why you need to know not just your passions but yourself. That is why you need to realize that you are more than your passions, you are also your failures and disappointments. That is why you need to learn to forgive yourself.   That is why you need to learn to fail.

Oblivion

Fling me back in oblivion

where I could paint you

with naked desires,

no eyes on them

Where you would smell

the fragrance on you

and know I have

stroked my brush again

and changed something

tiny, and impossible

for you to find

but never letting you be

the same

I would shroud a shade of you

with purple 

and love you until

I wouldn't remember 

what you really are beneath

Thats when I would start over

bottom up

to reshape, refactor,rearrange, 

my reasons of loving you






Linked to One Stop Poetry. Visit them to read other poetry and also Shay's brilliant opinion on what makes good free verse. 

Letting Life Happen

It has been a hectic blogging spree for me for the past few days. I have met and made friends with a lot of amazing people in the blogosphere. These are friendships that transcend space and boundaries, because when art speaks to you, it speaks to your soul. It inspires you to create. To live. To slow down. To breathe. 

Art is alive. It is not the artist. It is more than what the artist is. Because it is also what the artist wants to be. The artist is human. Art is her attempt at things more celestial. It is her attempt to dream things that are somewhere above her, in a place more glorious and more beautiful than the world she lives in. An artist lives multiple lives, dies numerous deaths. Art is those lives and deaths that are not her own, but that she experiences every day. It is the dance she was too awkward to dance, the song she could never strike that right note of, the painting she spilled wrong colors on, the dessert with an extra pinch of sugar, the verses that never rhymed. Art is the artist's imperfection. It is what makes her go on. She loves what she creates, but it never satisfies her, because she has a taste. For utter brilliance. She explores and pushes her human limits expecting a new glimmer every time. She is always trying. Never, ever content. Art is her child. She suffers to give birth to it, and she is reborn when it is born. She protects it from mediocrity, and nurtures it in details. She knows it is not perfect, but she loves it none the less. Art is the mark of her affair with life. A passionate, ignited affair, the flames of which burn her soul and keep her thirsty all the time.

I am going to take a break. And allow an inspiration to engulf me, till I write my next post. I am going to lay back for a while and allow that inspiration to happen.

The Village of Dance

I am thankful to my friend for directing me to this link. Nrityagram is a word with Sanskrit roots that means 'Dance Village'. I am not a dancer. Yet. But I have always dreamt of being one. And knowing about places like this inspires me immensely. Some day, I'll pack my bags and head for this village, to learn and live dance. Not being able to dance has always felt like a handicap. I wish to be able to express myself in this beautiful form of art that has the ability to transform one to a realm of greater things. I wish to experience the liberation of portraying a story - human, dramatic, real, surreal. I wish to be able to communicate to something deep within me, positively dark and unknown, something glorious and unexplored. I wish to be able to dance some day and forget there is, or ever was, an audience.

Some day.

Toy Story

What is true art but something that evokes emotions - genuine, sharp emotions. While I passed by Channapatna, the land of toys, I stopped by to admire this native and old form of wooden toy making, and I spotted this one (the picture above). While all the other toys will also adorn the house and bring a smile to a child's heart, this one- single piece, lying in a corner, seemed to have a tale of its own. There is sadness, ignorance, experience, and a haunting silence about this toy that makes it a masterpiece in my eyes. The couple shake their spring necks under their loaded heads, and in the attempt to amuse, they screech a muted story of toil, poverty, negligence, burdened love, and of an anonymous artist who sat down in a corner to pour out his stories in his work.