Day 360: Slime

In this coffee shop thinking about Art. Like the Buddha. Say my name and wash your mouth with soap. It's nothing. Words. Shut up thinking art or nirvana and get making and living now.

Old Bukowski had it right. You spew up what's in your gut and if it's bile and saliva you cheer the same and move on. Go down to the soil bed and create your pottery and then haul it in the trash. You don't snuffle around building a cathedral of poetry with perfect pillars and starched white walls polishing your marble pretending to be finding God in the blinding beauty. Just work with what's there. Worm guts and peat and slime. And if on occasion you find a glimmering opal, well, you kiss its sweetness - then fling it over your shoulder and move on. You move on and you move on and you move on.

This is art. This is life. Photography - you don't sit shining faces with radial dials and bringing down green saturation and making the perfect preset. Go fucking out and click that camera button. You look at light and you look at lines and you look at life. Keep clicking and failing and trying and going. Make bad art. Make it and make it. Love the making - not the having made.

Time for polishing, for sure. Polishing a jewel has its place. But that's 1% of your job. Don't do it all the day, as an excuse not to go down to the soil and get your hands dirty. Art is haggard lowly poverty work, it has to begin this way, or it'll never be worth anything at all. You have to love it when it's poverty work, have to be able to give yourself to it then fully, or you don't want to do it - only want the feeling of having done it. So roll sleeves and thrust hands in mud and don't ever dare speak of Art.

......

Hand Made in England, wall sign says. The light is coming in largely through those front windows. The burnished bronze backplate wall is shining and lamps hanging in front are just little lights hanging in space. It's all wonderful. The light is shining across her face as she watches yabbering on her phone, her friend sipping big coffee, handclasped, and they chat. Green sneakers. Silk shirt of mustard and coral and amber. 

16 people in this coffee shop, 7 of them staring phones this very moment. 7 laptops screening out. Including this 1. And there I go a buzzing in my pocket and reaching before thinking for that smooth black obelisk of attention.

World happening away from our screens. Greenflies borning and dying in droves. Light filtering. Old patchy men in windowless rooms sipping beers in forlorn night. Heat coming off these city streets. Gentle music mumbling. Here's helical-striped drinking straws in jubilant bouncing reds and whites spinning static in moulded cases. Staid young lovers dancing motions saying you pick, no you pick, maybe we'll just order in. Lines a chimneys. Eggshell periwinkle sunset and smell of riping blossom and keys of Chopin tinkling out.

All to haze. Sun fading to one colour. Sad calling caterwauling duskset. Night belongs to insects now.