FINISHING THE HAT

When events take over the steering wheel of your life, sometimes you have no choice but to watch helplessly at the direction they take until you manage to recover some semblance of control back. You hope you'll be eventually returned to the stretch of road you were traveling along before you were diverted from your original destination. It's hard though not to feel as if the journey you were on before said events can never be resumed just as a wise philosopher once observed: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man”. And so as I return to Digital Renegade this afternoon after a brief hiatus the water around me feels strangely unfamiliar as I cautiously lower myself into the depths of my imagination once again and attempt to chart the course of my continual development as a writer and as a creative through the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

Writing as if there's no tomorrow is one thing, but writing for today with tomorrow in mind is also a workable compromise never forgetting the rich storehouse of the past always. So, with an eye on the past, present, and future, I'm thinking perhaps I can now be the writing equivalent of Cerberus that three-headed dog of the Greek underworld, all-seeing and fearless.

Until events knock me for a loop once more and my certain mind scatters like leaves on the wind.

Finishing the hat.
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat.

In Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece "Sunday In The Park With George" charting the French painter Georges Seurat's completion of his famous artwork 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte' the artist's credo is perfectly expressed in 'Finishing The Hat'. Re-acquainting myself with the song recently has led me to reflect on how accurately it conveys the necessity for artists to maintain a certain detachment from the world in order to reflect it. It makes the case for balancing that strange dichotomy of both the self-absorption of one's creative obsession and yet at the same time dissolving the ego into the totality of everyone and everything.

But when you're at the mercy of events, you are no longer looking through a window at the world around you but very much living amongst the subjects on the other side of where you would ideally prefer to be.

The desire to get back to looking at the world from the God's eye view of the artist as opposed to being enthrall to events in reality reveals to me how much creating art has always been a sanctuary from the chaos of life. As you get older you appreciate that Crusoe-like island where you can exist, undisturbed with just your imagination for company.

I suspect however that it's the artist who can exist on both sides of the window who is the one who has truly won the battle between sensitivity and volatility.

It may take some time, but I plan to become more battle-hardy next time things get fraught and write fearlessly into the night when my demons prevent me from enjoying sweet repose on my treasure island.