Like gagged spectators on the riverbank

Today has been a different kind of day. You see, the ideal slips from time to time. It is not all poetic roses and prosperous heights, you know. It slips and the neck grows a rash. There are the irrational tics, the slumping on bed, the twisting of soles. If you watch closely, whatever the artist is doing, he or she is always accompanied by thoughts, sometimes dark thoughts, which follow them around like kids in a playground. Only these thoughts are meaner and tougher than any normal kid. At times, they are even like murderous stowaways. But this, we must preserve, is also what we must call art, and it may very well serve us well, that is to say importantly, that is to say we who try so hard to be there for the artist, to remember this. No, today has been different. True, but different. Some love was exchanged but there was an overflow of torment and self-doubt on the part of the artist, too. At one point I saw the eyes of a child and at another the deep grazing of senior wisdom. Of course, we must not interfere too much with any of this: the process of self-reconciliation has need too much for integrity. Besides, we are not the artists. No, we must let it all grow, even fail and rise up again at times, of its own accord. But we can urge it on, we must urge it on, quietly, internally, like gagged spectators on the riverbank, willing and willing the artist on against a backdrop of cultural blindness and spiritual amnesia as he or she cuts through the water like a bloodied but wilful salmon.