I am young. Ahead, I can count on a humbling expansion of the small grains of wisdom I now keep. If I am blessed, I am guaranteed to one day realize that I am losing those I love at a rate that exceeds their acquisition. If I am lucky, I will see my own children grow to a certain age, until I am allowed to watch them no longer. If I am skilled, I’ll be able to pay for this strange existence without accruing substantial debt. And regardless of blessings, luck, and skill, the future promises a wide current of repeated failure. This is not a sad boy’s ramblings, but a stunned boy’s recognition that though we are not all created equal, we’re all worth feeling sorry for.
Yves Klein, a Frenchman long dead, once had a photograph taken of himself leaping from the side of an ordinary Parisian facade. Arms outstretched, he lept into the void, which existed somewhere between his contentment and the asphalt below. He vaulted himself from a point that is manageable with caution and a healthy sense of footing. But by his flippant ease, his unwillingness to acknowledge the cruelty of gravity, we’ve no choice but to feel the fear and horror he ought to be enveloped by, there in his small reality. In Klein’s leap, he asks that you not mourn his potential failure. He has created something for himself, he has found a way to enjoy falling in a fallen world. He has found his own adventure.
Last winter, by way of giving up a dream, I found myself able to have a better one. I willingly chose to apply to a graduate school in the cities that I felt I would have the hardest time living. And oddly enough, when the time came to choose, between Saint Louis and New York, I thought not of what my potential success in each place would entail, but what of my failures. The New York story was simple, millions go, millions make art, and millions fail to ‘make it’. Failure in New York is a common story. But what on earth, I thought, does someone do with failure in Saint Louis? And there I had my decision. Though most assumed I came here with a girl in mind, and though I used phrases like small program and cheaper living in my crafted explanations, the truth is that I was tired of taking easy guesses at the unwritten chapters in my own story. Dogged as I am with belief and purpose, I wanted to be at the helm of a narrative I could love, with fear and horror. Maybe I did come for the girl. Maybe I came to be free of her. And maybe I came for the river. The asphalt resides with a factual and unwavering presence below me, while I explore the quiet void.
Over the summer, I decided to change what I do – keeping only the paint. I decided that in addition to paying thousands of dollars to have representatives of an institution deem me a Master, I would begin painting exactly what I wanted to paint, and continuing to live in the way that I want to live in an utterly seamless way. Without a wordy pretense, I would childishly paint the way a passionate child paints – believing in my own make-believe. I would no longer rely on old tricks and tired ideas. And from this resolve I recognized the inevitability of failure. I would need to be prepared for something I had rarely dealt with and never loved. Yet instead of being mindfully prepared for Great Failure, I became obsessed. Just the chance of such calamity was the missing piece to all that I had ever believed, the hidden wonder that made me feel as though I had skipped decades of confusion, and yet humbled me like a silly boy and allowed me to continue being one, with purpose.
Last week, upon her simple appraisal of the ways in which I fail to properly move paint across a canvas, a professor threatened the possibility of my not being allowed to return to the program in January. And on Friday, another professor looked at the same canvases and offered a strong and somehow kind sense of emphasis on familiar words, as she implored You need to learn how to fail. There I was, failing at failure, and smiling toward a woman that must have been genuinely perplexed by the nature of my own existence. And this morning, sitting somewhere between my contentment and a cup of coffee, in an otherwise ordinary inbox, sat a message from a young man I’ve never even met, for whom I have no response. Before me unfolded a youthful drama I did not create or belong to, but had no ability to ignore. With me it left a sense of difficulty, a future failure all but promised. After a hard night and before an even harder day, it took the otherwise constant grin from my mind’s eye. It was a reminder that no matter what risks I choose, and no matter how much I romanticize my own impending doom, someone else is responsible for the air through which I fall, and the savagery of my landing.
Sitting here, in my studio, I eye a canvas upon which I have allowed myself to truly dream, with a palette that I am capable of foolishly believing was forged into being by my hands alone. Yet between here and there, in sharper focus, sit tubes of paint un-squeezed, ground by strangers in London whom I must quietly trust before I dream with the slow and tremendous liquid within. Without the many, the unseen, the Other, there can be no painting, good or bad as it may be, by itself.
Again I eye the canvas, which has become a situation muddy and lacking. To have what I want I must try for it. With each brushstroke a prayer, each step a hope toward her, I take my small dream and act as though it rests on the verge of possibility. I buy more tubes of vermillion, or a ticket. We control very little, someone else has defined our surroundings and circumstances. Someone else has defined the rate of gravity and the density of asphalt. With trust and respect for those decisions past, we must either stand confused, or jump. And once we realize how little we know about the air beneath, the hopeful or horrendous mystery it provides, and all that lies beyond which we can never control or create, we are Masters of our own reality.