From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago and was so blown away by the scene of Lucia's hand dragging across a fogged-up window while her brother and lover fought below her, so blown away that I didn't know how to talk about it, the visual viscerality. I could dissect it for its symbology, its metaphor, how it became a fulcrum, the pivot point for the rest of the opera. I could write a whole dissertation on the movement, the tracks, each moment memorialized as the next unfolded on top of it... But no. It was glowing red, and I felt in my spine. I felt it. That is enough. That is everything.

And in that moment I remembered what I meant when I first laid claim to being an artist, what it felt like—the unnamed thing coursing through me. Before I cared about theory or the postmodern secret nods of artists to each other behind the closed curtains of their public faces, before I knew the pasted on smiles of openings, the things we were supposed to be talking about. The language and slight of hand that proved the point of the dissection that made what I had to say worth hearing, the worlds of prestige and tangled meaning.

I have been dog-paddling, forgotten entirely that I am a swimmer, grasping and scrambling to stay afloat, getting nowhere. It takes a willingness to stretch out long, point forward while looking down, have a little faith in muscle and breath and buoyancy. If—instead of all of this furious trying—I can let my muscle memory take over, I think I just might remember the cool meditative rhythm of my stroke: reach, pull, kick, breathe. Maybe after a little while inertia will take hold again, and movement will come more easily than the swirl of my own thoughts.