Dear Pen Pal,
I am writing to you from thin air; I have vanished, disappeared…When I walk these streets I am a blurry face, a scratch on the lens, the 1/3 second of a blink, no more here than there…
Do you believe it to be ironic that my art is at the mathematical mercy of an algorithm? I do, nauseatingly so. But yet, the cursor has stopped blinking, the manuscript has been flattened, printed, the eraser rendered useless. Therefore, the art is the art, the algorithm affects only the audience, and as I wrote as the final words of the art “I pray these paper planes land in the hands of those who need them most.” And may the flights be direct.
Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations that “Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was no better and no worse…Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it?” I have absolute conviction that Paper Planes is beautiful because it served to me a beautiful purpose. The words came from a raw, vulnerable, human, place, which makes it innately beautiful. Naturally, the book is a direct extension of me, a representation of my humanness, and thus a literary compliment is a literal compliment to my being, but do I beg to be beautiful? I ask it only of myself to be a beautiful person, I cannot ask it of another to believe me to be so. I am sure you relate, as an artist, to the feeling I am attempting to articulate. Is a painting hung on the wall more beautiful because it is hung on the wall? Is it more beautiful than the one slid under the bed? There is nothing more arbitrary than appraisal. What does the price cost an artist? How can the value of an unchanging painting fluctuate? My rhetoric is designed for digestion; questions to feel, not to answer.
Your response to my letter on the trope of the suffering artist echos in my ears often. The opening line, in which you reframe a truth that we believed as a feeling, delegitimizing the stigma, helped me to release from the self-sabotaging snare of “inevitable” or “mandatory” suffering. “As an artist, I am all too familiar with feeling like I had to suffer and be broken, to be able to create something truly beautiful and meaningful.” You made me feel seen when you opened the letter in this way, and you made me feel loved as a human when you wrote, “I hope whichever paper plane you’re on now takes you somewhere your protagonist can feel safe and loved.” You are remarkably intuitive and empathetic and your words have great effect. I imagine the feeling of feeling safe and loved and tears come to my eyes, but just in you wishing me the sensation I am overcome by safety and love, it is the opposite of a catch-22.
In Kyoto, I wandered dimly lit alleyways with warm splashing rain running down my cheeks as if an egg had been cracked on my head. I felt enchanted, “enchant,” a word that should be reserved for gems of moments, elevated affectation. It has been many years since I have wandered in this way, physically, because mentally, rarely have I found a home. I am the same human as the postcards of the past, but I have a less peripheral mind, everything is right in front of me now, the focus has been defined and my eyes are less jumpy than ever before.
This moment is an opportunity to mature. I want this year to be the hardest year of my life. I refuse to revolve around the sun and be back where I started. The revolution of a personal evolution should never be 360 degrees. The person that I am waiting to become is 365 days away and there is not an hour to waste. The semantics are important to address, the person is not “waiting” as if an inevitable passing of time will guarantee his arrival, that person is a pencil sketch on my skin, and I must chisel and whittle my flesh into the statuesque effigy, or live shamefully with the tracing of a me I could have been.
To draw your life is to breathe art. The canvas you paint is the fabric of time and space. Tragic and empty would an artist’s existence be if they only portrayed life and did not embody it. Are we not art? If art reflects life and life reflects art then this mirror is the medium, every thought and action a perpetual self-portrait. As water is wet, an artist is art. We are creations creating. The life that we live will be our masterpiece. The words that are written will hail in comparison to the script we are interpreting, I promise you. Whatever your art may be, may you be art. Be a book, a collage, a splatter of paint, be a chord, be a scene, be a rhyme, be a sketch, be a photograph frozen in time. May your days on Earth be a gallery and your mind a museum of memories, and may the highest appraisal of your art be that YOU ARE.
Love,
Ryan Anthony Dube
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