It used to be that I could think of art as a refuge from such troubles. From the imperfections of life, one could take refge in the perfections of art. One could read a good poem--or better, write one.
Art was what was truly permanent, therefore what truly mattered. The rest was "but a spume that plays/Upon a ghostly paradigm of things."
I am no longer able to think that way. That is because I now live in my subject. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place.
There is a sense in which I no longer "go to work." If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am "at" my work evfen when I am not working. It is "my" work because I cannot escape it.
If I live in my sbject, then writing about it cannot "free" me of it or "get it out of my system." When I am finished writing, I can only return to what I have been writing about.
While I have been writing abot it, time will have changed it. Over longer stretches of time, I will change it. Ultimately, it will be changed by what I write, inasmuch as I, who change my subject, am changed by what I warite about.
If I have damaged my subject, then I have damaged my art. What aspired to be whole has met damage face to face, and has come away wounded. And so it loses interest both in the anesthetic and in the purely esthetic.
It accepts the clarification of pain, and concerns itself with healing. It cultivates the scar that is the course of time and nature, over damage: the landmark and mindmark that is the notation of a limit.
To lose the scar of knowledge is to renew the wound.
An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
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