all I write are epitaphs

I'm trying to ask myself "what's the point?" less when I'm painting

I used to amplify my impermanence by giving away the books I had read. the ones with my my thoughts written all up and down the margins, with my favorite words underlined.

Goodbye, fight club, with all my teenage feeling and scribbles. Goodbye, out stealing horses, the pages wrinkled with tear drops - lent to someone who would eventually matter less, in the grand scheme of things, than the fact that they never returned my things to me.

I scarcely held onto the art I created, paintings, which felt like my life’s purpose… not because I didn’t want to hold onto them - NO, I deeply wanted to document my life, and leave behind evidence of my existence - but because hanging over me was the idea of my death, that who “I was” would not survive me, would not exist in 100 years.

shouldn’t I just read and create and write short stories and paint portraits and yell out songs and do blind choreographies? to whom did I need to prove that here I was, I was once alive?

to make these objects sacred went against my belief in the now. which only goes to show how flimsy that belief was - that it could be so easily shaken by an object, a piece of paper, a clumsy sculpture. I felt then, that if I were really committed to enjoying the moment for the sake of the moment, or the process for the sake of the process, wouldn’t it be enough to have lived it?

wasn’t the present all we had?

even if you can leave a trace behind, what would be the point? you don’t get to enjoy your legacy. you’ll be dead.

but now I answer these questions differently. I am proving to no-one but myself that I am here, when I paint, when I finalize a poem. and I live to pass the torch.

what does matter to me is reaching others somehow. and when I read works by dead poets, look at paintings created by dead painters, I see cave drawings on wikipedia dot com, I am touched.

imagine the hands pressed to the rock, and the people extending them, laughing, painting over each other. we are really not so different.

one time i held a black and white photograph of my great grandfather, who was young in a white shirt. the photo was about the size of 4 postage stamps. when I flipped it over, I saw, written in my great grandma’s beautiful handwriting, “my fine husband.”

that he posed, that she thought to write - that mattered so much. more than any ideology, more than any point of view, this is the tradition I subscribe to, and this is the thing worth doing. we have to say “I exist!”