Artist to Artist: Your War Brings Peace. I see you.

It’s brave to die in war. To get your guts blown up by the other guy.

If you’re lucky enough to live you may be stuck with the blood of your friends who weren’t so lucky, on your hands. This somehow undoes ones own sense of purpose in the matter.

My father is living testimony of such a bombed psyche, longing for pieces of his heart back.

He’s no longer in war, but it’s in him. Still. 

An artist though, he’s a soldier of a different sort, publicly blowing his guts out to people who could care less whether his guts made it out alive. 

A war hero (hopefully) gets validated for heroism. Artists though, don’t sustain an artists pulse with the validation of mere effort. The effort part goes unseen in a culture oriented around results.

Artists stand naked at war with their insides somehow making peace by extending the parts of themselves no one ever touched that if only the world could hold the hand of, then maybe they’d understand why they were in it. 

I’m not (literally) comparing the danger of war to a world where an artists only real issue is of the psychic earthquake of whether we feel safe enough to stand with leverage, holding our true selves up through it. Forgive me if I want to though.

I watch as a little boy in a very expensive jacket, with a very expensive desert and a very expensive screen in front of his face at a very expensive restaurant complain that the music is too loud as his doting mother cuffs his ears to armor him from being exposed to the bomb of the naked and exposed guts of my lover who will perform for hours long after the kids in bed and make less than his family’s dinner just to do it. 

Artists don’t choose art, they’re chosen by it, and sometimes, we’d like the power to un-choose it, but like war is in my father though he’s no longer in it, art will stir in us, until we dish it out with the spoon that stirs. It’s not easy to get away from, so we’re asked to face it when it makes absolutely no logical sense to do so.

There he is. Facing it. Again.

Though he’s center stage, he’s background noise.

I want to clap louder than the music to make up for the sometimes silent intermissions where people talk happily, laughing and loving together, inflicting a battle scar in their turned eye, while only he and I (who am across the room), know the necessity of the nakedness of this kind of soldier blowing out his own guts just to feel alive. 

Against my impulse, I stay quiet with the rest of them when silence comes because no solider gets out the same as they went in, no matter how much I want to preserve him in this battle. 

So I sit in the corner, soldier to solider, but in a position when validation isn’t ever immediate, so the silence bothers me less; writing, my art, inspired by his guts to say - again, forgive my desire to compare the two; but art; really is coming home from the war, unvalidated, just like Nam, over and over again wondering who and what its done for. And, just like Nam, sometimes it comes with a metal, and sometimes with spit, but usually…with silence.

And that’s the real killer. 

The real killer is knowing they’re watching, feeling your guts exploding all over them while somehow everything you care about, is made carefully, meaningless. 

But my love, you really are a warrior. The fact that you keep getting up to face the war of art brings peace to every artist who’s too tired to keep up on the field. 

Your effort is like the peak of an uncertain scene in an action movie. Me, rooting for the character who just fell off the log with heavy bags and only one bullet left in his rifle, into a raging river.

They might not see you in the river. They might not know how cold you are and that the current pulls you under just to stand on the other side of the bank. The bank that often feels like enemy territory when your art is deemed unnecessary or your motive, misunderstood.

But I do.

I see you like I (and the world) see my father. Not as the sexy blond who’s musically inclined, but a soldier of his own kind, with the persistence of will to constantly show up to the battle, which is half the battle.

Guts to guts; artist to artist; I see your blood.

You’re my hero. 

Your art is the only war in the world, that actually dissolves itself into peace.

For this, thank you for showing up to the battle. Every. Single. Time.