A Brief Homage to the Jersey Shore

 

 with prayers for Sandy’s victims, both the people and the places they love

 

Every other summer or so, we head down the shore in Jersey.  It’s never just my family and me, but always a caravan of friends and relatives traveling along the Parkway toward the shore points — car after car packed with children and boxes of pasta, gallons of homemade wine, loaves of Italian bread fresh from Arthur Avenue, pounds of prosciutto and mortadella wrapped in white butcher paper, batons of homemade salami, and hunks of provolone that were toted in pocketbooks from Italy through customs in New York City.

I live among grown ups who give to relaxation the same vigor they give to work.  They put everything they have into both.  For most of them, trouble and struggle are the fixed points of their days, and these good times are the little break of light in the clouds.  They reach for the light like plants stuck in dark pots, and they’ll curse anything or anyone that tries to get between them and the light; this includes cops, hotel proprietors, and their own children.

A block of kitchenette-equipped rooms at a hotel in Seaside Heights has been reserved.  Our caravan rolls in like an invading army.  I am one in a squad of some twenty children, disembarking from station wagons, tearing into the warm salt air, screeching with liberation after the near two-hour car ride.  While the teenagers step out of the cars more coolly, slowly, than us children, aviator sunglasses hiding their eyes, fingers running through hair feathered and teased.  They help unload brown bags of groceries and luggage.  Each family sets up camp in its own room; but every room is everyone’s room, all doors are open to me.  In every photo I’m in on these trips, I am in the arms of someone different — in the arms of mothers who are not mine, of teenage siblings who are not my siblings: But they are my mothers and they are my brothers and sisters.

After the sun goes down, we move in a pack toward the boardwalk.  Its mechanical clanks, its neon and high-wattage-bulb lights create a carnival facade across the air above the thrashing ocean, making the water, all tangled with the moon’s great tug upon it, seem less menacing.  I can already smell the sweet white powder sifted atop the funnel cake my daddy will buy me; I can hear the ding of the game stands, anticipate the balloon atop the clown’s head growing and growing as I shoot the water gun into its mouth, vying for my stuffed bear.  But the grown-ups walk leisurely in their sandals and summer shorts, agonizingly slow for us children who flutter around them like wings, hoping to propel them faster toward the great fluorescent merry-go-round, the shivering roller coaster, the dizzying teacups.  Finally, we reach those wooden planks and pound across the boardwalk, mixing into the stream of sunburned people, the parade of people holding ice cream cones and slices of cheesy oily pizza, with the barkers hollering two plays for a dollar always a winner step right up…

Not the Log Floom, but still some boardwalk fun.

On one corner of the pier, my siblings and I hand our tiny paper tickets over to ride the Log Floom, which hovers over the Atlantic, and from the top of the tracks I can see the dark waves slapping against the beams of the boardwalk way below us, and how wild the ocean really is, how deep, how dark; just before the log-shaped car we sit in launches us rollercoaster-style into a pool of chlorinated water below, I look down and see my parents standing beneath the starry sky, the Himalaya behind them spinning its little cars in a blurring circle while the DJ blasts record after record of dance songs and warns everyone to hold on.  My father has his arm around my mother, his left hand on her right shoulder; my mother holds the bear my daddy shelled out dollar after dollar for me to win, and I feel giddy and loved, feel summer and the magic of the shore flitter in my belly as my big sister grabs my little hands from the metal safety bar and yells, “Hold them up over your head!” And our log floom car sails down the ramp, through the ocean wind; our screams just another high-pitched note in the chorus of boardwalk music.

The next evening, at the hotel, the grown ups take it upon themselves to drag all the patio tables together to make a long, unified table at which all of us can sit to eat, because our mothers have cooked some five pounds of spaghetti and the grill has enough meat on it to feed all of Jersey.  The adults stay up long past the point when we children, sun struck, well-fed, collapse onto laps or pullout sofas.  They drink wine, then espresso, then limonata and Sambuca; they eat pasta, then steak, then salad, then nuts fresh from cracked shells; they smoke cigarettes, laugh laughter of howls, and tease each other with double entendres until the early hours of the next day dawn.

When we wake in the morning, the owner of the hotel, a middle-aged American woman who lives with her reticent husband, is angry because all the furniture is rearranged and because the other guests (there are other guests?) are complaining.

“You can’t just go taking over the place!” the hotel owner says to the grown-ups. “Don’t you know how to behave?” she asks. “You can’t just move things around to suit you!”

This is how they know to behave — eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

And they can, actually, they believe, in their infinite stubbornness and pride, transform with their own two hands any damn place on God’s green earth they set their feet upon.

When the hotel owner, not mollified, stomps away, hollering that we’re not welcomed to stay in her place again, my father sighs, says, “What does she understand? She has no family.”

The Window You Cannot Close

On Loss

October 8, 2008 – October 8, 2012

“That which is lost be not found.”

                                -  The Winter’s Tale

He’s been gone four years and now you understand what people meant when they placed their hands on your shoulder and said, “It never goes away, but it gets better.”

You wonder, however, about the subjectivity of the word, “better.”

What people mean when they say it never goes away, but it gets better is – the loss never goes away, but the grief gets better.

You are no more okay with his death today than you were the day he died.

You are angry.  You are motherfucking pissed.  If you could, you would stand on top of Mount Sinai and thrust your middle finger up at the sky.  You know that is blasphemous.  You also know that is what loss looks like, and the Lord has to accept it, even if He does not like it.  Just like the rest of us.

Where does grief go?  It’s a mystery as great as the mystery of the loss.  The way it arrives, solid as lead, and then, dissolves.

For a time, day after relentless day, you suffer, walking through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing all kinds of evil, until one of those days you thoughtlessly stop and lift a tulip and admire it.

You are surprised when you realize your grief abated for a few minutes.  It forgot to consume you, or you forgot to be consumed by it.  You are surprised when you realize you thought of something else, felt something else, if only briefly.

And those moments become more numerous.

A little bit at a time, the way hills of snow melt as spring starts to show itself in a brighter sun, your grief begins to thaw.  Steam lifts off cold.  Water glistens as it rolls off ice sheets.

Some people have trouble with this.  Some people equate the lessening of the pain with the lessening of the loss; they think that if they’re in less pain, they must suddenly care less about who they lost.

You want to reassure those people: Nothing you can do lessens the loss.

The death of a loved one is an unsolved crime.  A crime that will never be solved, for which no justice will ever serve.

You live with what is unresolved, that’s all.

You go over the facts of the crime.  You replay the events on the evening or morning in question, wonder if you could have done this, should have done this, should have said this, what if you had tried this …

And people say, “You can’t do that to yourself.”

But all you have is memory.

Pieces of you died when he died.  Some were pieces that needed to go, anyhow.  Some were good pieces of you.

The way life once was died when he died.  Maybe you can reclaim some of those pieces, but there is no reclaiming that life.

So there is, then, a double loss – the loss of the life itself, and the loss of the life you had when that person was in it.

The world turns to winter when Demeter loses Persephone; the Wicked Witch appears when Dorothy loses Aunt Em; Orpheus descends into hell when he loses Eurydice. The landscape changes.  Life changes.  The world is different.  Enter the dark things…

The loss is compounded by the mystery, and the wound grows thick and deep.

And the wound grows thick and deep.

You now know this is what people mean when they say “acceptance,” or at least, what they should mean: You cannot accept the loss.  You must, however, accept that the life you had is gone.

           This is the way the world ends

           Not with a bang but a whimper.

Loss is a window inside of you that will not close.

You are the curtain that billows and shudders when the wind passes through.  So that some days it is harder to get out of bed because of the cold; so that some days your joints ache with the melancholy weather passing through.  But you cannot close the window.  It is in you, agape, forever, a vaporous void shaped to fit your particular frame.

The poets, the wild-haired courageous, the gypsy-eyed saints, the ones who spit in the eye of the beast, the ones who slam their glasses down and wipe their mouths with the back of their hands saying, “Pour me another,” saying, “For the lost,” they don’t try to scrub the dark surface of life clean.

Alchemists, they turn the mystery into magic, pain into illumination, nightmares into bonfires.

For the past four years, you have tried to do the same.  Some days you are better at it than others.

With their shirts ripped open at the chest, with their hearts ripped open, they jump onto tables with their boots unbuckled and cry out and stomp and sing.

The song goes on even though the subject of the song is gone.

 it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive …

The bluesman strokes his guitar and moans a hymn; the choir harmonizes the mystery; the Irish keen.

The song goes on.

The song you sing by living is in honor of him.

You will sing for him until you have no more breath with which to sing.

You will not try to cover up the wound that grows thick and deep and you will raise your glass.  You will neither pretend the loss heals nor keep silent about that fact so as not to disturb the gentile.

For 29 years he was your comrade.

You lived in the trenches together for 29 years.

Like a soldier, you would have taken the bullet for him.

You would have given him part of your organ, would they have let you.

But now all you have left to do is sing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Through a glass darkly

Photo: Benjamin Goss

 “’Cause it’s hard to tell when you’re in the spell

  if it’s wrong or if it’s real,

  but you’re bound to lose if you let the blues

  get you scared to feel …”

                                                    – Joni Mitchell

Memory lays tracks in your blood.  If you are not careful, when a different train comes, hauling brand new cargo, you will remember what someone brought you before, and you will see the new cargo as no different than the old.

If someone, say, once brought you nothing but black top hats, then, if you are not careful, thereafter, anything someone brings you will look like black top hats.

But maybe you are being given roses.

It is hard for you to say, “roses.”  Especially when it comes to love.

You can say “black top hats” and “broken glass,” but “roses” feels like gullibility.

I’ve got a whole railroad line running through me, you say. Too much iron and steel to be fool enough to say, ‘roses.’

And so it is.  And so it will be; unless you can learn to see more than black top hats in your newest lover’s cargo.

You should talk about love simply.  It’s hard to talk about love simply.  Love can be the broom smacked against the parlor rug, sending up all the dust, unsettling all the settled things.  It gets in the air, in your hair, in your eyes, until the world around you is dusted in confusion.

To trust, to distrust.  To believe, to not believe.

Why do you believe you are more damaged than others?  When did you learn to trust black top hats over roses?

Take a minute.  Think of it.

Is it possible every lover comes hauling darkness?

Is it possible the darkness is in your eyes, shading everything you look at?

The lenses of glasses come in different colors – gray, yellow, pink.  You choose them at the department store, thinking of how you want to see the world when you look through them.

To look at love is the same.  The shade you see through is the hue love will wear.

You do not wear the shadings of disbelief well.  They taint your embraces and turn you melancholic.  You grow stronger in your independence and weaker in your openness.  You fall across chairs like a swooning woman and touch your hand to your forehead.  You look over shoulders and see nothing worth harvesting.

Maybe, this time, you are being given roses.

Maybe you deserve roses.

I don’t know, is it the cliché of the flower?  It is not a perfect flower.  Contrary to the poets’ odes — with its thorns, how easily the petals bruise — it is more realistic than perfect.  More realistic than perfect.

Love is not perfect.

You are not perfect.

There are too many black top hats in the world for your heart’s doorstep to receive every one of them.

Once, you watched a dark insect hauling a bright green cricket between its spindly legs, up to its nest.  The cricket was as large as the insect.  The insect had to rest between each attempt to lift it.  It aimed to use the dead cricket to build up its home; to make it part of its home.

The things you carry that have died must be used to build yourself into something stronger.  You must not let the things that have died rot inside of you, so that when someone hauls roses along your railroad, blowing that loud whistle in the name of your love, you open the great side doors, and, inside, see only dark things.

There are too many black top hats in the world for your heart’s doorstep to receive every one of them.

Why is it easier to believe in disbelief?

The story written on the Cross is not meant to be the story of the suffering, but the ascension from it.  You don’t have to believe in Jesus to understand that.

Your story is not simply that once upon a time you suffered.

In an infinite universe, there are infinite possibilities.

Pick one to believe in — without darkness, without memory.

Life is Lived Through Accidents

Image: Victoria Cali

“‘Cause when I was young,

       oh I was a wild, wild one …”

            – Rickie Lee Jones

(Dear lovely blog followers: an earlier version of this piece was not supposed to make its way to your in-boxes last night. Please disregard it.)

You thought love a garden, full of ripe things you could pick when you were ready to.  You would simply lift your long skirt and, barefoot, walk into the garden and take what you wanted.  You thought love a garden that did not need tending.

You thought love a fountain that would never run dry.  When you grew tired of running, you could rest against it, pump its white handle and the love you wanted would flow out — clear, satiating.

Daphne ran through the forest fast and wild as a doe.  She said to hell with men and to hell with love.  Even a god was not tempting to Daphne.  Even Apollo, that romantic, that charmer, could not impress her or woo her away from her freedom.  Freedom.  Daphne ran, bare feet crunching over thyme and honeysuckle.  Her father was a river god, so that flowed in her blood — the pulse of the river, the way it rushes toward a wider expanse.  So Daphne ran.  She did not think love was a garden or love was a fountain.  She did not think of love.  She thought of her self.

Life is lived through accidents.  Its rules learned in the clean up after each accident.

In one of those accidents you lost him.  He flew through the windshield like the most beautiful of birds and you let him.  Then your love was another wreck on the highway.

The old folk song:

Who did you say it was, brother?

Who was it fell by the way?

Oh, how you loved him.  But you were much younger then.  You did not understand that love is difficult — a thing that needs mending, tending, sacrificing for.  You couldn’t sit still long enough to mend.  He wanted to mend with you.  You wanted to swallow the world.  You wanted to swallow the world in one long, fluid gulp like a great whale, opening your jaw to take in the ocean and minnows, ships and silverfish.  You wanted everything.  You thought he would always come as the sea came — into you, without issue; the force of your love would float him in the flotsam of life’s current always toward, always into, your life.  You did not understand the force of love is not enough.  You did not know love is work.  You had to live it to learn it.

I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother

I didn’t hear nobody pray

When you come back to the garden the stalks are withered stems and the soil is stone.

And that’s how you learn that love is not a garden that flourishes without tending.

You go to the fountain for that cool drink of water you’ve begun dreaming of in your travels, and the fountain is dry and rusted; had it cheeks, they would be sucked in with thirst.

And that’s how you learn that love is not a fountain that waits for you to drink from it.

Ovid writes it so that Daphne lives happily ever after, or so it seems, rooted in the forest she once galloped through, turned to a tree one afternoon when Apollo has a good chase on her, her body transformed from flesh into bark, her fingers to laurel leaves.  But Ovid had never been a woman, running through life.  Put your ear to a branch and listen: Life is lived by accidents, she whispers.  Ovid is wrong; Daphne’s laurel leaves are not shivering with happiness.  Having learned by accident that it is better to love than to run, she must live with her losses.

Regret is not the same as remorse.  Regret is a desire to obliterate, remorse a wish to have been wiser.  You do not regret.  So you bring yourself to the confessional, the words trembling on the edge of your lips like droplets of water because, even all these years later, it still feels like a sin: To have been given a love like that and disregarded it.  To have tossed the keys into your purse after he sailed through the windshield and said, There’s more down the line.  Mending and tending and sacrificing, these are crafts, handiwork, branches of the arts.  When you were younger you were a flash flood; your love was lightning, it struck impetuously and vanished just as feverishly.  But it was no less true for that.  It was true as nature is true, and as wild.  Freedom.  Absolution.  You earned your losses like a soldier earns his medals.

Your sin was the sin of passion — that you loved life and wanted to live it.

And now there is no way back but forward.

I heard the crash on the highway

But I didn’t hear nobody pray…

Love, you say, find it in your heart to forgive me.

You Must Stay Drunk on Writing

Ray Bradbury

August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012

My piece on Ray Bradbury for The 22 Magazine:

Life With Ray Bradbury

And, breathe

“I’ve been trying to enjoy

       all the fruits of my labor …”

                                 - Lucinda Williams

The manuscript is done and off to where it needs to be.  Planning to take some time now to think and write about the dreams that break your heart.  And, of course, the beauty of living.

Grateful.

Check back soon…

Why it’s been quiet in these parts …

“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes you just need time to think, to take it all in, to sort it out, before you can let it back out of you.

More thoughts on the dreams that break your heart coming soon …

On giving more

“I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people, where it goes into their lives and nourishes them, changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their heads and makes them feel.  [Where] it isn’t vague.  It strikes against the very nerves of their life.  And in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.”

-Joni Mitchell

If you call yourself an artist, make art.

Tennessee Williams - working.

Outside the bar it was winter, and a woman in a grand fur coat that fluffed to her ears walked past the window.  They were sitting in the corner, away from the others, passing bits of who they were back and forth in a conversation that had, beneath it, a pulse of their growing attraction, a kind of warmth, like the cooing of something newly born.  Behind them, the traffic was thick and the sidewalks were busy.

“I want to make something lasting,” he said. “But I lose steam after the initial inspiration. I have a lot of first drafts, but no second drafts.”

“That’s because you don’t like to be alone,” she said. “You don’t like to lock yourself away from other people and work.”

“I feel like being out among people feeds the work. One is necessary for the other.”

She told him he might be right, but at this point he had only one and not the other; he was only out among his friends, meeting new people, spending his stories and ideas over cocktails so that even if he sat down and forced himself to write, he had nothing left for the page.

The waiter came over with the bottle of red and offered it to them like a question.  They nodded, then he refilled their glasses.  There were tea lights on the tables and the waiter’s hand elongated in shadow across the wood surface, then drew back when his hand drew back.

“This is the problem with people who have the urge to create but don’t,” she said. “You focus only on art as inspired fancy, and never think of it as the work it is. I’ve been writing my whole life,” she said, “and I just started to get good. I can’t possibly tell you how much I’ve written and revised throughout the years. How much I’ve thrown out. It’s a craft and you have to learn it. The only way you learn it is by doing it.”

“When I’m ready to sit down and write it, I will,” he said. “When the time’s right.”

“But then it won’t be any good,” she said, “because you haven’t apprenticed. You haven’t put in the work for it to be any good.”

She wasn’t sure if he was listening because what she said resonated, or because he wanted to touch her, later on, after the bar.  But then he paused, the glass before his lips, the wine giving a little swirl against the glass, threatening, for a moment, to spill out.  Then he nodded, a slow nod of consideration.  She thought he was  listening because it was an angle he hadn’t heard before, because many people thought of art as primarily a vacation from the normal, a deviation from their parents’ boring lives, say, and they had decided they did not want such lives, but they did not see it as work, as a trade.  They wanted above all to not be conventional, and so they had decided somewhere along the way that they were creative types, even if they never actually created.  As if creativity was accoutrement to a persona, and not an action, the result of which is a gift to the world, a gift against the world, with its brutality and its carelessness, a push back against that, a little love wrought in the darkness, a little beauty spit in the eye of the great ugly beast.

“Would you pick up a hammer and a box of nails and say, ‘I’m going to go build a house’?” she said. “When you’ve never learned how to build a house?”

“No,” he said, smiling, “I wouldn’t.”

“But because you have a sheet of paper and a pencil and you know how to spell you think you can build a book, something lasting, a story, whatever, whenever you want, just like that,” and she snapped her fingers.

He lowered his wine, smiling, and leaned back against the chair, like a chess player who’s been outmaneuvered.  He either understood or thought her moxie impressive, she couldn’t quite tell just yet.  She couldn’t tell if she was wounding him, which was something she did not want to do.  She was charmed by him and for a moment thought maybe it was his lack of this drive that would eventually make her no longer charmed by him, and so she wanted to be clear on this point.  She admired his gregariousness,  found it endearing, actually, she just could not abide others co-opting what she had given so much for – and so much to – without earning it.

“I can’t talk about writing with people who don’t want to put in the work,” she said, “it aggravates me. Call yourself something else,” she said, “but don’t call yourself a writer.”

The bourgeois desires of the bohemian

You have always wanted to be free to create.  You have the instinct of a romantic: When you felt your work was not so good, you yearned to have had polio as a child, like Frida Kahlo or Joni Mitchell, women whose periods of fever had created lifetimes of fever.  A fiery touch from God forging the exceptional, the visionary.

You wonder often if you have failed.  If everything you’ve decided you’ve decided wrongly.  Where you were tight, maybe you should have been loose, where you were free, maybe you should have been caged.  You hadn’t the constitution to be a true bohemian.  You think of Kahlo, say, setting her broken body back together by trading paintings to pay doctors’ bills, living with both her husband and her lovers in the blue house in Coyoacán, and the idea both attracts and repels you.  It is too much risk, perhaps, to live and die that way, unable to pay for chemotherapy if you need it, or a new set of teeth if you need them, and so on.  And what would others think of such sexual veracity?  Kahlo was a cripple and she behaved like a vigorous man.  She didn’t give a damn.  Sex made her feel alive.  The arms of her lovers healed her.  She apologized to no one for it.  She painted it.  She took it all onto her brush and she painted it.  Patti Smith once cleared an oven in a Lower East Side apartment of syringes before baking bread in it.  She pissed in old jars in a loft she lived in because there wasn’t any bathroom.  She fell in love with junkies and she moved like an eel, smoothly and darkly, through the waters of her youth.  All this both excited and unnerved you.  You knew you could never be that low to the ground, that grimy, that perilous.

Once you had gone to Memphis with your lover.  The motel you stayed in was low down to its core.   You wouldn’t even get underneath the bed sheets.  The room smelled like a suitcase packed with wet socks and old cigarettes.  There were stains on the ceilings and stains on the curtains and after you took a shower in that bathroom, you felt dirty just for having bathed in it.  Moss grew in the abandoned pool.  Men drinking 40s loitered along the balcony.  You slept on top of your lover that night.  His body touched the bed and your body touched his, you laid yourself across him like a plank so you wouldn’t have to touch any part of that room.

It has only been by failure — not by choice — that you have not attained all the comforts you want.  Even though you’ve listened to artist after artist say that those things would ruin you.  That money and safety and comfort make you fat.  You stop struggling in your soul and it is hard to create something that says anything worth hearing.  You have only been willing to risk so much life with your life, to risk only so much ostracizing from you family, to be only so strange, to be only so unconventionally beautiful before you reign it all in, pull it back: You make it safe.

You are always making things safe again.

When you run away you always run back again.

When you are wild for a period you are always tame, then, for a period,

as if there is a penance to pay for your freedom,

as if you owe the universe a balancing of the scales.

But still you’ve been wild, you’ve run, risked, been ostracized, strange, and disappointed the people you love.  They wanted you on a different path.  Something they could understand and define.  You went like a rag doll, this way and that, tugged here and there, pulled where you wanted and tugged back where they wanted.  You wanted to please them.  But you admired the people who sought to please no one.  Those who had been defiant from the start, setting out to make themselves in another image, a truer image than the one the world they had been born into allowed.  You admire these people, but you could never really allow yourself to be one of them.  At least not fully.  You love your hometown too much.  You love the very idea of a hometown.  When you plant bulbs in the spring you stare at the roots as if they are tarot cards or tealeaves.  You believe they have something to tell you, to teach you.  You respect your family too much.  You have never seen its members as idiots but as heroes.  They are heroic to you, made of stronger stuff and bolder.  They had come from the dregs and sought to be bourgeois.  You would have to relinquish that bourgeois to seek the dregs, and it seems so silly, to go backward, to throw away all they had worked for, all the mortar and brick and nails they had fought with, for some creative fancy.  So here you are, some hybrid creature — one half traditional, one half heretical.

You had another lover once, and he had disliked his family immensely; he disagreed with every bit of the way they saw the world.  You were not like that.  You did not understand that.  Bruce Springsteen never left the place he came from, but he went so far.  He made a name for himself and created a breathing, illuminating narrative arc, and still he felt obligated to something more than himself; he wrote, “… I paid the big cost, inside I felt like I was carrying the broken sprits of all the other ones who lost,” and you understand that.  You understand what it is like to feel like a vessel, carrying all the people who have come before you, carrying all their struggles, all they have done and sacrificed to create you.  You can’t take that for granted.  You can’t dismiss it.  You know people who do dismiss it.  They say, “That’s not me, that’s my family,” and this is a concept foreign to you.  It is like a baby telling his mother that is not his milk, but her breast.  It is unnatural, bizarre.

You have felt too old fashioned for the wild, too wild for the old fashioned.

But you love them both equally.

You are both of them equally.

This division is the chisel that shapes your life.

Out of this your art is forged.