MUSINGS and other writing by Mark Kolke

LIFE OR ART

Monday Sept. 25, 2017

Lately I’ve been writing more than usual – fueled more than usual, in some respects I’m clear where this energy is coming from.

In other respects, not as certain. And maybe it doesn’t matter so much that I know and identify all my triggers – but rather that I do what Henry David Thoreau said: “write while the heat is in you”. He went on: “The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience” … which adds to and mildly changes my interpretation of the first part of the quote.

For me it is the moment of inspiration rather than the heat of a clothes-iron with which I would burn something into anyone’s mind. Rather, I prefer spontaneous/sometimes knee-jerk reaction to the moment, acting on the thought – not always in physical action, but in putting words on a page the way house painters put paint on walls, happy to put it on and smooth it out … yet when you look at the art on the drop sheet, colour upon colour, stream of dots and trails of dribbles it resembles something Jackson Pollock might have seen one day and thought, “hey, if I do that on a wall or canvas deliberately in many colours, I’ll put my energy there in that place”. With apologies to Mr. Pollock, sometimes I see putting words on a page that way. Splashing about, smoothing it out and rolling it smooth with the magic being in the drips, drops and crumbs of thought which don’t make it to the page.