After a Storm

I was working in Flash last night using David Morris' book on how to create a Flash-driven web site when the storm arrived. Hail cluttered against the roof and window while wind and rain lashed the trees outside. Power went out several times. I gave in and called a halt. It was half past eleven.

The storm melted the humidity. This morning the air glittering with sunlight is fresh and cool. 

I spent the morning dealing with finances on the phone, an activity that can be frustrating. I'm glad for the work I did. I could have waited until tomorrow as I had planned to do and not discover that what I had banked on was not going to happen. Worry can be a good thing. It causes us to take action. But wouldn't it be better if we eliminate worry and simply chose action according to a rational view of the lay of the land?

In art and the activities where I seek artistic expression, there seems an unavoidable joining of tension and creativity. At lunch I caught a documentary on the Cliburn piano competition in Houston. Pianists young and old spoke of their art. A pianist who sits at the piano like "a bag of potatoes" is not going to ignite the audience with passion for music. It is when he sits at the piano as though facing his mortal enemy and struggles with wood and steel to wring out passion that the audience feels passion, too. Passion after all is intense emotion and art cannot be art without that intensity.

We express intensity of emotion in our voice, posture, and something about attention that viewers pick up though cannot describe in words. It's in the way our eyes look like those of a madman, every muscle in our frame poised for immediate action that they might be called to render in a split second.

There is quiet intensity, too, when the body appears still but not lifeless. It's the tense quiet before the storm. I worry about intense emotions and feel I should be calm and relaxed but creativity like love always presupposed struggle, tension, life-and-death combat, expectation maybe of hyperbole but without throwing our lines towards heaven and the impossible art seems not to appear. We conjure it with our blood, sweat and tears!