Making it Look Good

Or, the Audience of One

Some things look better on paper. But not many things. Two kids kissing in front of the subway doors, for instance, is an insignificant fraction of its true scene when put on paper. She gone and he ambling away in slow motion as though his environment were its perfect opposite and not the caterwaul of Bloor and Yonge Streets. I stand there small portions of the day, leaning against the building in a triangle of shade, smoking cigarettes and less conspicuous than a discarded coffee cup. I, as it were, do actually look better on paper. Real life is made of meat, and I am constructed of a series of syllables and contrasting ideas, worthy enough of the space they take up, but not much to look at when you run into them on the street.

I have not known what to write about. I struggle for a spark among a field of fireflies.

Accolades have been piling up like a stepped pyramid. I won a Juno award, played Massey Hall for Bruce Cockburn, got on the long list for the Polaris Prize, and in less than a week, am performing at the Governor General’s house for the Queen of England. It is a long way to come in a short amount of time for a kid who has little more to offer than a handful of poems and a good tolerance for booze. I am not being self-deprecating here. I am not even being humble. I am as proud as a sugar covered toddler on a waterslide. I only mean to relate that I may be tasting successes because there is nothing else for me to do.

I was recently expressing this thankless-sounding oddity to a friend over a late night pint. That there is a weightless, directionless feeling of limbo when I find myself with a week or so off the road and have to find ways to amuse myself. “Don’t you have any, you know, hobbies?” I was asked. And after quite some thought I realized that, no, in fact I do not. I have always only liked to write.

Now, at home, and spending time writing as though it were a hobby and not a career, this idea that most things do not look better on paper has left me with a cyclical conundrum. If the best things are off the page, then what am I doing? One must realize that writing for an audience is still somewhat selfish. The catch and release of poetry is most potent in the long moments of creation.

In university I studied theatre arts and had a professor who insisted that the art form itself was entirely for the audience, in all of its delicate moments. Twenty years old at the time, I staunchly and proudly disagreed with him, leaning more favourably towards a deeper, more insular reward of a performance. Now, more than a decade later, I am not sure. Perhaps an audience has a responsibility to nudge its own way in, and an artist need only make them welcome. In this sense, it is merely a polite traffic jam.

The young couple kissing on Bloor Street either did not know, or did not care, that I was watching them. In that display of everyday life, an audience is incidental, and can neither encourage nor hinder the flow of it. If I am to consider it relative to art – indeed, that it is a scene, and the relating of it now on paper is a sad replacement – the show is surely over, and cannot be recreated or properly communicated ever again.

If I am to put it into song, then it is a new thing rather unrelated to the original. And my own experience creating the song is – maybe, possibly – unrelated to its further existence. And each listener is, in that sense, an independent audience of one.

The sum of the parts, then, is not only unequal to its whole, but entirely disconnected from it.

I am purposefully alienating my recent successes from my work. It is because I feel foolish, collecting congratulations, while struggling to create anything at all. And while I am pleased to look good on paper, one must understand that the truly important things of life and art may never want to grace the page. This, then, among life’s fireflies, is my subject.

Link: www.ameliacurran.com