The Value of Being Worthless

I have the genuinely good fortune of beginning my scrawled attempt at being a Real Artist on the clean, white-paper premise of being utterly worthless. In the last few years I've made some huge, life rending mistakes as a mother and as a person. I am finally facing the fact that, despite love and good intentions, being a homemaker for the past three decades has been effort largely wasted. Think of the rock rolling, not just back down the hill, but rumbling right over Sisyphus, as well.

How can I explain the amazing value of this feeling of worthlessness to the task of beginning to be a serious artist? Oddly, it makes a person brave. And diligent. Because my time and effort feel insignificant, I can toss my art into the mail in total confidence that if something gets ruined, THERE'S ALWAYS MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM. I can tear my pieces up and remake and truly have a re-vision of how they can be better. I've set artwork on fire and been happy with the result. I can venture experiments in outsider forms and dark, surreal sensibilities that are likely to be completely misunderstood, condemned even. I can quite happily put in the thousands of long, hard, lonely hours necessary to launching this sort of mad venture. I can wear myself out and bang up my body doing it, and it's really, truly all right: Sisyphus strolls back up the hill every single morning. Whistling.

For anyone who has not experienced it, I also want to try to explain the strange and magnificent gift of freedom that comes with truly gigantic failure. Middling-to-large-sized failures are only disheartening and humiliating. If one has enough ego left to be embarrassed, then that's not the kind of self-detonation to which I'm referring. In recent years, as all my desperately held hubris was ripped away, as my most treasured self-definitions were one-by-one annihilated, I can't lie: it was agony.

But then, with ego and the stifling constraint of its walls torn down -- zen thing-- I found that I could look deeply into my own darkness, pain, ugliness, terror, rage, and even mortality and USE them. Now I have black, strong, silky warp threads against which I can weave whatever glittering or profound stuff I want. Now I can open my hands for the wind-borne gifts of randomness, no matter what precious thing I imagine that I'm clutching. Dream with my eyes open. Jump with my eyes closed.

I realize that letting go of my life has saved it. Enormous failure is a free fall that seems to be turning into... flying.