FARID
Sometimes I think I went too far. Everyone who starts out trying to be an artist delves within themselves. The harder you try to be an artist, the deeper you go. Everyone who starts down this road, starts down it thinking that they're going to go all the way and that it's only a matter of time until they get there.
Certainly not everyone who tries to makes it. Inevitably there comes a point at which you recognize that you have become lost. Most turn back. Some go on, thinking to themselves, “I’ve got to keep going, I’ve got to get there no matter what, I’ve just got to!" Only then are they really on their way. This is where the road actually begins, all the rest was just the on-ramp. Should you be one of them and somehow manage to persevere, then with an inevitability that can perhaps lay claim to being described as ultimate, you will arrive at the point-- and it’s also the point at which it’s too late; that’s the part that truly terrifies, that it’s always exactly at the point that it’s too late-- when and where you realize, in a blinding flash, that you’re never going to get “there”, and not only that, but that there is not now nor has there ever been any “there” there; that there is only another here, and then is only another now, and here and now is all there ever was, is or will be. Praise Allah!
Now, as soon as you realize this about "there", the first thought that follows is that you want to get back to where you were, back to where you started off on the artistic quest; that you want to try to be a regular Joe-- or Jane-- again, and to hell with all this art crap. “What a fool I was!” you think. You feel happy, even ecstatic, that your blinders have been removed and you’ve been freed from your obsession, that you can go back and live like everyone else, that you can, at long last, go back home.
Then when you try to, you discover that you can't. It hits you with a punch that lasts a lifetime: You don’t know how to get back and live like everyone else. You learn the inexorable truth that while you were locked inside your mind you were locked outside of time and that everybody else had kept on moving on in lockstep into the future. You no longer know where they are let alone how to catch up with the pack. You discover that time is not an abstract intellectual construction, but rather is a living thing composed of the flesh and blood of your fellow man. The human race, indeed.
And as for home? Well, it turns out that you didn't know what it was in the first place. You see with a clarity of vision not ever experienced before or since that you've never even been there.
And so, the rest of your life stretches out before you, an empty plain of no return. It is at this moment that your real life as an artist begins. Just when you throw in the towel. It is at this point that you first truly experience the hereness of here and the nowness of now. It is at this point that you realize that you have no choice to make nor course to plot other than to start constructing a self out of the spot you find yourself in, and then with that self to create the life that you will lead, a life that for the first time will truly be your own as you discover that the phrase "making a living" means first and foremost that life is in the making and that it is made to be lived.
As far as I am concerned, you are free. Do what you want to do. Play what you want to play. All that I ask is that you put your body and soul into it and don't leave nothing behind. You don’t owe me a thing. I’ve given you no money, we have no contract. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I believe that the best work is always produced by those who are free to do exactly what they want. And that's what I want more than anything: the best work. And I believe that you can give it to me. I don't want you to have to work with me, I want you to want to work with me. If you don't, don't. You read me?
Sometimes I think I went too far, and every time I do I get down on my knees and thank God that I did.