the artistic temperament

Geoffrey Lewis
2 min readOct 16, 2023
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqL8wpKry0m/

the hunger for absorption in images; the desire and need to disappear into color, form, story, narrative—we so badly need an exit from our tenderness, insight, potential; privacy is difficult, silence unbearable amidst a war, an eclipse and a death in the family

i lack patience today; i’m physically wired, unstable, excited, tingling, leaping at all angles, splayed and strung; these are verbs; my crisis is amusing, world-class

i used to write grand things; now i sputter from the starting line and waddle out, plodding like a tortoise to just another horizon, then i stop, look off, listen to my silly, redundant heart, and come back to the blinking cursor and meager pile of sentences, remembering times when i could blindly write 8,000 words a day…so i become another content marketer, trying to enlist one reader at a time into voluntarily climbing my mountain of media to see the glistening Me in real-time, in need of more security, more guarantees; some places in my life, I am the stern father, the lawyer, the one with the wallet and the one who wields the iron club of justice, doling out proclamations and judgments of who and what behavior is good enough — do I still secretly crave an authority to bow at the feet of? What is the authority? The law? My health and countdown death?

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