I am an artist to my very core. I always have been. Poetry, music, paintings, sculptures, dance, film, theatre: these are the things that fill my soul and give me purpose. For many years, however, I could not identify exactly what it was about art and being an artist that harkened to me so deeply. It wasn’t until my mother, an accomplished performing artist in her own right, shared with me a letter written by the legendary choreographer Martha Graham to her equally renowned colleague Agnes De Mille regarding De Mille’s dissatisfaction with her newest work. That work turned out to be the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, arguably one of the most influential pieces of all American theatre particularly with respect to it’s use of dance within story. The text of the full letter can be found here, but for me, the nature of art and the artist was revealed in complete clarity through these last few lines:
No artist is pleased...There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes "us" MORE alive than the others.
Artists deal with dissatisfaction differently. Dissatisfaction does not defeat us. It drives us. It pushes us beyond “good enough”, beyond “great”, beyond “excellent” even. It drives us, when we let it, all the way beyond that which is human and launches us into transcendence. It can, when we feed it, take us into the realm of the superhuman. As artists, we live in what we have come to know as “the apex moment of life”, those moments that are so full, so rife with meaning, that our only option is to lean into the experience and suck from it everything that we can, and then let it go. It is in that way of working that we are never satiated. It is not that we become full for a moment and then lose that fullness and become empty, but rather that the fullness we achieve in each artistic experience only wets our appetite for the next experience. There must be something stronger, higher, deeper, more intense. If there isn’t, what’s the point? This is the “queer, divine dissatisfaction” that Graham meant. This is the “blessed unrest” that makes artists a completely different breed of human.
No work of art is ever perfect. Art is never finished, it is never done, and that is the real beauty of it. There is ALWYS more. It is just waiting to be discovered, waiting to be realized, waiting to be created and brought to life, a new life that is deeper and richer than any life ever known before.
