A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. —J. D. Salinger, from “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”

The weather doesn’t match my mood; the script never supplies itself, nor is the score composed to instruct my feelings, and there isn’t an audience.

must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head.

But he was a sailor, and not a conceptual artist. I always forget about that.

Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?

About how flying and falling are almost exactly the same.

Because people don’t want homes; they want show houses—only

What was it about the sound of a DVD case striking the bottom of a DVD deposit box on a drizzly day in spring that made me feel so abruptly and inexplicably bad?

The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and now I don’t think I can bear it any more. The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed.

It’s a great lump of bronze. Brown and hard and twisted like the moon never was.

I want her to waft free, and find me.

Because structure and maintenance and pattern, and broccoli, are what sanity consists of.

And for approximately the first three minutes of running, I feel spectacular.

And so my father has every right in the world to be disappointed by the dog’s dinner I am making of the last life he gave up his own for.

It wasn’t my parents who annoyed me; it was the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in their presence;

‘I think about the gap, the huge gap between my life as it is and my life as I would like it to be . . .’

But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

The artist’s last words to his brother, Wikipedia says, were: ‘the sadness will last forever.’

think: there are only two directions, really. Away from home, and back again,

Works about Lying, I test myself: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929. The painting shows a pipe, and beneath it Magritte has painted the words: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Because his image of a pipe is not a pipe, of course, it’s a painting. Every painting is just a painting.

I lose even the puny, haphazard purpose I normally maintain.

my insides are glutted with salt

‘WHY CAN’T YOU LIVE A GOOD LIFE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,’ I yell at the telly, ‘INSTEAD OF IN DEVOTION TO A MYTHICAL BEING?’

‘That was the magnificence of God,’ she says. ‘BOLLOCKS TO GOD!’ I yell at the telly. ‘THAT WAS THE MAGNIFICENCE OF NATURE!’

I sip my drink. God is an abdication of personal responsibility, I decide. I like this phrasing. I sip my drink. He is an excuse for escaping the hardest parts of life. I sip my drink. My third, my fourth? God is history’s most successful scapegoat, I think, and this is good phrasing too. How good I am at phrasing tonight.

But in the end, it only lasted as long as every day lasts. Immoveable, intractable.

As if, in the instant which came before the stopping of her heart, she learned to swim, a second too late.

It’s nowhere near Christmas, and I’m all on my own, and I’ve never been able to sing anyway.

I am not sick, just lost. And lostness is an entirely fixable state.

‘I’m okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren’t living up to other people’s version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest,

find his stillness will do for me.

I wake on the morning of my birthday, and think at once: now I know, with certainty, that it’s too late to be a genius.

But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.

And now I wonder why the fuck I bother, when there are already so many versions of me, writing down my thoughts.

I follow his trail but I leave the brindled slug where he is. I assume he knows why he wanted to be there, what business he has with the bathroom mirror.

But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.

How do the flowers know it’s night-time? Why is the moon everywhere?

I cannot bear to be the kind of person who simply watches television.

I HAVE BEEN CERTIFIED AS MILDLY INSANE!

Have I puked up my deadness now? Only dahl, only lager.

I think about how this wide openness is the view I love best, and yet, if I was out there, how quickly it would kill me.

Check your wardrobe for suitcases. Your life for the space a young white man used to take up.

‘I write the world’s simplest poems,’

‘Don’t feel guilty,’ she said. ‘Nothing good comes of guilt.’ She said it after I admitted how frightened I am that all this stupid sadness is chewing at my intellect.

it’s time to postpone—if not entirely abandon—my burden of unrealistic ambition.

But it isn’t fair to forgive myself so easily.

My eyes prickle from the early cold, crying without my consent.

You can’t dance to paintings.

It is so utterly the end of summer.

Please stop all the worrying and just enjoy the slow stars,