To Lose Your Mind

I never go back and touch my writing. Someone, sometime, somewhere once said that art is never truly finished, just abandoned. Then, it is discovered and appreciated, warts and all. Whether or not that's the case is immaterial, but anytime you put something in a public space it becomes shared. No longer does it belong solely to me; it is ours. Even my stupid tweets about stupid, shitty things are going to exist forever. I won't change that, and I wouldn't want to change that.

It's not as though there is a preservation society that works to contain and catalogue my impressive, leather-bound works, which is good for me; I'd carry it around all the time and be an insufferable twat about it. But I think fan passion and the sense of ownership we have towards favorite properties is fascinating. I wonder sometimes what I would do if something I did really exploded and became part of the social consciousness. In the future, am I going to be okay with what I've done? When confronted with it constantly, wouldn't I want to tweak and make it perfect? What do I care about what someone else thinks of my work? Sure, things become shared when they go public but what's the ownership strata? These weird, unspoken social contracts are just insane.

For me, I go nuts about Neil Gaiman. There are a few generational touchstones that everyone experiences, like when you have your first profound realization or when you finally realize you are an adult. Another one is when you first "get" art. When I started The Sandman, just a few pages into the first collected volume (ugh, sorry), I think actually felt the power of the moment. Every year I reread the whole series and I still look forward to certain parts and dread others. Captured by a storyline you can sum up in one sentence. They recently released an Annotated Sandman that includes Gaiman's notes and discusses in-depth some of the choices that were made in each panel.

This makes me wary. I can never read these annotated versions because my interpretation of the art is my own. Mining the reasoning behind every decision made in the story would be doubtlessly interesting, but I'm very protective of my interpretation and connection with the work. Besides, I'll never--no matter how often or hard I try--capture the same feeling of discovery I had when I first read it. Maybe that's why we feel so passionate about art: it is the continued, fruitless pursuit of feelings extinct.

Until an asteroid,
Adam