Whether my writing qualifies as art is an open question. But, for our purposes here, I’ll call it art, and rephrase Tony’s words by saying, “I make art because life is so unbelievably full, so rich and complex and resonant, that I have to make art to do something with all of the surplus meaning that’s just lying around. There are people who don’t see the beauty of the world, and I want to use my words to give them a little whomp upside the head (as we say Down South) and say, ‘For Heaven’s sake, will you please just LOOK?’”

Now, this business about satisfaction – Tony’s words, again: “To be satisfied is to settle. It’s to accept less than the best and that is mediocrity.”

When I started varnishing, I had to learn the rule of “good enough”. There comes a point where nothing more is gained by working on.
If a varnished rail is perfect except for a single embedded gnat, you certainly can resand and varnish again to eliminate the gnat – but in the process you may gain a dusting of pollen, or a family of spider babies, or even drops from a sudden rain. If a rail glistens beautifully, has reflective depth and no brush strokes – STOP!
It’s good enough.

It works for writing, too. There always could be a better turn of phrase, a more elegant word, a funnier metaphor, but I always know when a piece is done and at that point, I’m satisfied – not because I’ve “settled for” something less, something mediocre, but because I’ve created from whole cloth a new bit of meaning or beauty in the world.

As for the practical utility of art – its meaning, or lack thereof – the longer the view of things, the better. A small example, here.

Some months ago I wrote a poem called “Search Pattern” after the death of Roger Stone in an offshore boating accident. I published it on my blog. Nine months later Roger’s widow found the poem through Google – her initial comment is there on the blog, beneath the poem. She also emailed, saying she was going to print it out in large scale, frame it and mount it in the room that would have been Roger’s study in their new home – the study he never got to use. As she said, “If I had found this before his service, I would have had you read it.”

Such occurences don’t happen daily, of course, but they happen with enough frequency that I’ve learned to take the long view, to be patient, and to always, always, do my best – for whoever is out there, waiting for the next thing I have to say.