Where there's Art there's Heart
Here's a stupid thing: I adore art, but I start to panic whenever I step into a gallery.
In the one place I should be at my contented best - surrounded by walls teeming with creative expression - I fall apart. What ought to be an enriching experience, tacitly designed to facilitate the exploration of human empathy and perspective, is for me an overwhelming purgatory of anxiety that compresses me to the point I cannot breathe. At the same time, I experience a sense of extraction, as though my head is being prized open to create a hole so big my sanity could evaporate. Somewhere between these two opposing forces of vice and vortex, I feel myself dissolving in a stream of panic that makes me want to cry; and I feel so daft feeling this way, that all I want to do is run for the hills.
Comments (1)
Love the use of “jaggedly,” so concrete and tangible. “The blazing warm sun” closes the haiku with a sense of peace and feeling the sun on one’s face. The second line is dramatic and it introduces water strongly but it also takes over the peace of the other two lines because of its length and choppiness (although the choppiness echoes the waves). The challenge would be to reduce that watery and airy emotion of the second line to 7 syllables like reducing a perfume to its core essence.