There’s something immediately beautiful about the incomplete. Some visceral unquantifiable quality is lost when an incomplete work of art becomes the polished completed product. And this isn’t to say that one shouldn’t aspire to finish their projects. No. Not at all.

Only that some emotion must inevitably be reigned in and filed down to make a cohesive thing. Honest contradictions must be reconciled, or one prioritized over another, to make a wholly rational statement.

One must have a true endgame in mind to make art. A journey without a destination is aimless wandering (and it should be noted here that aimless wandering can be its own destination). Yet the journey is the essential spirit where the art resides. The destination becomes inconsequential before the desire to reach it. But there must be a desire to reach it.

So the process then, when in servitude to a higher cause, is the master. It is the real true art and mastery. And so, we return to incomplete works of art.

Those works that are stalled before reaching their True North. An unfinished draft; raw video footage or unpolished grain. Half-drawn sketches. Living beating hearts, laid open-breasted upon a table.

And what are our lives but incomplete works of art? Unaccomplished dreams. Grieving loved ones. Shopping lists and chores. Words left unspoken. Nobody leaves this world with every thread resolved and their character arcs concluded. We exit it as untidily and ill-prepared as we came into it.

And so we come to me: the artist at the end of his life. I have been a vagrant upstart. The pale imitator and the disrupter. The visionary prophet and then the establishment. The follower, heretic and mentor. I have been the babe at the teat, and father. Leader, ruler, dictator. Advisor, businessman, monument.

My body of work is beyond reproach. I have sculpted the very heart of man and painted the heavens themselves. I have lived and I have loved and been loved in turn.

I have reached True North. I am sadly complete.

Farewell.