Allegory of Winter

Does a day really make a difference, those 24 little hours?  Do people actually wake up and become that which they wish they were in the last twelve months at the start of a new year?  I suppose it gives people hope and inspiration or merely provides that strange comfort demarcating the threshold and passage of time can offer.   No matter.  Whatever gets you through the day, sweetheart.

I find it utterly intoxicating... not the booze, lights or glitter of a moment but that spark of recognition.  When you see art or hear music that illustrates the colors of your own dreams.. the sounds in your own head.  That to me is what I get up for, why I keep up the charade of every day life.  For that precious moment when you and the piece are one... at the risk of sounding trite, the moment when you know you are not alone.  

Someone else was haunted by that color, that image, that sound.  They laid awake at night drowning in their desire for expression; waited for its writhing birth into light and spirit.  Sometimes, I think, that's why people crave physical relationships.  It is their longing to have their Other highlight what scurries furtively around inside them, begging for an audience.  Craving to be seen.  That is pain. That is prison.  A treasure, a blessing and a curse. 

My paradox is uncomfortably banal.  Whilst craving others' company, I am almost immediately disappointed by it.  So this is where I shall stay, until Geppetto grants me my wish.  Suspended between these two realities in a body that increasingly feels less and less real.

Remedios Varo is a saint.  Her work is salvation. (click any image for larger slideshow)

From Someone Else's Dream

Can anyone guess what movie I watched today? 

Drowning past regrets
In tea and cigarettes
But I can't seem to forget
When you came along

Tethered in the Ether

There is a part of me that has always felt different, an outsider.  Even in my own skin.  As though I were tethered to the Earth, made from it even, but another part is always desperate to rejoin the Ether.   Perhaps that's why the ideas of transcendence and resurrection have always fascinated me.  Filled with uncompromising and haunting images of something resembling transformation or redemption.  A Belonging.  A wish to be a shapeshifter, born into a vessel less rigid and static.  One with the multiplicities of microcosms growing inside and on me.

Christina Bothwell's work comes very close to these inner desires.   Add to it, her entrancing manipulations of clay and glass.  Part beast, part earth, seeking companionship and union.  Maybe even liberation. 

 Dreamboat ended things last night, quite suddenly.  I'm still trying to piece together the exact coordinates of our demise.  When something feels so real and reciprocal and yet, for some reason, it ends.  Stung and aimless.  Though, perhaps not entirely surprised.  I could feel something on the horizon, not a severing but a subtle rending.  Second guessing one's intuition, it's a perpetual curse.

It all seems so illogical to me but then again, if the pieces don't fit together, there can only really be two reasons.  You're missing something crucial for comprehension or you don't like what the pieces add up to.  The brain is a snarling ego maniac and when it doesn't like something, it denies.  For right now, this is not real and I'm denying.  Avoiding all social interactions in the hopes the bruise will fade before anyone truly notices.  Tomorrow, I will try to put myself back together and do all sorts of healthy things.  Things my art therapist would be proud of, like cooking and yoga.  But for tonight, tonight I deny.



Cocteau Twins // Know Who You Are At Every Age // Four Calendar Cafe // 1993

I'm not real and I deny
I won't heal unless I cry
I can't grieve, so I won't grow
I won't heal 'til I let it go

Couleur Obscene

Big, bright, smash you in the retinas color.  The kind that makes you sit up, rub the crust from your eye creases and take notice... or run screaming.

It's Never Over

There are some things that never leave us.  It's been a long time coming but I've finally posted the draft I wrote the day of my grandmother's funeral.  It's here.  Some stories are here, here , here but most are buried in this blog or elsewhere.  Regardless these stories reverberate so much deeper and last far longer than I care to remember.  The days spent with her in the nursing home after her demonic husband beat and abandoned her.  Cleaning her fecal matter from her most private of areas because no one else would while she cried and longed for the man that put her there, forgetting he was the reason.  The anguish and anger at both the justice system for doing nothing and the disease that took her far too soon but let her linger here far too long. 

I cannot describe the last two years; actually, I can.  Too Much.  Maybe it will come one day; rising to the surface, like yeasty bread left to do its business.  Words will make sense of it at some point, right?  I mean, I moved to California and moved across the country back again for love.  A love that morphed into something else and here I am, figuring it all out Again.  An orphan three times over.  I no longer feel sorrow or anger; only a void.  We are not Family, nor are the people we choose called Family.   We are guaranteed nothing.  Just the moment we are in.  Be it what it is.  There is no hope, no desire, no joy strong enough to sustain us in perpetuity. All is flux.  If this is what Buddhism promises as liberation, I'm still endeavoring to understand the difference between non-attachment and its lesser foster dog, Nothing. 

I once posted this song in the hope I would find the Family I crave.  It was, and in some measure continues to be, a hunger that is never really satiated.  Perhaps that's okay... perhaps what we called heartbreak and wickedness is really something more like Natasha Khan's alter ego, Pearl.  The call to our true selves.



Image credit: Ville Andersson, Dreyer 2012

The Black

Some days are for giving up.  Taking the mantle and resting it yet again on Atlas' already burdened shoulders. Don't drop the world dude.

Art by Daehyun Kim.  See more here.