XXXVI
|
S |
tars were each, behind my eyes, perfectly aligned
in a sky of flowing fire and darkness. They did not blink out when I did but
rather remained a shimmering constant upon a brilliantly lit mindscape. The
image was too chaotic to evoke
kaleidoscope but as well there was an order to the ambiance that was
unbearable. In those three interminable days since my surgery, I had been
incapable of removing a phantasmal landscape from my closed eye view. My brain,
the doctors would suppose, had been traumatized, shocked, and was now unwilling
to let its guard down. I was, for the length of three days, incapable of
achieving unconsciousness. Neither they
nor I had wished to risk apothecaries' mixtures so soon after surgery and, despite the discomfort, I was curious
to witness this phenomenon run to the length of its tether.
The discomfort could be
endured. I was, at no time before or after, in any pain whatsoever. There had
once before been headaches but those had eased immediately upon diagnosis and
the application of anti-inflammatories. Now I was nonchalant abed but for
double-vision and inability to escape my head. I had only now to lie there
until doctors deemed to discharge me but therein lay my petit crisis: I could
not escape my consciousness. I was shackled to the universe! To lie in the
darkness for every instant of every night seemed a curse. There is no relaxing
and no drifting off. If this is the state of the comatose then free them immediately!
This phantom land, it
seemed to me, to be a graphic of the brain. The central web of shimmering,
shapeless stars hovered in the foreground but they were a galaxy without number
some brightly aglow as certain thoughts were kindled but then to dim and turn
down again as the mind meandered. Behind this limitless screen of lights was a
rolling Turner sky of reds and browns. It was though composed and as I think on
it today it is reminiscent of a mirrored Michelangelo, The Last judgement. It
has the same interrupted flow.
In the upper right
corner of my scene is a nebulous void, a portal, a blackness, and I know that
all past thoughts, all memories, could be withdrawn from therein. Images of the
past could be made to appear there, incomplete, with fleeting opacity and
stature but more, it was only disconnected portions of images that floated
there, ill-defined.
A grand staircase, more
a slide, plunged from the portal of memories and I saw a constant train from
peak to base. Phantoms of my past, or past television shows that I'd seen, or
past stories read or heard, were an endless parade of non-descript, vague, and
near to formless things. They were without focus yet down they climbed.
The base of the
landscape was a cauldron of colours and almost images. Here, all manner of
ideas and icons were stirred to bring together haphazard juxtaposes and
symmetrics, like a tumbling jigsaw puzzle where the pictures and puzzle shapes
were constantly shifting.
It was in this soup
that I could piece together any thoughts. There, by mixing up my memories, I
could find solutions or problem solving compromises. From submerged depths of this maelstrom, ideas would surface
merged in tight embrace with memories that I had no notion of ever bringing
together.
The slide continued
down past this, defiant of physics, and in the bottom left I could paint all
manner of pictures. There was where my memories coalesced and the empty
portions of those images could be filled in by constructs of the central,
semi-cognitive broth.
Over the course of
those long days, amusements might be found in trying to craft as complete a
picture as possible and then try to hold it there, in the low left repository,
for as long as I was able. Even as I flitted onto other stewed ideas, I could
sometimes manage to keep the paintings solid for some time but over the course,
always eventually, , they must break apart and float about as though to return
to the broth. And they did make their way, piece by disingenuous piece, back up
but they also, in those same uncertain moments, pushed up from that lowest
left, rising in some gesture of defiance, toward a second doorway, more
lightless than the last, and here they were tucked away, invisible, and lost.
The uninitiated might
conceive that art is born full formed from the brow of the creator like Athena
but this is untrue. We do not simply, thankfully, print out the data that
describes the images in our mind's eye. The path between figment and fingertip
is heavily travelled in both directions. Artemis serves as midwife at the birth
of her twin.
A mark may be made that
seeks to describe the notion that has propelled our creativity but that mark,
by its inclusion into both conscious and unconscious, alters the idea. One
might call it Shrodinger's Art. The very act of making necessarily modifies the
way that the artist appreciates his idea. More than merely mistakes made by
human irregularities colouring the process, it is the variables of the impure
universe that suggests to the artist that he ought second guess himself. When a
pencil stroke is imagined, the reflected light from the room, the absorbency of
the page and the width of the graphite are all unknowables and when the
finished mark sits upon the paper it
gives back new possibilities.
If art is an argument,
every brush stroke is an attempted refutation that needs be addressed.
"Yes, but did you
consider this?"
Often, an emerging
artist will seek to shout down his canvas, to overpower the real with the
impassioned imagination. A good artist though listens to the questions raised
during the creative process. It is more important that the argument, in the
end, be valid and coherent than it is that the original vision of the artist
prevails. The goal must be subservient to the object.
I do not here advocate
for the democratization of process for
though the plebians might have a valid point from time to time, the chorus is a
cacophonous roar that must be quelled by tyranny unless, in the hands of a
philosopher King, it is assuaged into a harmony.
…and Anne.
More than once amid my
bed-bound purgatory, I collected the fragmentary pieces, shattered and
scattered, that were the remnants of my Anne. Half-lost, ill-formed glimpses of
her sparkling starlight laugh echoed the red-torrent sky of my Paradisio just
as the sweep and roll of her blonde curls were in the rhythms reminded by the
tidal morass of my mind.
While silver synapses
fired on and on through the timeless nights, the process of my mind brought
Anne time and time again to the surface in some unfathomed manner. In all my waking moments, I dreamed, and my
brain fought to make sense of its history. What story was told by the artefacts
of my past that were emerging thus?
I had believed my tale
already told but here was Banquo's ghost to refute me. There was still every
opportunity for either comedy or tragedy.