"Before, Again II" (1985) Joan Mitchell, DIA
It's like someone looked directly in my brain and saw it's essence at the very core, then put brush to canvas. This is exactly what I feel like every waking moment. Simultaneously energetic, frenetic, dizzying and sullen, sagging and misunderstood. I like to stand in front of this massively imposing painting and let it wash over me. I can feel the cool paint dripping down my face, and down my body, over my toes into a growing puddle on the floor. The pungent smell of oil-based pigments, sadness and comfort swallowing me up. I feel very akin to this particular painting. I feel people would stand in front of us both and say "I just don't get it."
"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, that I didn't know who I was...I was far away from home haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared, I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost...I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then that strange red afternoon." -Jack Kerouac, "On the Road The Original Scroll", circa 1950's.
This quote too often describes what I feel like. Acting outside of myself, outside of any rational control, in both my inhibited and uninhibited extremes. Thoughts swirl and bubble inside my brain, I can pick up on inane details outside myself, but can never quite connect to the external world. Always just one, perpetual out-of-body experience, I am there, but I am not really.
I have this ridiculous notion that maybe sometime, somewhere, someone might actually understand me, or even care to. I daydream that someone will find my irreverence and flippancy intoxicatingly charming. But people, as much as I try to analyze and plot their next move, they elude me. Humans will inevitably let you down, hence why human equates with error. Words, words on the other hand, they are always there. Like a loyal old coonhound, never asking you for anything, but ready to drop whatever they are doing at a moments notice to help you. Faithful and rock steady, they flow whenever I feel like letting them. With their serifs and boldened lines. They are this monolith of permanence in a world full of the flighty and volatile. I always need inspiration to write. I can only seem to write if I am in a contemplative state and generally depressed in mood, the rest of the time I am too anxious to sit down and write a full page of anything. I am constantly looking for stimulation. Writing is a release, much like sex is for me.
The water is the only thing that equalizes me. Driving by the water makes my thoughts slow down just enough to get a cohesive picture of them. But there is this latent fear in that relaxation, that for whatever reason my hands will cut the wheel hard to the right, and I will sail right into the rocky and shallow outcropping. And even worse then sinking down, car and all into the murky depths, I will just get slightly and mortifyingly stuck. Then they will inevitably question why I did it, and since I wasn't drunk, they will haul me away. Driving by the water makes me lust for the ocean. I begin to taste the salt on my tongue, and I feel the saline residue it leaves upon my milken skin. The sense of it gets so overwhelming that I immediately want to pack up and start driving to either coast. My longing for the ocean just gets stronger and stronger as the days go by with no winter thaw in sight. Everyday, if not dreary and raining, is cold and overcast, with a wind that cuts right through. I have given Michigan enough of a chance. It's time to go where the weather suits my clothes. I need to feel the burning heat of the sun searing my flesh with a passion and vigor that no person has been able to produce in a very long time. I need that envelopment of warmth from the choking humidity, that wraps around me like the arms of a long-lost lover, the rose-tinted memory of which has only grown more sensational and romanticized.
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