Thursday, August 6, 2009

PART FOUR ~ Number Nine

A Clarification:



Dates elude me. Sequences elude me, also. I’ve never taken care with numbers: They are like the many nights I spent with Beauty, only much more elusive, now that time has passed, and I’m alone. And yet, I am filled with reminders, remembering, with such clarity, all the small details of our first meeting.



I’d first seen Beauty as a painting. Then, with a fateful night, she was brought to life, transfigured, and made all too real. Beauty, flesh and blood.



Now, as I piece together those four months of painting, I’m not quite sure if I’d finished the Work on the 20th or the 21st of December. [I guess it matters little, in the scheme of things; however, I know,in retrospect, it makes for a confused narrative.]
I guess I wasn’t born to be a writer. Every moment of my life has been invested in the here and now experience of living: It’s tones, colours, shadings, objects, and bodily figures, were all of what mattered.



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In the Classical sense, I’ve always been a dreamer, rooted to the role of Outsider, and clinging to the Archetype of the Creative Loner.



[I see, when conjuring this image:

The Artist, in his garret-loft, penniless, but obliviously happy with his paints and mistresses.] My Childhood was indicative of this stance toward the World; each moment of cruelty inflicted by Others, (“What ya doin’ ya little bugger,” was followed by a good, hard shove, and the sketch pad flying to the curb and landing into the muddy, puddle-jumping, curb, smacking with a disconsolate smack and splash. The bully-boys, with their clenched fists, and manic eyes, bloodies my nose.)


All of experience, taught resolve; a girding up, of any wall I could build around my determination. What I needed was one other person in my life who did not scorn my separateness, my fixation upon the lives of Artists. [When I wasn’t drawing, I was reading books: Biographies of the lives of Artists; textbooks, devoted to technique; Cezanne, Renoir, Degas; and, even, a sprinkling of Goethe, Emerson, and, the theory of Frederic Taubes. All of these Representative Men became idealized heroes in my quest.]



The visual side of life, a rendering of the “Seen, became a measure, a yardstick, I could use to sublimate everything gross, cruel, and hurtful in my life. My peers didn’t understand this. In my love of creative solitude, they perceived something queer and unmanly. They never left me alone. I wanted companionship, and all I found from them was ridicule; validation for my efforts, wasn’t small beer to contend with. All of these slights did nothing but draw me further away; deeper into my own world, a deeper, kinder world.




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I’m more firmly grounded in the experiences, and situations, which time presents. Understanding doesn’t adhere itself to the rendering, or recalling, of dates.

What I believe is this: Understanding is made up of experience.

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