Monsters of Hope (pastels). THE NEXT BIT... MADNESS HISTORY.

pauldrobertson

Monsters of Hope (pastels). THE NEXT BIT... MADNESS HISTORY.

This text is a continuation of that started in the piece immediately preceeding this: sketching mad.

I started drinking one afternoon was sure I didn’t go out or see anyone but woke up in a pair of dirty women’s underwear.
I was at a palatial house with a goddess and threw up in her spa. Don’t know her name I don’t think I did even then.
Winters were the worst always lost and drunk and cold always wet and so fucking far to walk in the rain.
Crashing twisting in fear and self-loathing, detesting, despising, abhorring leper outcast unclean. And so goddamned SICK pathetically grateful for whichever nutcase girl was looking after me and holding my long dirty blonde hair out of the bucket.
“Why do you hate us all Paul? Why do you do this?”
“I don’t hate anyone. I have never hated anyone. I am the avatar of dismay. I am the boiling man. I am just too selfish to die.
One of my good friends threw himself from a building and I stayed drunk for weeks. An old and loyal friend fought me in sneering drunken fury, both of so full of poison that we could not even form fists. Neither of us spilling heart’s blood whilst we fought, so young and so completely ridiculous.
Drowning men.
My ex-girlfriend spat in my face that day. Tried to catch a bus and buy vodka with blood running everywhere again from my own cheap knife the despite boiling inside me, rage a crevasse of pathetic sadness and grief for myself. For Andrew. For all of us feeding from ourselves eating our own venom until it bubbled and frothed in our mouths. I didn’t know where I was just fucked it all up and sullied the memory of a good man. Lost and wandering and crying fucked up and such a fool, such a fool so damned my scalding hell heated the slippery corners of my eyes.
He was the funniest fucker I have ever met.
Such waste.
S A D S I C K N E S S.
Fevers of blame and despair. Spreading between us like Andrews’ beautiful young body across the cement.
I miss him still. No note. His mother’s shuddering sobs shall not leave my memory and spilled in echoes over my ruin as I catalysed the manufacture of my own disgust.
Got so used to casualty wards where I would wake up (“seemed euphoric” I read on the chart) with stitches and no idea how I had got there who had taken me. Hit on the nurses, once one reciprocated I couldn’t fucking believe it. More psyche wards again and again I always liked the schizophrenics they were, at least, as mad as me.
Locked wards psychotics everywhere screaming at night. The half hour or hour or whatever the fuck it was we were allowed to wander around outside our cells, the men all of them except me, every one, ALL hung on the wire fence, heads at odd angles staring out, fingers through the chicken wire. Razor wire at the top.
I remember I had a chance to get out and go to the open wards an interview with three guys running the place. I looked forward to it for a week or something I don‘t know the haze too thick, chemical dust deep – I do remember the longing it I thought my articulation would save me again. I hoped and hoped waited got visited by three girls had tried to destroy with the holes in my heart, cutting arcing guilt betrayer that I was, liar, storm of pain my touch and words a plague of emotion.
They didn’t come back I think the number of doors with locks scared them though they all tended to think it was PRETTY FUCKING ROMANTIC.
I was tanked on some hardcore drugs I have no idea what. Varieties of thorazine the zine family yeah, a chemical lobotomy the pain whirling inside, a thrown running power saw spraying meat but no expression nothing connecting, shut out of my own body.
Got to the meeting and I opened my mouth in front of these psychiatrists and I could not SPEAK. Too wasted oh wasted yes but not in the fun way that’s for sure.
I could SHAKE though and I could drool cuz I couldn’t get my facial muscles under any sort of control. So I stayed there for another week or more weeks who the fuck knows?
Hated being there so I longed for squalour ethanol sex attention. Filled instead with drugs and shakes and sobriety. Polluted with chemicals worse oh fucking worse oh yes than my own toxic liquid destruction.
I DARE YOU TO FIX ME!
They had this thing where some poor lost mad bastard would stand up and say the THOUGHT FOR THE DAY after our group meetings with people rocking in the corners. They were all so fucked up most of them could barely speak some not at all others never shut up but they only spoke to people who were not there. I stood up and quoted Shakespeare for ten minutes. Midsummer night’s dream I think I thought it was nice and cheery for everyone.
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains such shaping fantasies that apprehend far more than cool reason ever comprehends.
One sees more devils than vast hells can hold, that is the madman…”
Got out and stayed on the drugs like a good boy but kept drinking and kept cutting. All the fucking useless things did was excise my personality make me impotent make my hair fall out make me fat make me slow and make me HATE. Worst of it was I could not react act my speed acuity lust passion poisoned memory gone awareness gone focused to an angel point into pure hissing SHAME. That I was born in a fucking PARADISE of love and that I had flared brutally, violently bright. I knew history enough to understand that we live in a utopia of humanism; I knew enough LIFE to know that I had been born raised loved and somehow STILL WAS by the most beautiful minds hearts and hands.
Mother. Father. Sister. Every kindness I had repaid with failure. I deserved every torture I could devise to inflict for betraying them so deep and hard, those who threw everything anything they could find to save me into the pyre of my fucking excuse for a life.
Shuffle along undead NOT LIFE PAIN but undead don’t fall and weep with acid logic with scalpel reason undeniable distress killing my father see his eyes watching me tear myself to pieces. Hooks of my own hurt see it in his shoulders slumped he has given up I hurt him so much he is dying ahhhhhHHH. Raised with passionate care, soft hands, sweet voices singing in the night care and care and care such a beautiful boy oh he is so beautiful the boy the betrayer the monster the liar the drunk.
Guilt an endless sun clawing every sense every thought and it was RIGHT it was TRUE the only thing I had ever done was break the bones in the hands that held me. Eat the life deserve this worse such a coward mouth red and sticky and still Life eater ALIVE I was still ALIVE why was I alive?

i shall continue more posts tomorrow, serialised hm.

Monsters of Hope (pastels). THE NEXT BIT... MADNESS HISTORY. belongs to the following groups:

Complex Simplicity of Art, Fine Arts, Hands, Live, Love, Dream: , Self as Other and The Male Nude Available for sale as

Greeting Cards, Matted Prints, Laminated Prints, Mounted Prints, Canvas Prints, Framed Prints and Posters

Monsters of Hope (pastels). THE NEXT BIT... MADNESS HISTORY. by pauldrobertson
  • BonitoPhotography

    BonitoPhotography

    Wow! Awesome Image.

  • pauldrobertson

    pauldrobertson

    thanks bonito

  • Karen Cougan

    Karen Cougan

    You are so talented but boy what a trip you live….............obviously it makes great art this uneasy mind you have….....I wish you love peace and JOY mate
    xkc

  • LittleHelen

    LittleHelen

    Amazing Paul….my mouth is still wide open after reading your story….keep telling ;)

  • Firedrake

    Firedrake

    Excellent piece! Love it…

  • hatefueled

    hatefueled

    i cant beleive this wasnt up here yet! or was it at the back and you used the new rearranging feature to put it at the front?
    either way its one of my absolute favs of your work, im so drawn to the gesture and detail in the hands and the way theyre pushed away from the body. again, i have to mention the feling of falling or waking from a nightmare with this piece too. its so strong!

  • pauldrobertson

    pauldrobertson

    thank you ms paula. i know you understand what i mean, and what it may mean to me. remember when you pointed out how the figure was falling, and i didn’t even KNOW? i mean it took me almost two weeks. not going to change it now.

  • butchart

    butchart

    i’m so entranced by both the image and the storey,,,, so raw…and so brave to share it… i hope this purging was healing for you…..........b

  • mklau

    mklau

    A powerful image …. I am caught between fear and immense sadness … that is an impactful image

  • nymph44

    nymph44

    not only is your writing amazingly beautiful and your work somewhere close to that which will be remembered along with the great artists of this age, but the way in which you discuss every aspect of your pain so perfectly in all its hurting glory that forces me somewhere close to tears. as a young girl i have not been able to voice my own pain for a long time and even getting closer to my 20s as i am now, i am still silenced. you are lucky to have a voice so that you can feel and mourn and tell the world or however many people are listening what pain is for you. i am not allowed to due to the way in which sydney shys away from anything that is so real, it is somewhere close to impossible to even get things finished without a person turning and saying that what ever you are doing or saying or thinking or feeling or trying to portray is not right. scary. too brutal. too sad. too much pain. too much anguish. too much longing for death, to be normal.

    and yet it is not normal. it is never normal. nothing ever is. everything is individual and new and different and painful and will show an ounce of suffering in some way no matter what. that is this orld, it is pain and it is insanity and it is death and it is destruciton and revoltion and beauty and temptation and darkness all together with anything else that can ever be described, and never will two things be the same, they may be two genetic copies but they will be different, and will differ from everything else in some way, and therefore differ from health and sanity and normality and life in every way shape and form.
    so anyway what i am trying to say is that you are lucky to be allowed to express your pain in the way that can be glorified and not turned against you. you are lucky to have to talent to do it. you are lucky to be able to feel what you are feeling and know it within you and be whatever that emotion dictates for as long as you need to. i have not been allowed that, and as someone who wishes that she has an ounce of your talent i thank you for allowing people like me to view your work and your writing. i thank you

  • pauldrobertson replied

    thank you for the depth of your praise. you write with extraordinary passion ALREADY. i had not the courage to exhibit with truths and passions publicly for many, many years. until i reached 28 or so i guess. and from 16 – 24 i did NOTHING creative and walked in shame at this.

    i suppose there is luck in some genetic ability. but almost all of what i have done and made is because of my WILL and my refusal to lie about ANYTHING. most of all my courage.

    few, few indeed far less than one% criticise me.

    it is NOT where you are.

    you must find a way to scatter gentless amidst your pain. for there is this, also in life and love and hurt.
    you already show talent and more than that, more important than that, courage.

    ‘trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string.’ emerson.

  • EnderWiggins

    EnderWiggins

    Wonderful work Paul, I don’t know what I love more, the colors or the image.

  • pauldrobertson replied 18 days ago

    thank you so much my friend. i have been v sick offline for about a yr but am recovering like an upholsterer…
    it means so very much to receive such words. thank you

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