The Letter

The Letter

- better shot.

Pastels on Paper.
120×90 cms

pastels… not sold the original as of april 2007. not SHOWN IT either. 120×90cms

I have chronic bipolar disorder… it sucks, mostly.

I don’t seem to be able to stop being too hot or too cold. I should probably get a house with air conditioning (I will just spray the conditioner I have in my bathroom up n down and all around and see if that helps.) I USED to have air conditioning at my house – I wrote on the controls in purple felt tip pen “for permed or colour treated air.”
OK well I have done all the remarkably simple tasks necessary for this morning and for me they were mammoth undertakings requiring much sweat and most of all, courage. Just have to ignore all the fear and go DO IT ALL ANYWAY.
Hm…I love the names of paints. Not the ones that they come up with for you to paint your house with. I have always thought I would be good at that though –
For your lounge “winter ferret” and for your kitchen, “happy exploding sunflower” and in your dining room, “fragrant maroon mice” with a split level in “hungry hungry hippo.”
Or not.
Real paints have names like crimson alizarin, burnt umber, spectrum yellow, French ultramarine, titanium white and cobalt blue. Somehow more real they elicit possibility like a blank white canvas or a snow-white untouched high cotton yield watercolour sheet. Like a beach without footprints or a wide green field of soft grass. At the same time they threaten to overwhelm me with their original unsullied beauty.
So, anyhoo, I sit here, naked in the cold because I choose to be, because I don’t care. I do believe, I do, that we are brilliant and unique, random, an act of somewhere silent, sliding through the world on the diamond flaws that everyone tries so hard to believe. Arbitrary, indiscriminately created, hacked open and carved from the world.
I have been remiss but that does not indicate that I have not been paying attention.
The distress abates by degrees, and by degree it returns and haunts and hurts. This is how it has always been.
I have even been up of late, yes directly up not even dysphoric. Can feel my fingers and toes tingle all day for no reason in slow waves of pleasure, hold them before my face, bend at the hip to pick lavender and put it in my pocket. Stretch strong and beautiful in the morning sun.
Just the tantalizing threads of it in my blood making me bite my cheeks and begin, once more, to push the worlds of my mind onto paper, to hold their drifting and stinging forms.
And it surges and falls like the sea, beats like wind against glass in my head. It has been a few days since I felt the irrational pleasure throb through my limbs. But ah, yes ah YES I know it will be back and soon and I will whisper to it and brush its feathers and ask it to stay stay stay.
I have been being very careful. I have not worked to the extent that I know I can, that I am pushed to and pressured in the back of my mind. I have even held back from the truth of my desires and have been making works that are gentle and lyrical. Before the storm. I have rational rationale that I must follow before I get all carried away and covered in paint inside and out. I do feel in a kind of limbo. I don’t know if this is happiness or not. I am lonely and dissatisfaction nests in my mind. Of course, of course. But limbo is better than purgatory and purgatory is better than hell. Often I feel… vague and unreal.
I stare so keenly at the moments days weeks without knowing that I am actually mad – this time, it does not possess the defining edge of reality that the very distortion and pain brings. How odd. Ridiculous.
ABSURD. And while I have this stillness, this ineptitude for subsistence there is always the star monster, world eater, inside me. It is inside us all, somewhere, elsewhere, else-when, telling us, calling to us in the night…
Don’t ever stop asking don’t ever ever stop reaching the answer to the question what is the meaning of life is the question what is the meaning of life.

Breathe the sweet breath of madness tie your mind to itself in switches and arcs of pleasure and lights and pain, in stutters and twitches and flights and bursts of colour in your vision.
We are all so bound to lucidity. To rationalism.

Ah hell. And to it we eventually return.
I wish I was my cat (the cat is dead, long live the cat!)

“I am a brother to dragons
I am a companion to owls.
My skin is black upon me.
And my bones are burned with heat.”

Ah my friends, my loving mad friends. I do so hope we all survive.
Spin through the random sky… faithless, of course. Faith in what?

Paul

The Letter belongs to the following groups:

All Things Poetic, Artistic, Philosophical, Green!, Short stories - Spherical Scriptings, The Drawing Board and WA Red Bubbles