Started the red paintings last week. It felt like there was nothing to start with other than what I knew. And if there were lonesome perspectives to have, then trying to bridge what you know, with something yet not made, then starting with what you know turns around and looks back at you like a solitary confinement. I feel like a ghost. Like I've been dead and now am walking around dead. Wait - that's a zombie. And I don't want to be a zombie. I want to be a ghost. I want that special knowledge that comes afterward. Like after something goes wrong you have this weird understanding. Like when you see a car wreck or a train wreck or a drunk wreck, don't you have this immediate sense? Doesn't it feel like seeing it has now made it your own? Human nature becomes drawn to killer apps like that. Why we look. Why we speak out later on. Why? We're on the further end of process. Hearing voices in the windows when you stare out in the street. The corner chair in a room where a spider web keeps appearing after the nurse ran through the room with a vacuum. And the crows that drop into the garden like airborne thugs with shiny feathers and who land for a moment and do nothing else but inhabit a freakish brief time and then lift off back into the air without a sound either coming or going. I want to paint everything red and that's the problem. It's the color. There's too much of it. It's hard to paint that color. You need a toe hold in the land of forever and that's a bastard to get. And I don't have that. It's equally as difficult not to paint that color. But if I don't paint that color then what? Will I be left? And if so where would I be left? Maybe it's like this. Maybe the color red is on to something. But what though? I don't have that answer. I don't know where it is. I want to locate something. And in return have that something locate me. I have this rush to get into an ethers of dreams. An ether of practical day long opportunities. An ether that wont stop. What I fear is I will be left behind to roost. Like watching a dragonfly hover in the warm humid air above a set of green plastic lawn chairs... then longing for that motion... where that motion appears as a stop in visual time... There used to be a body out in the world that once belonged to me and now that body has long been gone. And it's best to remember here, reverie should never be mistaken for nostalgia. What's in the past is just so. Like any amazement that happened to you. Why sift through that dust? What's the popularity there? If you have an idea you need to make that idea stand up and sing and that won't happen yesterday just because you thought it up yesterday. Ideas don't wait for us to get an act together. The overall feelings we hunt for - like where did that body go - where do we pause and stand tall in the shit stream - or whatever else we want - take those into account and what I find is that the image of ourselves we need in that face of time running away is not important. That image counts less than the details. And once fired those details bring a money shot but thank goodness they settle back down and then bring out a tired old truth for inspection - that we can't make anything happen again. The nurse was just here. I was talking with her about red paintings. And she said any stage of life was just another label that didn't pay as well as the one before did. Why keep it dull she said? She sighed and tossed me a dish towel. Part of my occupational therapy is to catch things in motion and then put them away. I'm getting better at it. Though sometimes that quick response and coordination reflex I'm to build upon leaves me somewhere ajar in the brain and that's another place to deal with. On occasion I miss the dish towel.
