Closet Paintings

A mostly hidden blog by Mechanical Grace.

When I was 8 or 9 I did a messy, free-form painting, the type that starts with beautiful colors but ends up a brownish tragedy. Still, small flashes of color remained. When I looked at the abstract mess after it had dried, I noticed a tiny shape that looked remarkably, precisely, like a small house, perched on a ledge. Suddenly the chaotic whorls became a cliff face, balancing this little house, and the grayish yellow strip across the top of the page, an odd-colored sky. Looking more carefully I found people, other little buildings, a horse. I marveled at having created such an objective reality, not because it was an accident-- on the contrary, I tried to forget that-- but rather because it seemed such an accomplishment to have achieved that impossible magic, verisimilitude. I kept the painting in the closet and would look at it in private, feeling unreasonably proud, and engrossed in the story I'd hidden in my own painting. I never expected anyone else to see the things I saw, and I still don't, but I work more intentionally now, so you never know...

May 15

43. Driven To Abstraction

As I add to this list of thoughts, knowing that no one may ever read them, it becomes harder to resist the lure of abstractions that will mean very little to anyone other than myself. Abstraction also beckons from the sharp slide I’m trying to avoid, the one that keeps me dulled by sleep for eighteen hours a day if I let it, and leaves me incapacitated by a deeper depression. Abstraction and sleep— my two favorite means of dissociation. Maybe sleep is itself a sort of abstraction of life?

I wrote about sleep earlier, a sleep that comes of real if mysterious fatigue. This is the other kind of sleep, the one that is a substitute for death. It has been four weeks since I’ve written to the man who was my best friend for years, and knowing that that very status of friendship was what drove us apart, because he was so much more important to me than I to him, well, it hurts. The more he knew me, and the more I loved him, the less he wanted me. Who would not want to die, a little?

I wrote a story a long time ago, based on a real experience I’d had, about having hit a dog with my car. I remember standing stunned on the side of the road, only able to look at the shape of the shockingly red blood pool that was forming alongside the poor panting creature, itself only an ink-black shape to me. In that moment, the shapes seemed mirror images of each other, and that abstraction infused me with a raw comfort. Writing about it in a story a few years later— a further abstraction— helped me cope with a painful situation at the time, and writing about that process now in this once-more-removed context of abstraction as a subject on its own, well, it still helps.