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...
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I’ve more or less always hated how I look: as a child I was told almost daily, by one particular person, how hideous I was, and although I know now that that person was troubled, who was I, back then, to doubt the truth of it? So aside from brief periods of being in reciprocal love, or thinking I was, I’ve felt a self-repulsion that is nearly physically painful. That sounds pretty melodramatic— to say nothing of self-indulgent and perversely vain— and for that reason I’ve always tried to keep it hidden. But at low moments (of which these few dozen whiny posts seem to be symptoms) it’s difficult to suppress. Suffice it to say I had a bad outbreak of it last night.
