it was huge.. a huge bank of clouds.. rolling in towards the city, coming in from the east. i was sitting on the back steps, drinking my tea, and watching the lightening.. a huge mass of pent up energy. it wasn’t a storm, it was an airborne electrical explosion..
it made me think about myself in unnatural terms.. i gained some form of objectivity on my life. it’s a storm. as each flash executes, it lights up parts of itself. different parts of the cloud bank.. and just as one flash dies down, the next starts.. occasionally they overlap, and the sky is as bright as…. interspersed with all this, are moments of pure darkness.. if you didn’t remember the last flash, you could be tricked into thinking the cloud isn’t there…..
and that’s where i am right now. a brief moment of pure darkness. i’m beginning to forget little things about the last flash… the darkness lasted too long.
my cat came out and sat under my legs. she hates storms, terrified of them, yet she instinctively knows when i need her company..
my nearest and dearest tell me i am like a cat. strong instinct and intuition, quietly comforting, territorial, yet, ‘sensibly shy’ (if that makes sense). in conflict, i retreat and observe, until i feel the need to fight.
with so many things going on at the moment, my instinct is to retreat from it all.. but i know i must deal with at least two of the current problems, and, of course, one is inexorably linked to another, and so on…
i can’t escape.. i know there is more lightening to come..
i’m relying heavily on metaphor.. and i usually despise that tendency in writing (particularly my own). the text gets too choppy, too flowery, too heavy, too laden with imagery apart from the topic at hand. the feeling. the core. the intention.
what’s bizarre about that (to me), is that my art practice is all about leaving the work open to interpretation, trying to get away from the artist’s intention.. away from the answer to that mind-numbing question that artists hear from people who don’t want to think for themselves.. “But what does it all mean?”
do i really see art and writing as being that different? we’re talking polar opposites here.. in writing, i get to the core, express that hidden agenda, or the demon within, that nagging thought that won’t leave me alone, and drives me to action, i let people in to see me, the real me….. and yet, in art, i am always trying to push people away from that, from me. my art is as personal as my writing, yet i treat them so differently, and i expect different things from their respective audiences….
i don’t get it…