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12 nights – a favorite drawing

IMG_5366If I was to choose one drawing that I liked particularly in the flood of drawings of those nights it would have to be this pretty simple one. There were some much more sophisticated pieces, but this one, conceived towards the end of the 12 nights, is playful and relaxed in a way that convinced me that in the end there was a point to my practice. I wish I could hold on to that for a while longer, at least when I am drawing.

lunacy

From that day on my world has been different. Even though I have lost some of the feverishness that I lived with back then, a feverishness that brought on a clarity about which I knew nothing as long as it lasted, I still hold it for possible that at any moment in our lives just about anything can happen. I still know that we are like divers in a deep ocean finding access to different currents and tides, each one of them distinctly different in temperature, clarity and speed. Accepting the reality of the girl in the window I acknowledged that I preferred to be raving mad to inhabiting a world without surprises. A suburban world where everything was designed to be stagnant or at least to create the never to be questioned illusion of stability. Even my free spirited artist mother surfed the tide of that illusion. That day I rejected the comforting hand of a reality created by others for needs I didn’t even knew I might have one day. Instead I allowed myself an unfiltered acknowledgement of the impulses that my brain felt inclined to produce. I did not know whether or not there was anything out there at all, I didn’t know if we possess any kind of objective reality but whereas before that had horribly worried me (along with the question how to prove to oneself that one exists at all outside the universe of our own brain), suddenly I was intrigued by the freedom of it. So what – if this girl in the mirror did not exist, I could still see her bright and clear, she looked like a normal kid.

there was a gate and there was none …

there was a gate and there was none. to step forward required no courage just a lion’s heart. beyond it was the mirror land. hares parading on their hind legs, walking canes in their pretentious front paws as was to be expected. what else? i could not see enough from where i stood. i stepped through.

once through, the scene changed just as i had suspected it might do (but had hoped against my better judgment it would not). no green bucolic scenes, no childhood dreams. there was another gate and not a gate, a foot of grey no-mans land between realities, not more. i stepped through the second gate, as if one step mandated two, oh, what a fool i was!

beyond the gate there was bright blindness, no object, no surface, no orientation, no gravity – not dream, not reality, a blindness that did not originate in the eye’s inability to see what was there, there was nothing. there was no gate, there was no path, but in the brightness, invisible, the pretentious hare, checked his silver time piece smugly, and i did not know how i knew he did.

then i heard it fall, the silver time piece, fall with a dampened thud that sent shivers down my spine. i felt the rabbit searching for it like a blind man, paws frightfully extended, and suddenly i understood why i could see the hare with unseeing eyes. when i had stepped through the second gate i had turned inside out, and the rabbit was trapped within.