Portrait of a young artist

Like most people I know, I have given serious thought to the state of my belongings should I suddenly die.  Say I fall down a set of escalators (again) and this time crack my head open. Or catch another heel in tram tracks and get flattened on impact. Or contract smallpox from one of the foreign lands I travel to and die on the side of a dusty road. What would I have left behind? Because, it is not the dying part that scares me, not at all. What truly bothers me is what happens after. What the last page of my journal will say.  If the book on my nightstand will portray me as intelligent and literary, or lazy and silly in the most embarrassingly female way. If my bed will be unmade, or worse have crumbs in it from the toast I ate for supper the previous evening. If anyone will even notice I have vanished. I only say this because there are truly incredible people in my life, but as much as I love, for as long as I can remember I have tried often to keep myself just a little detached. So perhaps they have too. I am a bit of an emotional and physical gypsy that way. I have nowhere to go, and everywhere to be until I find the place I am meant to stay. And it may take years to pin me down. Sometimes I feel like being chased for eternity. Or chasing eternity itself.



I realise this sounds a little mad to those of you who don’t believe in multiple lives or non-linear time. But that’s alright. I am a dreamer, a believer. Humanbeings and dreambeings aren’t so different. And there are worse things in life than being seen as a little mad. I think it was Janis Joplin who said ‘I am one of those regular weird people’. I get that. I have been told that. Mostly by my mother. And I do wonder how that has driven me.

Do you understand where I am coming from? Maybe not. Sometimes I talk and I talk and I see that no-one knows what I am talking about, so think to myself ‘I should talk to a 5 year old, a 5 year old would know what I am talking about.’ Simply because my mind is often like a child’s; naïve, hopeful, and boundless. I still daydream like I did when I was 7 years old. Staring into the sky and suddenly realising hours have passed by. So nowadays I tend to keep multiple alarms going on my phone. I have too many responsibilities, responsibilities I love and care about to go allowing myself to get lost all the time!

It helps to write down my thoughts to pick up again later, so I can focus on other things in real time. And all these written down things would make up my story, scattered about my bedroom in abandon. And I suppose this is my principle concern... what would my story be? What would yours be?


I hope mine would read about voyages and adventure. Emotions, sensations, instincts, ambivalences, and all the obscure and elusive parts of the experience, with people, with music, with life. I hope it would read about influences, and the pure joy and consciousness of them.  I hope it would contain naked truth, unbearable to most but a facet of being I have spent a lot of time fighting for in place of pink suede elephants. And even a cure for denial, a cure for the human resistance to truth. I hope mine could be read as silly, and serious. As a key to unlocking dreams, relating dreams to life and in so finding deeper significance in our acts. As a ‘writer’ I hope it could be read as a morsel towards the consciousness of an expanded recreated realism. A tool of expression, layered and colourful, teaching how to speak and feel as we see.  I hope it will read as spiritual, full of faith and belief in magic, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. And those who don't believe in magic will never find them.

I hope it will tell stories of people I have come across, all kinds of people. Other artists, writers, musicians, teachers, carers, wanderers like me, and people not like me at all. People I have laughed with and listened to. All the time knowing, even in caring for them, I can never go their way. I will have to go another. Insane as the rain, and just as simple. 



In any case, I have many stories yet to live and tales to tell and be told. Unless I get hit by a tram crossing the street anytime soon.  

So for now I will look both ways, tread carefully, and remember as I hope everyone does, that the real proof that I have tried to live fully will never fit on the pages of a thinly lined journal, on the post it notes cluttering my wardrobe door or the paraphernalia lining my well worn shelves. Though I do hope I have many great adventures ahead, and a (successful) love story to add to the collection one day. The kind of love that makes me feel nauseas, faint and tingly all over. Although each time I know I will wonder if I am in love ... or if I have caught smallpox.

Comments

  1. Hope you found some good bookshops! Sadly many have gone and been replaced by fast-foods! By the way don't resist eclair au chocolat...life too short! :) Great blog! DeeBee

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  2. I did of course! There are still many hidden gems left in Paris. Thank you for your kind comment. I just had a peek at your blog... it is wonderful! Almost as good as being in Paris itself :-)

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