SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out if they’re part of a larger picture. Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red. Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic, peach-coloured mesas bruised by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert. Are these the wanna-be windows of life who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view of what they’re doing here swiping off knives thick with the gore of cadmium red, cleaning off brushes that get to go out on the field to caress and poke stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players. I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like the heaviness of a bell that’s supplanted my heart. The right root, but the wrong blossom. Even though I’d melt that bell back down into raucous cannon to defend the concept to my very last breath. But tonight I’m tunnelling under the foundations of the cornerstones of life to bring the walls down on top of my head, like an avalanche of prophetic skulls to just get a peek inside the grand paradigm, the white light of the gessoed underpainting. The secret garden with low-hanging fruit on easy street with the sacred whores of Babylon. An existential sadness, deep as a death-wound, as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart by the hands of a clock that mistook me for an intruder, undermines me from below, a pyramid built on quicksand. As if all those who had drowned in life like fish up over their gills in water were swimming in the watershed of every tear that almost makes it up over the top of the dam I try to throw up like a manly front to what I know I won’t be able to hold back for long. And there go the villages in the flooded valley I tried to live among like a neighbourly mountain come to Muhammad on the way up and down. It’s cold and lonely and the air is thin at the peaks of experience, with only a star and a cloud for company. The hard diamond in the rough I used to be has grown mushy over the years. Tears. Imagine that. Warm, salt seas with undulant tides of emotion coursing in and out, the way we breathe, the way we live and die, unite and separate, pour our shining down an inexhaustible black hole like Parthian gold into Crassus’ mouth in the hope of efflorescing like the bird fountain of a better world on the other side of hyperspace. Armed with some decent human attitudes, and a few that are wholly out of bounds, no reason my mind can catalyse out of chaos that I should feel the sorrows of the discarded colours on a paint rag like the afterbirth of the universe that’s gone on to greater things than road kill. I feel the deep grief of widowed eclipses and the creeping shame of sunspots that were born into a maculate caste of estranged birthmarks on the forehead of a lighthouse. Space is warped like water by some unknown disturbance in the pond. And I can’t discern from here whether it’s a crack in the dam or a birth sac ripe enough for its waters to break and wash me out to sea like the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked lifeboat. I hear the lilac whispering into blossom. I see the starlings building their nests in the corners of my third eye and the spiders weaving mandalas between the witching wands of the aspen saplings trying to transcend their roots. Still, time seems studiously impersonal and more matter-of-fact about suffering than perhaps it really is. The mind is an artist. Able to paint the worlds. As they say in Zen. And I can see so clearly even through this cloud of unknowing the kind of world I’d love to live in, giving it my full assent in peace and contentment, as long as I never lost the hunger that desires these things and no one else had to live like a ratty old towel abused as a paint rag by the shroud of Tourin. Yet I can’t help feeling I’ve spent my whole life trying to piece a lost constellation back together again from leftover stars that don’t have a clue what they’re shining amounts to. In the stained, marked for life, castaway things of the world, in the eyeless dreams of aborted inspirations, in the twenty million dollars an hour we waste on war, in the eyes of the twenty-five million children a year who are starving to death globally in civilizations based upon agriculture, I’m looking for the trashed masterpiece of a paint rag soaked in the blood of hemorrhaging roses that might have parted our eyelids like the Red Sea or a gallery on opening night to a vision of what they might have done had they lived to do things differently and their genius and beauty not been squandered like blood for oil or the waters of life learned to mingle more olaceously with oil slicks in the womb of the dark mother like an alternate medium of creative expression that wasn’t shunned like the evil skin of a shedding rat snake. There’s an expanding emptiness in my heart, a vacuum nature abhors like a miscarriage of what I hoped to wake up to the day after tomorrow like the smile of an enigmatic Mona Lisa that didn’t die in childbirth married to a banker. What faces reside in a paint rag I might have fallen in love with at first sight, what mind, moon, sea, sky and landscapes might have sat on my easel like windows in space that might have shown me a way out of here like the eye of a hurricane at the end of a telescope that made things at a great distance appear larger and more astronomically intimate than they seem when no one’s trying to paint the other end of the lens by wiping their glass slippers off on the grass as if the princess just stepped into a mess of Hooker’s green. Disoriented hues of colour blind rainbows, who knows how many faces have been wiped off on a towel with the big, sad, musing eyes of luminous gazelles? How many cardinals nesting in red cedar trees were wiped off the canvas like lipstick on the moon when the sun went Puritan, midnight at noon, and scourged the scarlet letter of the kissing stone until nothing was left of humanity but the purged shadows of an abstract divinity that burned a hundred thousand women foxed out like witch hunts in the seventeenth century at the stake of a principle that stood up to the flames like the backbone of a heretic with a streak of Payne’s Grey in her nature slashing at the orange sunset with a painting knife in her hands at those who resented the concupiscence and dark innocence of her sacred body and soul and saw her go up in flames like a bouquet of sable paintbrushes stacked at her feet like the pyre of the phoenix to come. Sooner transform the emptiness into something as absurd as it is meaningful, than ponder the waste of a good mirage trying to look for real water down a wishing well. Sooner try to patch the tear in the sky that rips me open under full sail running before the wind and lets all the stars come pouring out I was saving for a rainy day, with a paint rag, a discarded face towel sadder than viridian pine trees in the distance with an aerial perspective of pthalo blue gentled and blanched by the intervening atmosphere. That said and done until the sky drys I’d rather wear the patches of a compassionate clown like paint rags on the Sufi blue of my cerulean robes. I’d rather walk in a pauper’s clothes to show my solidarity with the cast offs of creation, not just finished canvases with artsy attitudes in stiff upper collars and colours that match the wallpaper like seasonal mood swings. Sometimes it breaks my heart from the inside out, it guts me like a tube of alizarin crimson to see all these fledglings strewn at the foot of my easel, my tree, my loom, my lean to, like the paint rags of crumpled, ruined, leftover lives that couldn’t quite make it as flying carpets. But I’m not going to forget the ashen sorrows and habitable earth-tones of starmud under the winged heels of inspiration. As for me and my zodiacal house of ill-repute, my renegade observatory on the wrong side of the tracks, I’m going to ride this wavelength of light out to the very end where the wildflowers open like the complementary loveletters of a colour wheel, a rainbow come full circle, unbroken just for them. The donkey looks into the well. The well looks back at the donkey. Art. Life. Zen. When the line turns round the donkey at the end is in the lead. Yesterday’s bleeding paint rag. Tomorrow’s aesthetic creed. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:35:46 +0000
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