Paint by Letters

So, human canvasses are white, but the original canvass wasn’t, at least according to this folksy book called the Bible. The original canvass was black, darkness, nothingness. Then this God dude comes around and creates space—heavens and earth—but there was nothing except darkness around it, until he was all, “Light, please,” and bam! Light. At which point we have matter, which needs space to sit in, and light. Then finally, he (because clearly God must be male—females wouldn’t have fucked so much shit up) put stuff in that light, like water, earth, plants, animals, humans…

You’d think that in the tradition of creation, canvasses would be black—nothing—and we would paint light on top of them. But that’s not how we humans roll. It’s too difficult to create on top of nothingness, I assume. So I’ll begin my story with light, white light, in white space. I’m an ID in white space. Hello. I just said hello to you. I guess that means you’re an ID in this space, too.

It’s not very interesting here, bobble heads in an empty white universe. We need a world. So let’s paint the earth underneath us. Let’s go with a field in Southern California. We’re facing north. There’s an ocean three miles to our left, and we’re standing in a field speckled with white flowers and cactai and bumpy hillsides in front and bugs buzzing in our ears and hawks flying overhead and maybe a deer to the right. I like creating this world. Perhaps it’s a God complex. Maybe I’m transgendered. But no not really. So we’re in a field.

But wait—we’re modern day people. This scene doesn’t make sense. There aren’t many fields left in Southern California. I’ll flatten this natural scene and paint a concrete road beneath us. There are some buildings to my left and right, blinking lights from LED billboards above my head advertising the most recent HBO series, and a freeway entrance just behind.

But these things exist in highly commercial areas, so I don’t want to be standing on the road. Let’s move to the sidewalk, cars zooming by on the right. The sound of cars replaces the sound of bugs as the ebbing and flowing white noise—whish, whish, whish. In fact, there are no bugs, save the occasional cockroach scuttling into the drain nearby. There are no hawks flying above, either. I guess this is our world.

Friend, this is how I live, picking at my canvass. I can’t help it, when it all seems so artificial in its temporality. Sometimes I think stories would be more interesting if they didn’t have a central character but instead just observed the same piece of space for a century or two. An adobe room one decade, ruins in a field the next, a grave site the next, a new building the next, and all the faces and encounters—plant, animal, human—that occupied the same morphing GPS coordinate. Where I’m sitting right now, on the concrete step in front of the Bank of America next to the road by the freeway entrance… are there bodies buried under here? Did lovers make love here, where a field used to be? Did cowboys and Indians stab each other in the face on this very soil—or rather, where soil used to be?

Some call me an overthinker. Some call me crazy. But don’t worry—I don’t wear that moniker like a fucking badge of pride like so many artists. “Oh, you don’t understand me. Oh, I’m so complicated.” No, you can understand me. I’m just an observer. The only difference is the obsession, maybe, an obsession that some might call crazy. I guess I have an idea of what it would be like to go crazy, since my mind loops in ways that I can’t control. You see, I don’t pick my observations. They pick me.

I suppose it might be Chinese water torture, drip, drip, dripping on my forehead, never stopping, never ceasing, always rhythmic, always the same, day by day, night by night, pattern by pattern, and hours pass and I’m strong, and days pass I’m irked, and weeks pass and I’m furious, and months pass and I Scream! Cry for it to Stop! But it won’t stop. It won’t stop. It won’t stop. Scream! It won’t stop. It won’t stop. It won’t stop. Scream! It won’t stop. It won’t stop. It won’t stop. And it breaks me, til there’s no me, no more fighting, no more pain. I am the drip, drip, drip, I love the drip, drip, drip, and drips fall endlessly into stillness, into themselves, and some call it crazy.

Maybe it won’t stop until there’s no it to stop. Maybe it won’t stop until it’s still. The observant mind isn’t crazy. The observant mind is.

But I think you can understand this—you seem to get me—right friend?