Status Updates From So Much Blue

There is a cruelty in abstraction. It cuts into flesh. It relies on our fear of mortality for its meaning. The way it disturbs, distresses is meant to undermine some illusion of duration, of time controlled, even simply perceived. My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula.

I fought the urge to open my eyes and instead watched the event over and over, wanting desperately for it to end differently, but it never did, wouldn’t.

The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.

It could have been argued that ten years earlier I had succumbed to a banal midlife crisis, but now I was falling victim to something far worse, a late-life revelation.

I was beginning to face an annoying truth that I had long avoided. I was unhappy. I looked at my life and it was clear that I should by all measures be happy, but I was not. And it was not that way because I had isolated myself in my work. I had used my work as a refuge, a sanctum, a hiding place. However, this harborage turned out to have but one way in and one out and I had lost sight of it.

“It’s a strange thing,” I said as we walked across the river toward the first arrondissement. “If one is awkward consistently for long enough the awkwardness becomes safe harbor. Is that somehow disingenuous or deceitful?”

We only ever spontaneously deny the presence of things that are actually there or should be there.

I looked left to the water and for the first time the beauty of it came to me. There was movement on its surface and some life. I felt ungenerous for not having seen it as beautiful until then. And even then I wondered if my finding it so was not some self-preservative reflex, an attempt to close out the immediate world in which I found myself.

But unlike my hero Leonardo’s beautiful method of extracting nature’s secrets from painstaking observation, I had deluded myself into believing that nature would simply reveal itself to me, like the coral of a sunset, like the many whites of snow. Instead, I failed even to see the most transparent and patent features of my own family. I was ashamed of myself.

It was far more socially acceptable to be a workaholic, the obsessed artiste, than it was to be a drunk, but, using an old neighbor’s phrase, I’m here to tell you that one addiction was as bad as the next.

I arrived first, as I arrive everywhere first; I am always early, a combination of poor planning and a desire to delude myself into thinking that I can have some control of a situation even if it is only that I get to see the world first.

That illusions are a physical fact is difficult to reconcile with the knowledge that reality is anything but real. All that I will tell you is true, but I have no idea what true is. I come by my ignorance honestly, perception beginning and ending at the same neurological point in space.

Way more dour than I am used to