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Saturday, June 25, 2011
Is it strange to miss something that never existed? Somehow, and very much inexplicably, I miss so many things that have never occurred to me in this life before. When I look outside the window I hope to see a scene so much different from what reality actually presents to me. I miss emotions that I remember probably from another lifetime, miss the things that I've never had in these fifteen years...I probably miss living something I can truly call life, and it's strange, isn't it, if I never even knew life?
I've gotten back to writing a bit these few days, and what I retrieved was a world of lonely hours enclosed in a fictional universe, whose life I would weave by churning out more words to supplement the wonders of visionary inspiration. I used to have a job there, perhaps even a working place, a studio or an office, a summerhouse even, where I would wonder to and fro freely between work and pleasure and life was truly what it was meant to be. I thrived on an expenditure of words and a salary of experiential creations. My work was just to create, create, and endlessly create, and be rewarded with the joy of reviewing my creations as they become animated and alive.
As I grew older, I became enticed for awhile by the promise of more rewarding bonuses from the outside world. I quit my comfy job and ventured into a dangerous new world called Reality. I shifted out of Fiction country, into a vast new land called Reality, perhaps proportionally as big as Russia or even bigger in the real world, in hope of finding a new home in that new endless realm. Expectedly though, I did a horrible job surviving there. Reality gave me less than what it originally promised and I lost sight of many things I wanted to do. My skills became rusty and my ambitions dulled. Once in awhile I would remember to create, but my creations were restricted because Reality would not tolerate such wild ambitious projects. Reality had a God, and we were to obey it.
I miss Fiction. I miss Fiction so much. I have a house in Reality right now, of course, and everytime I push open the window I would see solid, beautiful scenery, perhaps a row of birds dwindling into the sky, or stars and sun and people and trees. These things remain as the hours pass by. Days, months, years, decades, and they would occasionally change, but fundamentally remain rooted. In one way or another, the knowledge that I could walk a hundred rounds around the estate and return to find it still there, of course, offers a modest kind of comfort.
But sometimes I can't help but miss the indefinite quality of Fiction. I miss pushing open the window and seeing a light, which takes no form and shape, but which I can manipulate and think into existence a new creation of sorts. I could create a night, with stars and clouds that drift ever so slowly over a sleeping landscape. I could create a day, with blue skies and a sun whose heat is warm upon my skin. On days when I'm sad I could create rains that plunder so heavily to earth that everything is a foggy silhouette beyond a translucent curtain of obscuration. There was so much imaginative freedom. Things happened for me. I didn't have happen for things. And that, in all aspects, was all it took to truly live.
Someday, when my work is done in Reality, I will go back to Fiction and enjoy my days of retirement by immersing myself in the creations I have quit such a long time ago. Only when I have reunited with what I truly need to do will I be revived.
***~~~*Played with the winds at 11.33pm*~~~
Saturday, June 18, 2011
There's so much to think about ever since we found his site on google. What originally started off as a form of friendly curiosity ended in the discovery of things so long unknown, so absolutely unknown that we were blown off our seats in that tiny instant. How can someone be so different? Whatever happened to him? Why is he the way he is now, a sad and lonely soul too distant to be embraced?
He was such a brilliant young man, and I'm sure that right now, deep inside, he is still that brilliant young man in one way or another. We just can't see it because of how far apart from him we're standing. Perhaps he is hiding for some unspeakable reason, or we're just sand-blind, but whichever way it is, an enormous, crucial observation has just scaled up the bridge of our nose, past our eyes and up into thin air. His english was gorgeous on the site, his essays full of wise contemplation and psychoanalytical philosophies that kept me reading and craving for more. I feel ashamed to have never seen or hazarded a guess about that part of him; what appeared to me, and which I accepted, was an aged man with not much up his sleeve and whose vain attempts at art (after being a chem teacher) was somehow plaintive in some ways.
How wrong I have been! How wrong I still am right now! It unnerves me that I can be so unobservant, so blind and unseeing that I eventually succumbed to taking him for who he appears to be.
Now, how am I to return to school and face my coursework? I am making a mockery of myself. Instead of being that perceiving soul standing up from the rest of the crowd, I am just as blind as the crowd is, blindfolded and unseeing, even if I may be aware of another direction I would wish to take off in. And there he is, trying his best to help me complete that hypocritical artwork. How ironic, how satirical my artwork can be in terms of admonishing myself! Self-portrait alright, I think it really fits, despite in a crude way, to be one right now.
Reading what he wrote drew me back into my old blogposts and those diary entries when I was a kid. I was surprised at how similar some of our thoughts were; our depression, our desperation, our fears at losing our grasp on the reins of an untamed creature like life. Deep beneath that aged face and slightly irritating demeanor is a poor soul just like the rest of us, with the same experiences and perhaps more. For once I felt this strong urge to reach down to him, reach out to him, to pull him out from his pit of misery. This is not a heroic action a matyr would do. It is simple, basic human kindness. I want to help him. I want to help him because of how human he is, how much like us he is.
Ever since the start of the year I just knew something was a little amiss about him. When many people urged me to join in the blasts of criticism targeted at him, what I saw was a sad, sad soul, so immensely lonely and forlorn, shrinking from the hurt and pain of exclusion. He needed understanding and acceptance. You could tell it just from looking at his eyes, that timidness, the slight hesitation sometimes when he speaks which makes me cringe. He's expecting rejection, expecting to be taunted and teased. And yet at one point in time my earthly emotions overshadowed my more perceiving intuition, and I yielded to the onslaught of negative feelings towards him. I felt so annoyed, so furious with some of things he did. I couldn't understand why he does things that way. I couldn't understand why he couldn't be a different person.
And now I can't understand why I didn't see that different person in him.
***~~~*Played with the winds at 11.40am*~~~
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Have you ever felt this strange, otherworldly sensation, as if all of a sudden so many things are flowing into your life and yet you're inexplicably at peace? There's something slightly disconcerting about it; somehow you know that this is an illusion, a calm before the storm, but it lends an almost ethereal quality to life which waters down its less desirable aspects. You know illusions aren't real and that they don't last, but you're glad to keep it up because they are so much more reassuring than cold, solid reality.
That's how I've been feeling for the past couple of days since the start of the hols. The first couple of days of week one was spent travelling back and forth between home and school for art coursework. I would spend half a day slaving away before the canvas, the other half at home dealing with my parents, relaxing instead of trying to do even more work, and then sleeping for approximately 6-7 hours before the next day. On top of that, my inbox churns up fresh emails almost daily regarding scattered school-related duties such as Geng Yun Illustrations, Art Initiative Speedpainting Video, ArtsFest Manga/Anime workshops, RI Badge-Making Machine etc. There are just so many things to do, and for moments like any other I would quickly switch to another tab, desperate to escape the harsh reminders of work from my inbox.
I'm tired, but somehow strangely content. Well maybe it's apathy, but I can't exactly be bothered to figure it out anymore. All I know is that things have settled into a relatively safe rut and life is passing by almost automatically without much effort on my part. Perhaps for this period of time it's neither me driving life, nor life driving me. Life may be driving itself now. And that's good, because I've always wanted to take the backseat a little while in the vehicle of my own life, watching instead of participating, but knowing that I'm still making progress all the same.
Sometimes I feel as if there is a growing split within myself. It's not a dangerous split like a hairline crack that may break a delicate vessel - it's the kind that expands, expands and endlessly expands, but never limited, never restrained. There is just too much space within myself. At certain times I feel as if I could contain two worlds, one for me, one for me, each cocooned in its own universe only to take turns to revolve to the surface.
When I was painting over the past two days, it was as if I was watching someone else paint through my hands. There's this strange sensation of being in control yet not totally, being there but not quite. It doesn't help that my painting consists of a self-portrait of sorts. When I refer to my self-portrait to my friends, I call it a "her", not a "me", and it felt so natural it's almost remotely scary, as if it's a part of me that makes up my being but doesn't exactly belong to me at all. Staring at her backview makes me feel even more alienated from the surface, as if I'm being pushed gently back underwater and told to take stock of things from a reclined spot. I know I'm being told to wait a little while for something which I do not know. The wait, however, no longer disturbs me. Instead of boredom, it is now a chance for a reprieve which comes by so rarely I have learnt to cherish it.
Life pushes me on now. There is no motive in its encouragement, just a mindless, droning pattern it dutifully wishes to get me back into. What surprises me a little is that I respond to it just as dutifully. I am not depressed, at least I don't think so, and definitely not now at any rate. It's just a numbing of the senses which I have no idea how to react to. Maybe it's because we both are tired. Life and I, the unbreakable bond between us from the moment of my birth...we've come to a consensus to resign for a while, to arrive at a well-deserved truce with that vast, unfathomable something we have both been battling together.
It would do us good.
***~~~*Played with the winds at 9.45pm*~~~
Thanks to all the blogs the designer referred to (countless) for html code help :) (esp. cyn' and sixseven)
Adobe Photoshop Elements for supernatural abilities
