About nine years ago, I drew a picture with the title blue skies, yr brain is
beautiful. Personally understood, an unwavering magic was created by those
words when placed together in this manner. They felt almost as if they were
the first words I spoke of my own accord and, unwittingly, thrown high into
the night that lay before and endlessly after, was a powerful star to navigate
my steps forward.
The picture was a fine pencil drawing of a young woman blowing a chewing gum
bubble, big enough to largely obscure her face and head. The source of the picture
was a photograph I had happened upon while flicking through a magazine. The photograph
illustrated an article that detailed some general facts on chewing gum within
the global culture:
If all the pieces of chewing gum produced every year were laid end to end
they would stretch to the moon and back six times.
The energy consumed by all that gum would be enough to light a city of 10
million inhabitants for a year.
I drew on a greyish/brown scrapbook paper, that lay somewhere between A4 and
A3 in size, with a 2B pencil and deviated from the photograph only mildly.
I thought the photograph was a great image and, though obviously appropriate
in its usage within the magazine, that the image’s own unique charms
were being overlooked or undervalued – itself obscured by its surroundings.
A month or so later, a quickly painted version appeared, about four times the
size of the original and carrying the same title – a hot air balloon
was added in the distance of the top right side. I was attending Belfast’s
art college at the time and a few months later, nearing the end of my second
year, we were asked to write a statement of our artistic intent. I typed in
a flurry from start to end one-and-three-quarters A4 pages under the title
blue skies, yr brain is beautiful.
I left art college for the Summer and didn’t return by the Autumn. At
the beginning of October I arrived in Edinburgh to obtain a job. The city of
beautiful bricks, as I had always referred to it.
During the first December I spent in Edinburgh I met a very, very special old
lady for the first occasion. She informed me, during an ostensibly innocuous
conversation, that in reality the city was an invisible city made from glass.
A sudden change in the potency of her words was clearly expressed as she spoke,
that yes, Edinburgh was, indeed, a beautiful city but that it also was an awful
city, made entirely from glass and that it was easy to get lost while living
here and that over the years you will desperately want to leave but because
everywhere and everything was constructed in glass that it was almost impossible
to find the door leading out.
I would, over the years, learn and understand that her highest wisdom was carried
as a single and delicate fern branch is carried at one’s side in a journey,
out-of-time, amidst the high-afternoon high-street pulse.
the pine wood,
We wander through the pine wood for a long time – sometimes forever.
It is a dark place to live, with little light penetrating through the constitution
and construction, its undergrowth and overgrowth, its branches and foliage.
There are animals to encounter and there is the soil beneath.
And, we pine for our loved ones and we pine at the injustice, the culture all
around – and we march forth with the faintest of hearts.
But, as the song Isis mentions: we chopped through the night and we chopped
through the day.
the log fire,
When you travel to the land of the dead, you discover that it is a strange
place to return from. To reach this land you must walk without fear and your
heart must burn out and through your every pore – and your eyes will
shine and the world will fall apart and time will not operate a clock.
It is important to make clear that the journey takes its toll upon your body.
It is not peculiar to believe, on occasion, that you have not returned, that
in fact you died when you made your visit – and I guess, either way you
look at it, you have.
And so, during the recuperation and realignment of your body’s strengths
and practical functioning’s, for a while, things will be experienced
partnered alongside confusion and, once again, your heart may waver and feel
faint.
It is difficult to accept what has unfolded to your eyes; there is doubt snake
nesting at your feet. You have never been under a sun without obstacles obscuring
the path of its emanation and this sunlight is the darkest place, ever, to
experience fear.
To remember your heart, the strongest of hearts that kept you alive, is to
remember your heart, the strongest of hearts that sat beside the swirling tide
and pebble-skimmed the physical and the mental into the centre of the darkest
hole. It is the quiet smile of this recollection that will bring the happiest
days of your life together inseparably. Do not think that you are unable to
win a staring contest with a black hole; obtain its power.
Your days will fall into you. The worthy matter will pass through and the rest
will be destroyed, only to fuel your next step.
the cubs,
&
the spell.
It is the saddest of tricks to let our selves be fooled by: to awake and admire
the blue skies but in faint-heartedness let them canopy our movements and separate
us from what lies behind. Our existence becomes roughly pick-pocketed from
a place best expressed by the use of the word love when we let our selves forget
that behind every blue sky remains the universe, the universe we see when the
sunlight becomes obscured each nightfall of our day.
When you have lit the fire, return to your sofa and take a seat – sit
back comfortably, rest your feet up and be at peace. You are a spell. You are
a cub. The spells are in the air; they are the stars of our hurricane. You
will soon be warmed and nothing can harm you. You live in a place we call love.
We are all cubs ad we are, all of us, the spell.
Beside you will wait your cubling and you can tell them with absolute accuracy
that you are in love with them and you will kiss with only your hearts because
both your minds and bodies no longer exist.
At the tip of your growth from one moment to the next, as each molecule replicates
its existence from one second into the next without ceasing to be or falling
asunder, hold your most beautifully understood explorations and adventuring
wide open as your lips suddenly meet for the first time, again.
yours sincerely
gavin duvet
|
