Involution

By Paul D Robertson

Bitumen and oils, 130 x 90 cms.

Available for sale

The name means involvement or the act or process of involving. I have been having a great time experimenting with the variety of tones and hues available when I mix bitumen (the stuff that people fix their flues and gutters with) and different colours of oil paint. This piece is done from an old photograph of mine that I stumbled across on file. I have found it VERY HARD to organise to have two models pose for me at once. Often individuals will volunteer but when I ask them to pose together they get skittish and suddenly seem to have otter things on. I find that having more than one model is far more satisfying and complex than one. I guess I will have to make it happen more often. I have plans to do just that. (I added something in bad taste about arranging threesomes in general but one of my friends smacked me across the nose with her feminist taste control rod and so I didn’t.) smacked me across the nose with her feminist taste control rod and so I didn’t.)

SLEEPER'S RANT:

At the end of the day as I attempt to sink into drugged sleep, sometimes it occurs to me how hard the day has been. "each one a curled ankle an epic plan a gift, a laughing sickness - a gaseous truth."
I fool my mind, each day - distraction, a fine art if ever there was one. The AA philosophy (if not their philology and definitely not their theology.) Not just one day at a time, one moment, one breath, one more flick of an eyelid.

It is an immense act of faith, continual, repeated, sacrosanct. You see, I need to believe each moment that the next will be easier than the last... which in and of itself requires WILL. I need to find the choice and make it ALL THE TIME, with deliberation and the weight of my mind. It's like something in my head need to be reset -switch, click whirr, I can do it I can I can I can.

It is one of the reasons that sleeping is so hard for me without drugs. Each need of the human body is met with an action - hunger, sex, thirst. But sleep, SLEEP, is an inaction - it requires no will but is something enigmatic that happens without conscious volition and I find it not just mysterious, but mystical. My constant analysis fails and flounders against it, all I know is that it is bizarre and necessary.

OK. So this leads me to memory. If I need to reset my emotions with reapplied hope in a continuous barrage of specific emotion, then when I also REMEMBER, when I consider and take apart the events of the day, then I am left with rational conclusions. These take the form of hopelessness.
I need to delude myself throughout the day in order to get through the day. I am still here (though presently I am stuck on death-delusions and the possibility (probability?) that I did in fact die when I was 22), so ipso facto I must succeed, a thousand times a day, a million times a week.
When this is taken from the panicky need of daylight and applied to quietude, alone, I am lost. I cannot sustain that tomorrow will be easier, that the next moment before the sweet breath of sleep will require less from me. One from another, I have been doing this for too long - I know that this is not the case. In the clarity of singular darkness, the illusion is stripped of its hue. I CANNOT believe it at that time.

This is my rationality, having strangled my illusions:
LIKE IT OR NOT... HERE I COME.

These are the most dangerous times for me. It is then that I am hopeless and drowning. It is irrefutable, and I have been trying for so long, so long. It is more than just the seeming of the ease of death versus life. I know in my hearts core, in my heart of hearts, that it is true.
The inevitability of the next day fills me with dread. The scale of it; the enourmity of the willpower that is necessary for a continuance

Of life for one more heartbeat. It is a horrifying prospect and no verisimilitude of peace will fool the crystal ease of logic.

So instead I fool my body with chemicals, and this is how I ascertain enough precious sleep to stay, well, alive.

I believe very strongly, - I know that this has been said, and said by others more articulate than I - that the primary driving force of life is not sex. Freud was essentially incorrect.

It is fear.