Amber

By Paul D Robertson

Watercolours70 x 28 cms

SOLD

I have been remiss but that does not indicate that I have not been paying attention.
I have been ok. Well even, yes. The distress abates to degrees, and by degree it returns and haunts and hurts. This is how it has always been.
I have even been up of late, yes directly up not even dysphoric. Can feel my fingers and toes tingle all day for no reason in slow waves of pleasure, hold them before my face, bend at the hip to pick lavender and put it in my pocket. Stretch strong and beautiful in the morning sun.
It is not true mania, not yet, just the tantalizing threads of it in my blood making me bite my cheeks and begin, once more, to push the worlds of my mind onto paper hold their drifting and stinging forms. And it surges and falls like the sea, beats like wind against glass in my head. It has been a few days since I felt the irrational pleasure throb through my limbs. But ah, yes ah YES I know it will be back and soon and I will whisper to it and brush its feathers and ask it to stay stay stay.

I have been being very careful. I have not worked to the degrees that I know I can, that I am pushed to pressured in the back of my mind. I have even held back from the truth of my desires and have been making works that are gentle and lyrical. Before the storm. I have rational rationale that I must follow before I get all carried away and covered in paint inside and out.

I have written a few new songs, and I have finally started writing creative lines again, the first chapter of what has to be, what WILL BE my first fucking BOOK. It is fantasy fiction but so weird and different it is genre-less it hangs out there not horror or fantasy or science fiction. Sex death and sleepwalking, a hanging city, warehouses full to the rafters of books that no-one can read. I invented a religion because I needed to make a war. And it surges and falls like the sea, beats like wind against glass in my head. It has been a few days since I felt the irrational pleasure throb through my limbs. But ah, yes ah YES I know it will be back and soon and I will whisper to it and brush its feathers and ask it to stay stay stay.
I have been being very careful. I have not worked to the degrees that I know I can, that I am pushed to pressured in the back of my mind. I have even held back from the truth of my desires and have been making works that are gentle and lyrical. Before the storm. I have rational rationale that I must follow before I get all carried away and covered in paint inside and out.
I have written a few new songs, and I have finally started writing creative lines again, the first chapter of what has to be, what WILL BE my first fucking BOOK. It is fantasy fiction but so weird and different it is genre-less it hangs out there not horror or fantasy or science fiction. Sex death and sleepwalking, a hanging city, warehouses full to the rafters of books that no-one can read. I invented a religion because I needed to make a war.
I paint and I hang out with my cat. I have made enough money to pay my bills scraping enough together and going without as always.
Someone mentioned their scars recently. I have… so many. For years I was so ashamed of them, but that has changed as I have so much as soon as I gained strength enough to see I knew that it was not something I would ever try and hide. It is rare for someone to ask about them. It is more likely that I will tell them about bipolar and they will ask then, and I will SHOW THEM. A truth that I have found that surprised me is that I have never had a woman not actively LIKE THEM. Recently I have had people ask me what happened to my throat and I tell them – then they are so curious I can see it - how did you do it? What did you use? They are in truth battle scars as if we had been at war. Literally, of course, because we are. Wear them thus – you have survived, you beat the monster and are still alive where so many many others cut too deep.
Here is a piece that I did about this very thing:
http://www.pauldrobertson.com/sanguis_ex_machina.htm
I do feel in a kind of limbo. I don’t know if this is happiness or not. I am very lonely and dissatisfaction nests in my mind. Of course, of course. But limbo is better than purgatory and purgatory is better than hell. Often I feel… vague and unreal. I am so used to suffering all the time that moments days weeks without knowing that I am actually mad do not possess the defining edge of reality that the very distortion and pain brings. How odd. Ridiculous.
Fucking
ABSURD.

Don’t ever stop asking don’t ever ever stop reaching the answer to the question what is the meaning of life is the question what is the meaning of life.
I have been learning more and more and more. I think I understand the genesis of Christianity now. I have read a book on Greek mythology, on Celtic, on Norse. They are all tied in together, and these stories, all these stories and stories, interlaced and beautiful, they are the products of madness themselves. The most daring ideas, the most exquisite – these are outside the workings of a mind that fits the requisite barriers of societal acceptance – more much more than that – they are outside the limits of working within a mind and not causing it pain. Nietzsche’s abortive saints, one and all – all of US that is what we are.

I have started drinking green tea all the time. I swear it gives me some kind of little rush. I have even tried to learn more about eastern philosophy… got some INSENCE for fuck’s sake, but the philosophy is, of course, just as dense and vast as its western counterpart, and it is slippery to me. Though I have already learned that so much of what took the west till the 18th or 19thc was already understood by the 5thc BC in India. There are holes there too where the west went forward and the east never considered. It is frightening in sheer scale. Vast. I understand that I will never know it as deeply as I would wish to.
I remember when some confused DICK decided I was colourblind when I was about 8 years old. I was devastated – I could never be a pilot or an electrician. I had no desire to be a pilot or an electrician until then. But I feel the same kind of loss every time I realise that I can never know as deeply as I wish to the twists and surges of brilliant humanity that move me.
There is not enough time.
Ah, time… everything is fucking RELATIVE. How fast are we going? Well… to us, we are still. Everything else moves, each of us anchors the universe because THAT IS WHERE WE SEE FROM.

It doesn’t matter if we are mad and we see monsters and hear voices – they are as real as the rest of the world, they ARE because for each of us the things that define our world are what our senses tell us, there can be no other truth, EVER, this is it, the world that we see, distorted by our minds and full of panic and magic and fear – this is no less real than the first vision of a perfect newborn child or the last of an ancient man’s eyes before they close! If our memories differ from what our senses tell us, if other people tell us that things vary from our fevered and mad perceptions, what does it matter? How can we trust these things more than what our OWN SENSES TELL US?
The slide into hell, tell me again why I should trust the words of someone who does not feel the things that I feel, why I should believe that my hell is less real than their
FUCKING
OFFICE
When my heart swells and bursts with conviction stronger than the deepest oath, stronger than the faiths for which people die and kill, I am supposed to believe someone outside my mind with words as uncertain as the TIE that he wears, that I do not know or love, that MY world is wrong, and that THIERS is the real, the pure, the right and absolute.
Or the paradise of high euphoria, give it up! Go back to pain return to ugliness and sorrow and grey, spurn bliss and the conviction of genius, blooming pleasure in our veins, believe it is a lie?
It is such a GIFT. Our own bodies slight of hand against age and pain and omnipresent atrophy, a chattering blissful and horny twist of relief, give it up give it all up for harsh light and slow ugly time.

“If we had a keen sense of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar that is the other side of silence.”

“Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend far more than cool reason ever comprehends. One sees more devils than vast hells can hold. That is the madman. The lover, all is frantic, sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye in a frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and as imagination bodies forth, all is made compact. Gives to airy nothing a local habitation. And a name.”

Breathe the sweet breath of madness tie your mind to itself in switches and arcs of pleasure and lights and pain, in stutters and twitches and flights and bursts of colour in your vision.
We are all so bound to lucidity. To rationalism.

Ah hell. And to it we eventually return.

I wish I was my cat.

“I am a brother to dragons
I am a companion to owls.
My skin is black upon me.
And my bones are burned with heat.”

Ah my friends, my sweet loving mad friends. I do so hope we all survive.

So, I sit here, half naked in the cold because I choose to be, because I don’t care. I do believe, I do, that I am brilliant and unique, random, an act of somewhere silent, sliding through the world on the lies that everyone tells to themselves, arbitrary, indiscriminately created, hacked open and carved from the world.
I have to believe that what I am and what I do; what I say, is important, that it fucking MATTERS. Though in my heart of hearts I don’t think that I can.

Spin through the random sky… faithless, of course. Faith in what?