Gothic

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Charcoal and chalk, 75x 57 cms.

Winner, Maddington Art Award.

I won the maddington art award when I was still a student, indeed when I was in second year, with this piece. The photo is pretty bad. It is better to take picutre out of the glass before taking pictures. But I was only a baby artist then and still drinking too (back in the days of alcoholic Paul , see the Bipolar and Paul page).

But really this piece was the first time I ever used charcoal and chalk together, and I have been using it ever since. Not to mention the fact that the $500 I got for the award bought the stereo I am listening to now.

It is I, artist guy Paul, inventor of religions and slayer of mighty pies; I am he who fills out ALL FORMS in the dark with a crayon and I am presently planning on

CRASHING A PLANE INTO THE BIG BROTHER HOUSE

And if anyone wants to help let me know.
Well it may be too late now as I really wanted to do it when it was full. One would hope to catch more moronic lifeless passionless clone losers that way.

But hey

There are always more.

Always…

I am in some limbo, some almost land, some never was, some place spattered with light and pressed with scarred hands and almost heard.
I am definitively indefinitive – let me attempt more clarity – nothing for me is clear. I don’t know where I am, I can’t seem to see anything, nothing – it is not even the black the dark that I know so well this is some nether-state. Unfamiliar and so fucking RANDOM.

Sure, yeah I understand, I have seen faith, and some simple differentiation of degree and belief leads me into a desert of meaning and all our cries – I know this it is more real to me than the keys that my sore fingers hit – our cries are unheard and go nowhere but into the dead, empty night.
This meaningless world. Yes.

The more I learn (and I learn and I learn I can feel the secrets in my TEETH I know so much and crave so much more) the more it is clear to me that belief is…
I can’t start there.

I will begin again.

I won’t talk about God.

I have been – having trouble working. I don’t really want to paint. I have been writing fiction and writing music. I have worked a great deal anyway and am still doing about a piece a week. I consider it all, think about it too much; too sharply; too hard.
I feel like I am coasting, like there is no touchstone of life hard enough to jolt me back again into the sense that I am, in actuality, HERE. Living, being, breathing.
Someone very close to me said something that scratched at my heart – she said “do you know the word inspire means to breathe into? Is that why you do it?”

I can’t – I can’t seem to work out what she meant.

I have little feather cuts on my palm, on the palm on my right hand in fanning straight lines. Bloodless scratches. Shallow. I don’t understand anything about why I make them. I do know that I am strong enough not to let them get any bigger or any deeper. Not right now. I do not do it out of self loathing, and even the IDEA of doing it for attention makes me seethe with black killing rage. I find myself looking at it now and then, in different lights – a marked arc, artificial and within my control. I would cut words but I have never written any that I would consider powerful enough to wear on my skin, and I would never, not EVER consider using someone else’s.

Any of those who cut will, I think, understand. The desire to do it, no matter the years between the times when our will bends enough to make blood appear, it never leaves.
I imagine myself at the altar, on my deathbed, about to make love to the woman of my purest dreams, finishing the best work of my life – thinking of the colour of blood and of making a small incision into my arm.

How truly mad. Irreconcilable and more real than the fucking objects around me.

I don’t have the despair. Not right now. I should be grateful for its absence, but I am not. I am not. My mind is wild with desire and hunger I rage and rage at NOTHING I don’t know what to DO, there is nothing for me here, there never was this is a mistake some vast loud chattering illness I was supposed to die long ago I know it I do.

I think the true knowledge or at least belief that there are no Gods and certainly no magic, there are no spirits in the woods in the dark in concord against us - is actually more likely to defeat us than the conviction of their reality. At least the tribesman clutching his sword and shivering and making some ritual sign of arcane defense – at least, for him, there would be the sense that his terror was reasonable, directed and sane. If the world is emptied of such things – then our terror knows no manufactured license – we are trapped with the living reality that what we are really afraid of is ourselves.
Of the emptiness in us.
The endlessness of it.
Its truth, hard against our eyes.

Perhaps the best reason we have for the existence of God is that it gives a NAME TO OUR FEAR.

Ah, oh, oh yes, thoughts whipped and plaited cleft and made. Scratch my palm, clench my teeth, hold on.
In dreams…
Ah of course, in dreams in dreams in dreams. we-ell. And what differentiates us waking from sleeping? Hm? How are we to know the difference? Take rationalism to the next footstep off the cliff and look at this mind mess. Is it our memory? We have trouble remembering dreams? this is the most convincing argument I can think of in this fecund and doomed second. Our memories create themselves in a pattern beyond our control and certainly comprehension what difference dreams how many flaws may there be?
What else? The degree the fire of our senses seems sharper and more defined for us waking – or perhaps in the memory of them only – how to know apart from in memory of course oh sweet irony open your legs to me.
The last is the most insipid and also the most absolute. We know that dreams are dreams because they are punctuated and annotated by sleeping – by the act of going to sleep and waking. I slept and AFTER I went to sleep these things occurred to me – and then I awoke and I was able to vaguely recall them.
THIS
Is a dream.
Not so very different a simple illusion within the dream itself - we dream ourselves awake while yet we sleep and the entirety of definition crumbles. Far more powerfully – we doze and can appreciate perceptions of reality but incorporate them into dream and in a half-wakefulness we are more able to believe the dream is real.
These are TINY and brave turns and reaches of logic. None of these things would amass to a logician’s PROOF. That we accept one as dream and one as real is an act of desperate flailing COURAGE.

I dreamed that I was bound hand and foot; and that I lay exactly as I do when I trick my body to sleep – in my bed my small hands curled the bedclothes twisted around me. I dreamed a man stood over me; tall and full of power dressed in a grey shirt and coat from some other time. He was to kill me. He hastened my death. I knew…
He had no head. And yet he moved. A small amount of blood ran from his collar as he raised his hands unguided by sight above him.
I screamed. I cried out – what should and would have sounded as “NO!”
But was not denial but demand – “KNOW!!”
It was appallingly real.

Sigh. So it is morning and I am cold, it is cold I hate the cold – my cat and I we hate it together. I have hardly slept it was still dark when the headless man woke me.
I think I am beginning to understand parts of myself, parts that are wrong with me. And not in the sense that I am ill and these things are inherent or outside me and beyond my control. Things that I could change, had I the strength, the will.

Shadow fanged and hairy and mad. I was reading a friend’s book ooh ooh though I get all excited by the very idea of neuropsychology. In this book were illustrations from people who had suffered brain damage of various and neatly separated sorts. By illustrations I mean drawings – the page was scattered with sketches performed by those without inappropriate holes in their heads and by those given the same tasks with them.

They were, perhaps, some of the least human and most mad things I have ever seen. So utterly different and my own firing memory slips up examples on a white clear plate and I see the things that they have done, I see them in human and correct comparison. And these strange, strange, strange sketches looked to me like glyphs. Like RUNES.

Like

MAGIC.

We define things by an ordered comparison – we know things by their similarity and their difference they are separated and categorized striated boxed aligned embraced or cast aside. And it was this process that was damaged in the pathetic sketches of the brain damaged. This process, yes, this one – and it was here that I saw something awful and real!
They were unable to make copies of the things that they saw as the tests had asked them to do – ah but what they made instead!! This! My god –
You see the lines looked so close, so very close, to the things that I have seen and know to be accepted as occult.

The people with this suffering inability to make metaphor – the most human of definitions – in their attempts to translate and create comparison they ended up making marks that were recognizable as some other, some LOST language! (though only the verisimilitude of this I do not know any lost languages. They are lost. That’s what I mean.)
I had seen the marks that they made before – in books that I had read and learned to arm myself against spirituality and faith. (I read and learn such things so that I may know them well enough to repudiate them as utterly as I can.)
But these marks…
They looked like spells.

So this damage led to a reach into a primitive place where humanity has lived before. I found them compelling like a light flashing through my skull – here is meaning – here is meaning you convoluting bullshitting fool.

Ah yes, oh. I know things about myself – they are more clear to me I have learned and it is unpretty unbeautiful. I want that madness, I want that damage. I want that magic. The illusion of it as convincing, make me believe, make me believe. I want it so much I drool when I think of it the images attract me like the curve of a woman’s upper thigh, full and potent and voluptuous. Effortless creation, effaced artifice.
I consider sticking a skewer through my brain. Hah. I would not know where to put it.

This kiss of logic burned. Hm, oh yum.

I have been considering freedom. I… have been honest, I think, more honest than I have perhaps ever been.
The degree to which we are free. Oh… this… this thrills me and breaks my heart and encourages me to play and play and read into the empty sky. I am convinced that we rarely consider the extent of our freedom. And how central this is – how toxic and erotic.
We have choice – we all know we have choice.
Do I have porridge?
Corn flakes?

Do I ask my wife if I may drink her blood?

You see. Our constraints – they are almost completely self-imposed.
We have many that are utterly inescapable and they are real and should be understood and accepted. Fight them and we hurt ourselves. I am not espousing pain.
We have our morality. Morality in itself is a beautiful thing. It allows us to accept kindness as a part of our world – how our world would be were we to control it. We select our morality and it selects us as we grow. And it must rule us. This is one of the true and great things about ourselves, about man. Its bizarre form shapes our lives and holds the corners of the shadows of the world. It is innate to each of us and we should follow its commands.
And we have our physical limitations. We have, inescapably and mysteriously, the guides of our tastes.

Ah, yes. All these things hold us.
But sweet in the night and between our legs and in the hairy corners of our brains there are the things that exist in the cracks between these controls. What we must understand, what we CAN understand is that everything between the dictates that we know is within our hands.
We OWN IT.
This is fucking
OURS.

I think that we forget that we have such choice. And I know that very few people will ever realise what they can do. Consider. Think. What tastes have you wondered about? What heat have you never touched? What sun have you never seen that you could choose to see… How have you wanted to fuck but have never fucked?
Your belief is also yours – it is liquid.
LIQUID.

Christian – then believe that majick walks the earth – pagan – believe for a day that Christ was God’s son and that you may eat his body. For a day. Choose it.
Don’t be fooled. This is your choice. There
IS NO TRUTH WITH A CAPITAL

T.

No-one
Fucking

Knows

Here have this:
In the fifties there was a group of people in France who called themselves the “situationalists international.” And though I am quite sure it has been done since, they came up with the first reasonably realistic critique of capitalist society.
The fundamental point that they called attention to is something that is really obvious to everyone but rarely actually SAID.
The idea of capitalist society is this –
You will spend your life doing something that you do not want to do. You will do this in order to acquire things that you do not need.

Which is of course not only basically irrational and absurd, but when taken into the extremity of suffering that we go through, I think it is actually pretty much classifiable as well, HAH

Insane.

I feel this around me – it is all some great masque, the most accomplished and shared masque humanity has ever worn. Look around you at your desk, your clothes, the complexity and precision of each of your

Cleaning products.

We must be aware of absurdity. I think that perhaps embracing it is the ultimate act of absolution.
“I forgive you.

“I do.

“You are absurd.”
If we can know it, just know this continually… more than that though. It is not capitalism that I abhor that drives me wild in the night. This is the joker’s face, but we are the skeins of wicker in this wicker-man (obscure reference perhaps. A wicker-man was, apparently, a form of Celtic sacrifice en masse. They would build a giant from wicker. They would fill it with people. And then they would burn it.) We bind ourselves and each other. We are, each of us, each step and breath living absurdity defying reason to apply meaning and importance to meaninglessness and impotence.
I don’t think this is wrong. We have no other choice. But we must, we should, we shall, we can, we could, we will, we may, we might, if we can if we can
We should KNOW this.
That this is what we are. Beautiful, impotent and meaningless. Absurd and completely free. Dipped in genius and majick each cell a miracle in its massive unlikelihood.
Awareness gives us power. It gives us choice. Ask, always.

Love to all