Polina

$1150

Charcoal and chalk , 110 x 80 cms.

POLINA SKETCH.

Hm what can I say? This is a piece of a young woman I was with and got confused about.
It’s ok. I am used to being confused.

Ah it is late. Late like me for an appointment with coworkers or like my beautiful sad girlfriend when I was 15.
Late like the witching moon or the reinforcements at Thermopoly, like the ambulance that came to resuscitate my friend dying on the pavement. Though I think had they been on time they would still have been overdue.

I am desirous, I need something, I need something, I need something. I need anything, some false lying distortion some beatific sense illusion of wellness, some suffusion.
My mind is rattling the cage with a big pewter cup, trying to get the attention of a jailer who does not and has never existed. “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!!”

“He’s not dead.”
“Well he’s pretty close.”
(“I’m getting better.”- dead guy)
“Can’t we work something out?”
(“I think I’ll go for a walk now.”- dead guy)
“You’re not fooling anybody you know.”

Digression into Monty python. Wisdom abounds.

The problem lies here and also there, but I may be forced to start here since that is where I am presently. I have looked around some and lifted the dark heavy rocks hiding in my mind, to find true desire, to find what it is that I want most, that I long for and have longed for all this burned and lost time, the billions of moments gone.

I believe that by some massive mistake, some colossal cosmic JOKE, that tens of thousands of years ago we suddenly became who and what we are. By this I mean that our brains became poisoned with understanding and gifted with choice. When our emotions bloomed overwhelming, full, desperate.

It seems that the freak accident of genetics, that odd irreverent irradiated cell changed and we sprung like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, replete with seething desire: or perhaps I should qualify that (though quantification remains, to this day, elusive) we landed on this planet spilling potential from our hands and from our lips, our eyes and minds a deadly machine. It is not this so much that represents the problem, the very vice that I require. It is the setting for the incipient disaster – the tragedy of all our lives. The sucking wound that every man and woman spend their lives trying to cover with action; to fill with activity, heal with love and trick with malice.

It is the desire itself. The lust… far from the classical sense, the BIOLOGICAL fucking imperative, though I think that plays some distorted and inevitable role like Richard III or Sammy Davis Junior. I have always, ALWAYS desired something INTENSELY. To live like this, to exercise each moment a dulling a subversion of this ache, a change a trick, an expert calculated distraction sharpened to a point by experience until it dampens with repetition and we look, we look, we hurt for this raw open cut in our minds and we must hunt for its extremity; its expiation, its EXCISION. We turn and turn and turn again, we acquiesce like the weak animals we are, we allow passion to fall, and fall for distraction – an admission and collapse into responsibility, into society - while our lives boil away into irreconcilable time.

I have omitted so far any allusion as to what it is that we desire, where our covetous green eyes might fall. Whose pockets we might pick and what it would be our furtive fingers would seek against the warm flesh of our victims. I don’t mean envy. Envy is a manufacture of an imagined satiation though full and flush with desire it may be. It may be doomed by exactly what it is – the grass greener on the other side of the fence but how much more green when it is someone else’s grass? What I WANT is central, and intrinsic.

The idea that I am suggesting is simple but its fulfillment I will pursue for the rest of my life.
I believe that every time I have come close to that utterly alien and enigmatic thing called happiness, I have recognized and tried to cradle and hold it to me. Its beauty itself breaks my heart; its aching simplicity – its small and intense grandeur. I am paralyzed with fear that I will lose it and my head curls around itself in desperate protection, conceiving and rejecting idea after idea to prolong its sweet warm existence in my heart. Which action, of course oh of course inevitable as loneliness, destroys happiness…

But is happiness itself the ultimate goal? Peace? Respite?
I… don’t think that it is. It is not what we seem to pursue, certainly. I want… I need…

I think that what we have by this malign divine accident is a desire to share every part of our minds with another human being.
This is what I believe the ultimate aim of love – of TRUE love, has to be. That craving – to be shared, to be apart from ourselves and yet so much more whole.
Fuck riches, fuck fame, fuck immortality, fuck any sort of material gain. Fuck comfort and fuck freedom.
This is what we all want. This is what we can not and can never have. This is what we crawl over each other to find, though I believe that very few would know, or even agree; or have, in the swamp of their minds, ever LOOKED.

Art is the shards of these attempts, and this is why the best of it moves us so and makes us cry.
This is true tragedy – this is our doom, our hell.

If you keep your silence you will talk yourself right into the jump.

Actually I wrote this about an entirely different woman. Not like Poli at all. She had value.