The White Noise Of our Desire

(Also titled 'Pretty  Good Year,' before I repainted it.)

(Completely redone as of the end of 2007.)

Watercolours on Paper

75x 50cms

I named this piece for one of my favourite songs, ever, Pretty Good year by Tori Amos. It seems that if I allow myself real freedom and do works that express more of the passion that I feel, then they sell better. Apart from when it is well RAGE, that doesn't go too well in people's loungerooms I suppose. Other than that, they seem to sell better than their less passionate sisters. Maybe I should give in to it more often and paint with any degree of feeling that I can muster.

Yes.

And now for some more ranting rant again...

ooh. Ah. Hm. Um.

I feel like I am moving through milk with a switch of wine or something more course (vodka gin nicotine steel? - the sting of some deadly chemical) threaded through it. Heavy limbs and tingles in my hands and feet. I am considering, remembering. Hard to see.
One of the unique flaws I have. (Unique? Did I just have the fucking audacity to say that?) My memory seems to work in a slightly different way to the way I understand the rest of the human world’s to. This has been made far worse and far more absolute by the ECT (for those new to this particular acronym it stands for Electro Convulsive Therapy. Shock treatment. ST. ILA. I Love Acronyms.) This in that I have realised how little difference there is between my memory as affected by the treatment and my memory unaffected. Little. None?
Say to me of an experience shared, and I will ask of you for more and more specifics, until I can build an image, or a sound, or a SENSATION of some ilk specific to that point, and then the experience in its entirety will flood back into my mind. This is little different from the way everyone else experiences things, excepting, perhaps, the degree of cues needed to spark the fire of memory, and also the extent and exactitude of my recollection. Like a flaking mirror. Like tigers in tall grass.
Like zebras stacked and wrapped in horizontally striped black and white socks.
The interest lies, perhaps, in this specific shard. I do not believe I have more of a facility. I think I have less. I think that I am in this manner more stupid than the people that I know intimately. Than those that I read about. In some sense I am dumber.
I can’t see memory, anyone’s memory, as being a continual, smooth line of experience.
You can drop a lit match into turpentine and it will sizzle out. Also into petrol and methylated spirits. The flash point is over-ridden by the impact with liquid. Zz-sh. Fire-free.
We are formed by our memory and choice, and so much, oh so much so, by the threads of what we have found to be the most powerful and beautiful. I believe that what I have seen informs others of their beliefs and the tenets of morality that instruct them is in actuality some kind of AESTHETICS. Take me down to my essence, to where I brood in my hind brain animal honesty, and you will find this. I believe that it correlates with how everyone (yes, bathe in the light and beauty of this instinct) forms the core of their beliefs. How we are formed.

BY BEAUTY.

And then from an extension of one selection after another built partially from each other and extracted and separated each time by aesthetic appreciation every instance.
There is some inseparable connection here between memory and action. We remember in some unconscious manner what we have chosen to believe, what we have found most powerful in the past, what HOLDS MORE MEANING FOR US THAN ANYTHING IN OUR EXPERIENCE – and this informs us how we should ACT. How we answer the phone what we eat who we sleep with what pets we have our reaction to the flies buzzing around our brilliant heads, how we will SPEAK and what we will say. Every choice we make. What we are thinking of as we lie dying and which fucking CEREAL we pick.
These things link hands and tell us whisper to us. Beauty and memory. Instinct and experience. Move my hands over the dirty keys and glance outside into the hot white summer light. I choose. We choose. I am informed as to how to choose. By a process I don’t and perhaps can’t understand.
The way we move and behave is extracted by the shattered lines of our memory. It is NOT a procession of smooth and comprehensible awareness.
I think this is what is dictating what I am writing.
And since I feel that I am in this way DUMBER than others, well, hm, I am left in an ocean of unconnected experience.
Bleh. Maybe I am just being a wanker and reading into everything wayyyyy too much.