TORN WALLS
By Paul D Robertson
Oils
75x 25cm
Summary of ideals and recompense...
What I mean what I aim for where I bleed why it fucking hurts and hurts and hurts me.
I have felt a terrible hunger and emptiness since I first stirred into sexuality at around the age of eight. But when I was twelve it became overwhelming and terrifying. I sat in class and carved up my hands with my father’s scalpels. I still don’t understand self-harm but it is that extremity, that
Living HARD. On fire in the flames. IMMOLATED. In life.
The terrible
pain and the endless fucking hunger.
And though I truly do believe that the closest we can ever come to its
expiation from our blackened chests is THROUGH ANOTHER.
The knowledge
CERTAINTY
I felt wise and sombre and bleeding at 13 years old…
That even then breathing into the mouth of another human.
Sharing blood with them.
It is as much
as we can ever have. And what I felt in my arcing and beautiful bones
as a boy-child remains inviolate.
The terror of it has been born out by the rest of my life. And it will
be born out by my death.
Alone.
Hungry. Dying and not even beginning to know what it is we are hungry
FOR.
Fire forges
steel. I have hacked myself from alcohol and from agony and of course
the madness that I feel right now.
In doing that I have forced beauty into my heart.
Others will see it even without my works. I have grown and turned kind and hurting to beauty. And in that I have found that there is a weight behind my words.
People tell me their secrets..
And they LISTEN. To. MY. Words. And not their torrents their covers for terror.
Having been as reviled leper outcast unclean as our humanist society can make one barely existing drunken shell.
This is a reward. That I can taste.
But still. I am on my own tonight.
TWO aphorisms THAT I LIVE BY OUT OF THE HUNDREDS THAT I KNOW.
“trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
And this one, yes…
“whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.
For there is
no wisdom nor work nor device. In the grave. wither thou goest."