Late night. Sleep hasn’t come yet. I have been listening to the opening chapter of The Magic Mountain. My mind is brimming with ideas. Why hasn’t sleep come yet? Have just arrived at the mountain in the Swiss Alps to visit my convalescent friend. It is remarked that time moves differently here when you are removed from down below. Below is the concerns of people and industry, of the living world. Up here, there are only the concerns of the mind. Up here people find themselves. Up here on the Magic Mountain.
My mind is gripped by an ideal insomnia. I have my mug of rooibos tea and a mind full of ideas. The classics. I have been reading the classics and it is changing me. Changing my thinking. Changing my outlook on life. I am an advocate for reading, but it has only been recently that reading has begun to change me in unexpected ways. My mind doesn’t feel too full when I think about all the ideas inside. My mind feels like I can concentrate. I still have a way to go before I can fully express myself, however this feels like a beginning to things.
I am thinking about of a castle in the sky. Why is it there? I honestly don’t know. It is the mystery that holds it up there, I think. Life in that castle is life going slow. You are unshackled from the burdens of down below. Of when deadlines are due, or of the conflicts of others. Truly you are never severed from the concerns of others. But the illusion of aloofness reigns up here. In the clouds there are the possibilities of giants, but you never meet them. You only meet other people, isolated into their own worlds here. Maybe that is what a giant is. Someone who is larger than life in their own minds. Someone who can interact with the metaphysical world but cannot have any bearing over reality. Maybe that’s what the giants in the clouds are doing. They are contemplating their minds high up, unable to see the world below. If they returned to the world below, maybe they would reshape it into a different configuration. Maybe they would be that physic disturbance in the collective conscious down below which would send ripples that would turn into shockwaves of human civilisation. If only we all weren’t so aloof in our castle in the sky. Maybe we wouldn’t have any effect when we descend from the clouds. All of our giant’s from would merely evaporate and the gaseous mass would disperse indistinguishably and uniformly into the air.
I stared at the blank canvas that stood before me on my easel. It was a blank. A void. Depicting nothing, but the fabric which the canvas was made from. I paced the room full of a creative fervour that yielded nothing. It wasn’t a writer’s block, so much as I was creating nothing. I had music on in the background; it was a Japanese album that YouTube had suggested to me, and which I selected because the thumbnail and title seemed to suggest creativity for this morning. I had seen a creative rival recently, and that encounter had inspired me create. Not just that, my thirtieth birthday had creeped closer. I hadn’t made any art of substance for years. The prospect of going into a new decade made me restless. Where had my twenties gone? For some reason when I was twenty, I had envisioned myself creating something substantial by now. That evidently hadn’t happened. Time had merely slipped through my fingers. It’s not like nothing had happened in the intervening years. I had graduated and was holding down a steady job. It’s just I thought I would be a successful artist by now, or a game designer, or a novelist. Instead, I was an office worker doing somewhat repetitive tasks. My work had value and I was in good working conditions, but it’s not where I thought I would end up on the eve of thirty. I paced and all these thoughts when through my head. At my easel yet creating nothing.
I wasn’t an accomplished artist who could claim that a blank canvas was a work or art: an expression of something inside me. I needed something tangible to call my own. No, I didn’t have pretensions that blankness was something. Yet I didn’t want to stain the canvas with some half-baked idea of something that I didn’t believe in. I had made plenty of art in my teens, so it wasn’t as if I couldn’t create something good. Time had lapsed and I left my easel. I made a sandwich and practiced some sketches. Some of them turned out fine, but most of them were off in some way. They weren’t bad per say, they just weren’t what I wanted to create. I think was struggling to hold a clear image in my head of what I wanted to make. I think that is the reason why I hadn’t lifted my paint brush to the canvas since coming to this location.
Art is a metaphor. Some writer said that, but I don’t remember who. I had contented to spending the rest of the day relaxing. I had spend most of the morning and a part of the afternoon in the studio trying to paint, so I felt I had expended enough effort on trying to paint that nothing more would come from forcing my self to be in there any longer. Worse than no making something today is making something that I’m not proud of. Making bad art, in other words. I think that art that is lacking some quality can be an important part of a creative process. Amateurish art is integral to making good art, but today I wasn’t in the market for painting something for the sake of painting, I was here to make something that I could feel truly represented me internally. A depiction of my soul to put this idea into poetic terms. That reminds me of the quote by James Joyce when he says, “never mind my soul, Touhy. Just make sure you get my tie right” in response the portrait painting Patrick Touhy talking about capturing Joyce’s soul in a painting.
Today I painted mountains. They were mountains from my imagination, tall and imposing. They were mountains that you could imagine ice giants living on, hurling boulders of rock and ice at anyone daring to climb them. I painted with quick hurried brush strokes, afraid that what I envisioned would disappear like dry ice subliming on a summer day. I could see parts of the mountain which were bare rock and which parts were glacier, the stone grinded to gravel under its enormous slow-moving bulk.
Sometimes inspiration strikes suddenly and the canvas that you had been meditating on for months, suddenly becomes a battlefield of oil paints. I’m not sure what sparked the fire in me to create such stark mountains. There were few nearby, and I hadn’t visited them for years, nor did the mountains I know look anything like these emerging on the canvas, however my mind was aglow. Maybe it was an emotional outpour, feelings that I had kept surprised while I imagined myself an undiscovered genius, or maybe there were mountains inside me waiting to get out. Either way, it was an outpouring of sorts.
I stopped. In part, this was to let the oil dry, in another, it was because I was feeling emotionally burnt out. I assessed what I had made. Bold sweeps of granite cleaved the canvas’s white. There were beginnings of a glacier that seemed to be a force of time itself rending the very mountainside apart. Great shadows stretched across space and in the foreground, what could have been tundra gave way to a surreal figure melting into the landscape. It wasn’t looking like it was going to be a realistic mountain, but that didn’t matter. What mattered is where my mind would take the picture combining abstraction with concrete symbols. I was losing words to describe the metaphorical mountain, but I knew I has a title at the edge of thought. Slightly out of grasp at this present time, but I would soon know it if I gave it time. I put down my tools and cleaned my brushes. I felt the feeling leaving me, the feeling of the ice and stone in my mind leaving me, but the idea of time remained. I knew this work would take time. I had to let things settle next before the next step could be taken.