Studio - a short story

I look at my studio and it is a living thing. Sometimes it is a warm, nurturing mother, sometimes a coiled snake. In any case these 350 square feet are mine - I do whatever I want here - I can create new things or alter the old, can have a tantrum or adjust my sensitivities to a particularly measured level. My friends are all here on the walls. They await my attention.

I fancy somewhere hidden in these walls is an element of humanly mystery, left amidst the framing an empty beer can with a note of contrition inside written by a carpenter seeking relief from the torment caused by dropping his infant son, damaging the boy’s brain, and then covering up his responsibility. Maybe some day when the building is torn down as a step to urban renewal the note will be read by a migrant worker making seven dollars an hour and this current of self abnegation will seep out into the well of life’s spiritual equilibrium.

And then

Sometimes I walk in to my studio and it is a cool empty blue. It is lonely, melancholic and prone to actions of self defeat and exhaustive self flagellation. On one of these one-foot-in-front-of-the-other days I sit breathing hard into my cup of tea and fogging my glasses in the hopes that the effect will prompt me, in spite of my soft–edged, blurry reality, to take something and make it what it is not - achieve some alchemical majesty.
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Suddenly the top on my tea cup rolls out of my weakly applied grip, circles across the table, and falls to the floor. For a brief moment I feel anger but quickly realize I am halfly purposeful in doing that, a self destructive measure which can then lead to another: putting my heavy tape measure on top of the tea as a substitute for the missing top, which then makes the cup top heavy and likely to spill if the flimsy table is jostled. For the moment I am living on the edge.

But then I turn away from myself to gather all of me to huddle in privacy where in peace I remember green fields of pure colors.

As I am kicking down the turf, dust and dirt participate in a rooster tail of false phone calls having to report fanatical fascists driving their cars around in a mischievous manner. Prancing pinks put forth, without hesitation, pandering to political people. By then, the event of my lost teacup top, with one’s life within, belongs to the panorama of all human experience over the course of history. A draw results.

And I am back in my studio pursuing a life force today. I look outside and watch as the wind blows a hanging plant against the backdrop of a shady concrete wall – that is separation. The sidewalks and pillar posts are quietly loitering – perhaps talking to each other.

Out in the distance of the great grey sexy sky there are bullets crossing a bridge over water that is a massive liquid protest demonstration and has reached a riotous pitch. Cowboy music is slashing the tires with nothing in mind besides the purity of organic line dancing.

The waters heave and roll, ready to vomit except that the bullets racing across are binding. In each bullet is a mind and inside that a theater of children’s games, forcing thoughts to travel faster to achieve an insurmountable lead on the environment.

Obstinately time seems to be ticking along slowly. I can see it rubbing up against the glass sidewalls of my truck.

Suddenly the rhythms are having an effect on skin and bones and the moment goes on and just as suddenly clean breath is returning to the maladjusted heart and there is dancing magnificent and wondrous.

Rroad to hipness

The draedle spins making cataclysmic facts out of centrifugical force; the thermostat talks to the furnace and a chill leaves your back.

As morning begins to manifest into another day the stories of Margaret in 303c rise out of sleeplessness. She attempts to remember the last dream she had that awakened her giddy with laughter. While swimming in the vagaries of her thoughts her hands punctuate the space within with cut and chop gestures.

Margaret’s emotional mechanism shifts gears and discloses that her finger tips glide across any surface ingesting information.

Skulking her way up the sidewalk, walking with flair, running vertically - using the language of art to stay in balance she throws her head back when she laughs. She runs to make the light and crosses the street starting and stopping to avoid collisions.

People talk about nothing and yet she manages to say nothing - it is not her child she says. The child is perched on her hip and handing the tot over to a dark haired young woman, she exclaims, “Not my child”.

The baby with glorious light, transcendent light, floats up, lighter and faster.

Luminous shafts thrust up into the ultra-violet sky, leaving a trail of blue dust behind the flagging baby.

“If love matters forget about justice”, Margaret cries. “Everything wants to be hip”, she breaks the brittle night, “Even lizards, logs, and lying legislators.

Her black perfume is bitter like diamonds over kneeling men with a penchant for God.

As for Margaret, in the lake of her mind, her eyes and the stars are all existence.

House of My Dreams: The Studio

I move past stages of my life seeing collectively just how I arrived here gazing into every delicious corner of my cold busy basement space.

Virginous brethren paintings, and phantom reality sensations bless my studio.

Tiny dust swells on streams in the yellow air – in the basement where evil is rampant. As popularly reflected, it is the place where rooms within rooms are used to perform acts of torture which give pleasure to the sadistic mind both in pursuit of application to others and to ourselves. The basement is a damp hole in the grounds that by its concrete barriers provides strict privacy to do things we know are socially unacceptable but are nevertheless fascinating. It is an environment quite unlike what we have been taught about hell – which is hot and fired with tormenting demons. In the basement we are the demons and we are locked into ourselves by the bondage of our psyches and we self-stimulate into annihilation. But maybe the basement has gotten a bad rap - sometimes good things happen down there – snakes in jars and grasshoppers in pockets of pants and an enormous heart in a jar – and occasionally clothes will come ejecting from the chute.

Maybe that face in an old painting that hung there was me kissing my bright future – Breughel’s dancing peasants take a left turn into my dream in their burlap dresses and vests. I am in my studio again randomly applying paint to canvas – without cause or effect and defying any constructive impulses – but then suddenly I hear the silence and it sounds vaguely like music – and I try to imagine inspiration.

My face in the reflective glass that covers the painting is an assemblage of elements that formally convey a conscription of malfeasance. A constellation of noses, and bulges beneath the jaw line, that orbit around the idea of a face and other legitimate problems. Can you look straight at this thought and address it directly?

My house became my studio. My mind poured over into this shabby space. And now my curiosity follows the place where one thing becomes another, that blessed alchemy that gave birth to pure freedom.

It is a construction out of elements of my spirit. I have laid a foundation of long ago events that grew increasingly notched together into a gray patina of battles won and lost.

Is there something hidden in the house that can help me?
Something that would put me right – a composition of mysterious solutions that I am blind to as camouflaged by reality?