Crafting Space

I was once told when overthinking, write; when underthinking, read. Sometimes I’m capable of neither and in that moment of crisis I debate the shortcomings of communication. If only I could purge the mess in my mind and lay it out to see, I could dissect these thoughts and figure out what the hell is going on with me.

Most of all I’ve been trying to figure out, how is a girl to get some peace?

***

"One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important"

Bertrand Russell

I have always been fascinated with the individual’s internal landscape. Endlessly, I have tried to chase away the anxiety that spilled like oil in my chest. A parasite under my gill, I wrestled to free myself from anxiety’s grip.

It was November of 2020 and I was not looking forward to my final painting assignment: An Exploration of Abstract Expressionism. Abstractionism always struck me as a pretentious movement to gatekeep the enjoyment of art. A study of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 in every sense of the word, changed my mind.

The piece is one of O’Keeffe’s earliest attempts to capture what an engaged observer of the flower feels. Principally, she viewed abstraction and representation as neither binary nor oppositional. Her undulating work eliminates unnecessary details and distills the natural world into abstract compositions of colour and organic lines. For this reason, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 is arguably one of the best visual depictions of the intelligence and ethereal beauty embedded in a flower. A tête-à-tête is conducted between the viewer and the flower, arranged by the large canvas and close up depiction of the subject. Arresting viewers’ attention, this piece invites a close examination of the subtle gradation of colour and supple-velvety texture of a bundle of petals that forms the soft essence of a flower.

I always knew that worlds existed behind the surface of every entity, waiting to be unfurled by the engaged eye. With this piece, one can see how the active eye is capable of capturing the spirit of nature.

Like the vagina after birth, once the mind has been stretched it will never reverse back to its original shape. My epiphany with Abstract Expressionism gave rise to a visual and semantic language that had the potential to communicate the nature of the interior dimension and its relationship to the outer world. If I could birth the words to describe my suffering, I could be seen and heard. I could achieve relief.

I vehemently believe that self-expression promotes autonomy and liberates the spirit. In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson elucidates that

"literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess one’s self”.

To possess and navigate the valleys of my own mind, I leveraged the power of neuroplasticity by consistently journaling. For months I calibrated my mental landscape first thing in the morning by purging three pages of pure consciousness. When I successfully pushed the limits of semantics and carved out the words to describe how I felt, I would revel in that moment of peace. I wanted to believe that I could develop a shared language toward describing a better world, but most importantly a better me. It became my goal as an artist to articulate a ladder for the soul to journey, only then could there be peace.

Yet,

“somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection”.

Maggie Nelson

***

The soul gets lonely and the truth lies.

Tap, tap, tap. Three feet away, a tall maple tree taps my window. A tantalizing reminder of the trickle of time. My sin, my soul. I grieve the go before it’s gone.

Mankind first revised its relationship with space and time during the Industrial Revolution. The development of the railway system was recorded to have annihilated space and time as Westerners circumnavigated the globe at unprecedented speeds. Concurrently, the introduction of photography reworked our perception of time. The splitting of the second, seized by the camera, was remarked with a dramatism equivalent to the splitting of an atom. The camera captured aspects of motion that were once invisible and

“[i]t was as though [man] had grasped time itself, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over”.

Rebecca Solnit

As a student enduring the pandemic, I raised my own questions as to the hard and fast rules of time. I experienced each day bleed into the next. Each moment in its passing felt infinite, but in memory, fleeting. My preconceptions of time and space obliterated as the natural pulse to which I capered through life grew distant and unbalanced. A photograph is only a relic of its time. How vain of our three-dimensional selves to believe that we held time and all of its invisible qualia in our grasp. I was only a puppet in the clutches of the passing hours.

There is a direct correlation between repetitive tasks and dissatisfaction. My dissatisfaction brewed as I dwelled on a mosaic of quotes. I would chew on the words of Alan Watts that

“a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So [she] loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion”,

and I would go mad with irony. In the words of Virginia Woolf, I can tell you

“[a]s an experience, madness is terrific, [but] in its lava”

I burned. Yet, I could not tell you everything and in that moment of crisis I abhorred the shortcomings of communication.

As the burning leaves of the maple tree fell, my vitality and sanity dropped with it. Truth and fiction waltzed with each other across the nonspaces of my mind. Deserting the body in the present, I worried my mind into the future and rushed it back to the past. I wondered, if something as fundamental as time can be an illusion, what timeless truth could I grasp onto?

Midnight toiled - then - tap, tap, tap. The tall tree taunted; this time I responded. Lifting the latchet, I listened to the lick of a lonely cricket.

On that night, I did not grieve the go.

***

Another day spent trying to write, trying to close that gap between the mess of my own life and my desired self.

I decided to go for a walk.

I traced my way through the neighbourhood and hunted for hidden trails that could lead me somewhere new. I came across a stream less than twenty minutes from home and reprimanded myself for not stumbling upon it sooner. Fiddling with a cobble in the water, I observed the change in pitch. A stream tunes itself over time, rocks tumbling into place. Inserting myself in its harmony I saw directly my impact on its song.

I followed the current to its beginning. Each step heightened my senses and quieted the skull’s chatter. The trees that lined my path groaned, refusing to be uprooted by the wind. The air was baked with the smell of pine and wet moss so thick that I could taste it.

Opposite to the stream, I heard the heart of the forest before I saw it. Red-winged Blackbirds chased their female counterparts for play and their wings cut air with a gentle swoo. Toads of some variety released deep-bellied shrieks, crickets rubbed a tune, and my mind was no longer interested in chasing some faraway place. I was content with just being here.

In his essay, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes being so present with the Earth that he loses his awareness of seeing, and simply sees.

“Standing on bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all”.

In my joyful and unbidden moment, the bounds of myself disappeared and I listened so closely to the equivalence of an invisible ear. The stream sang a lazy burble revealing a truth not as timeless as I preconceived. Spanning centuries and distances, the present holds a conversation that hushes the ego’s every argument. On the edge of madness, I could only understand change as the antithesis of balance. Nature gently clarified my mind with its harmony, a balance in motion that is neither binary nor oppositional.

I returned that night identifying with Larissa Pham’s confession in Pop Song, for

“I’d always been grabbing … Trying to take time and make it fit the story I was trying to tell. I’d tried so hard to write [my] narrative before it could ever be fixed, trying to force it to live up to my impossible expectations. I’d done it all to protect myself and maybe you too — but in doing so, I hadn’t listened to what either of us was trying to say”.

I still write when I overthink and read when I underthink but it’s only a fraction of my creative practice. I will never be able to write a narrative that removes my anxiety but the beauty of transience is that it will come and it will go. Peace was always a faraway place, something to be achieved. Now I know that peace can only ever exist in this moment. Truly, my craft is the making of space, space for my peace to flow and unfold. So much space and peace and love and joy that the bounds of myself unfurl and I am one with nature’s harmony.

I was once told that my peace is worth protecting. This peace is yours too. Listening to Earth’s wild music, you won’t argue.