Breathe Deep the Void

You don't keep moving, you don't keep busy, they will catch you and then you are a captive. You move on before the mind becomes idle. You do not want to be still. Don't stop. Don't be still. The shadow moves with you. You think you're safe. But you cannot get far enough. It's right there next to you. If the sun shines and you feel warm, the shadow grows stronger, ready for its next chance to devour. The cycle doesn't end. You stay busy, but eventually you run dry. It doesn't matter. You never last long enough. Then the shadow swallows. You disappear. You crawl in among thorns and hide. You question motives and reality and experiences and a probable misalignment of your entire existence. You sink into the gravity where the thing still lives that kept you awake at six years old, unable to imagine that decades wouldn't help define what it was or what it remains to be. You can sometimes look it right in the face now. That is the only difference. But it changes nothing. You will emerge from the depth of despair but who knows when. You will emerge with intense inspiration and creativity, manically creating something quickly, often brilliantly, then you will be extinguished before you can finish it. And then the darkness of the shadow tightens its grip. Deeper, colder, quieter, lost. It will take some time here. This is the cycle. It doesn't end. It doesn't wane. And it doesn't give a damn what you or anyone else thinks about it.

Go find something. A visceral place. One without rolling waves of dissolution and infectious despair advertising, misinterpreting movement as achievement, lost in the old whiskey barrel, aged for years upon the pious wings of preachers and politicians feasting on the past's intoxicating promises and virtues. Yet, you are here, stranded among the disarm of shadows, tattered sheets, empty bottles full of hollow, stagnant, haunting air. And all the conversations you have ever known are falling flat in your memory, deflated even before they can reach a deaf, useless ear.

It is not possible to be a good man and a great artist. Hyde and Jekyll. It is all about perspective, about expectations. Demands upon the synapses, limited in their availability. Nothing of merit will come unless there is an immersing within a certain madness. Something that is capable of perpetuating that thing that quietly murmurs, reluctantly quiet because its nature is to scream, chasing the pen or voice or brush or harp to create something one can die free from. Liberated from the burden.

Medication, it seems, has been only capable of postponing a revolt. And all the while building up a greater, more erroneous mode of pending destruction. The artist creates but cannot complete. The artist gives way to despair. It is something of a cycle, a spiral into a void. But at the bottom of the void, he can see clearly into the darkness. Like the staircase in the House of Leaves he can see it but it becomes endless. Truth creaks and groans under the strain of expansion. A door appears. A hallway lengthens. The void is constructed by the sweat of revelation.

He is in a room behind a door among the multitude of others spawning along an endless hallway.

It's a room full of forgotten things. Tearing paper from magazines and discarded, scribbled bits. This is exile.

This is the room.

Outside the cities, past the sprawl of suburbs hide the abandoned turn of the last century homes. Resembling mansions from movies. Decrepit. Forgotten. Homes for squatters, drug peddlers, geniuses and grifters. The outcast. He has taken up residence among the squalor. The artist is here to become. To be free from the dream. To breathe deep the void.

Psychosis. A laundry list of medications commissioned to keep the artist between the lines. Derailing is not allowed. But during the subtle yaw and pitch contained by the intrepid, chemical concoction, one can only be present within a slow blur. One can only consciously exist in this place when reined-in. Living, the rare moments when feeling and experience graft into something larger than blood and breath and feeble eyesight, that only occurs outside the lines. Those lucid places, though, can be dangerous. They cannot be trusted. They will consume you.

Breathe deep the void. Breathe deep the void. Breathe deep the void.