[100 Challenge] Ocean_28

Matryoshka

So little of the weft remains. But those who find the fortitude to permit themselves to fall through the mesh give genesis to a new species of journey. The gaze of the obsessive, say, of the pervert or the fanatic, stares compulsively, digesting all stimulus into fuel for the subject of its respective zeal. For instance, foods bearing holes such as doughnuts and fermented cheeses equated with the stigmata. It is exactly this obsessive imagination which is condensed for us by those artists conducting their epileptoid ventures on the imaginal frontiers, artists who return dawn and dawn again to their easels or chisels with eyes haggard and wild as Ulysses:’ they open in us a memory of the Now that unfolds like an exponential box. This perspective places the obsessive artist in the vicinity of the compulsive, who believes himself so powerful that an incorrect pattern to his actions might crumble the cosmos—in this way he behaves like the shaman, or the ceremonial dancer, whose rituals, if conducted improperly, possess the power to collapse the order of the universe. The dignity of such persons remains untouchable. Like the Russian Matryoshka, in which each layer nests in thrall to that which surrounds it and which upon splitting is found to host, the obsessive artist acts as a prism, channeling layers of the exterior beyond and the interior within. The prismatic opening of reverie into spectra of visibility brings the Seen to the people, the prism secondary only to the eye as metaphor for vision. Find him in his studio, in the alleyway: hear shiver through him a laughter which turns to tears, a tears which turn to laughter. Stand shading your eyes from a burning sun as his raft vanishes on the horizon of a sea beyond touching. Such artists’ quests into the hyper-real grant our senses conduit to a far richer sense of being than that to which we have daily access. Those who become lost to a turquoise sky, who quest forth on bee-back buzzing: it is their sacrifices, their precious squanderings of consciousness and roamings upon a scorched earth, which upon return bear Promethean flowers of fire to reignite our faded coals. Make no mistake: the fuels with which they return consist of compounds other than truth. Truth, in its aspect of accordance with the measure of things, remains ever in subservience to its elder, to its superior: the untamable wilds of the imagination.