Muddled Grace

It goes back to the concept of "Amazing Grace."  That's what the preacher told me yesterday.  He's not a preacher any more.  He left that behind, all the moaning and wailing and healing.  He had done all that with conviction and belief, but he finds it foolish now.  "It goes back to St. Augustine," he told me.

"He's the one who needs the beating, then," I said.

"Yes he does."

What sort of polar shift occurs in people to make them go from one thing to another in such profound ways?  How does one go from living with the Power of the Holy Ghost to atheism in a single protracted moment?

There are locks in the brain, I'm sure.  "Doors of Perception," I guess.  Kaboom!  Everything is new.

I'll take a door right now.  Perhaps I should go to the desert and fill my head with hallucinogens looking for "The Way."  Perhaps it is merely the month of January that has me off.  Then February should be worse.  Or maybe I am oppressed by the new conditions of my employment, me now being more a wage slave than ever before.  Perhaps it is the ending of a relationship and trying to fill that void.  Maybe it's the damn emails.  The woman I quoted yesterday. . . I want to tell you about her, but I'll say something and she will decide to come read the damn blog and then once again there will be all hell to pay.  She is trouble, though, a temptress.  I don't know if I need tempting now.  I responded to her invitation and to her analysis of my drinking while alone with this.

"You may be right, but I turn down all invitations.  I live like a drunken monk or a voluntary shut-in.  Maybe I've gotten The Fear.  I don't want to become a hermit, though.  I need to force myself into some relationships.  Too soon I will develop autism.  It is the Greta Garbo Syndrome, though.  Yes, that's it!  That is absolutely it."

But that may not be it at all.  Or not all of it.

I thought today, while reading about the riots in Egypt, that I would like to go there and make photos and stories.  I want to experience what that is like.  I want to be engaged.  And I realized that such a thing would be contrary to the project I am doing now, the one I've spent so much time with.  In that I deal only with surfaces.  The acts are staged.  I do not know the models.  They show up.  I ask them to represent something.  They leave and I am left with days and weeks of work shaping those images into something I want.  It has taken all my spare time and I have told myself that I will end it.  Soon, I say, but there is always another and another and another.

And this morning I began to think that it has become a way of not dealing with something else.  I am being "productive" I tell myself and others.  It is hard work.  And it is true, too.  But how much of it is the desire to tell one thing without going through another?  How much of it is simply substituting "art" for life?

It is a bad can of worms I've opened for myself this morning.  The question has consumed me.  How much of anything we do, I ask, is just substituting one thing for another?  We do this so that we don't have to do that.

I don't want to go to the desert and fill my head with hallucinogens in order to find The Way.  It is too similar to what I am doing now.  And it is easier than becoming engaged.  I hit on something in that email to my friend.  I think I've been overtaken by The Fear.  I do turn down all invitations.  I do live like a drunken, profane monk.  I think I have already developed autism.  And yes, like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone, to be remembered one way rather than another.

I am making pictures with people right now and not of them.  I am not selling anything physical, not an age nor a body type, so everyone looks good to me.  They are just what I need.  The human figure.  But in the past couple weeks, by chance, I've shot with some very young and pretty women.  You might think that such a thing would make me happy, may even imagine that is what I really am trying to do.  It is not, and in truth it has set me in this direction.  They are young and beautiful and I am something else and it reminds me of things we best forget.  And I'm not speaking of a longing for the flesh.  Nope.  It is much worse than that.  The butterfly must never dream of being a chrysalis.  Make that a moth.  Or worse.

And maybe all of this is due to a long series of illness and injury that have kept me from being active.  I haven't been able to run for months.  I've barely been to the gym.  I've grown fat and weak with drink.  My mind is muddled.

I will walk far this morning in the cold dark air.  I will watch the rosy dawn evolve.  Walking is a cure.  It has worked before.  It may take many miles to figure this out to any extent.  But who knows where it walking may lead.  Hell, by next week, I may be grateful.