Musing over Sanity

“Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled."-Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

I have wondered too, whether sanity is just a play...Not that we are all insane, but perhaps what we call sanity is merely the facade we put up to function in society with rules of conduct and decorum. Inside, so many of us are conflicted and confused, yet rarely show it.

Its slipping,
The mask I call sanity.
Every day it falls
I’m living in my own reality
I’ve lost it
No longer bound by propriety
It’s gone now
Farewell to all I knew of me

Girl interrupted at her music

This time I read the title of the painting: "Girl Interrupted at Her Music".
Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? ... the entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light. Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat. The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.-Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

The way I want it to be

Artist Norman Rockwell describes his work as excluding the ugly, and keeping in only the idealized image...Ordinary people doing ordinary things. As he so quaintly put it, "I paint life as I would like it to be"

Life is not that dissimilar from a painting. I think when we try hard enough, almost anything can be analogous to life. I don't know exactly how painting is like life though. I would like to believe that the paintbrush is indeed in our hands, in our control. We make the strokes, we choose the colours, the outline, and hope to project on it how we are inside. Such that by looking at it, our lives, or some degree of it is explained, in the simple brushstrokes, in the careful smudges. But sometimes it seems that we are all, in the beginning, a wide sheet of untouched canvas, and others come into our lives, make their mark. Some will trample on it, others leave it torn and you are left to mend the pieces. Some make permanent indentments, others fade over time. And in the end, we are all messed up, unique, ugly yet somehow beautiful. And looking at our lives at the end, the many overlapping shades, the moments of grey and the sudden bursts of colours along the way, we can truly appreciate our lives, and the good and the bad in it.I guess we do have some control. A choice to paint within the lines, or in a haphazard fashion. To be careful with who you let in as you want to maintain a good clean surface, or to let the chaos of the many into something so personal, and it that, share a bond.

I don't know. I just hope that at the end, my painting is extrodinary, even if it is made out of the most ordinary things.

A new year

Sometimes I wonder how far I am from happiness, the feeling of contentment, or at least the knowledge that there is something to look forward to. The little instances of happiness and hope that truly make me feel alive come so rarely. Maybe that’s the beauty of it…in its rarity, there is greater appreciation.
Here I stand at the start of 2005…My blood screams for some kind of movement that is truly my own. Truly something I’m interested in. Too many thoughts and I’ve become a prisoner of my own judgments. I’m lost. What am I doing? I don't know.

Maybe what is confining is the constant pressure to be rational, to be sane, and it makes the alternative feel more vibrant, more real, more free. To be free of thoughts once in a while, that would be nice. To do something simply for the sake of doing it. To, in that moment, live for yourself alone. That moment belongs to you. That moment is you.