no, that’s just silly

so i was waiting in SFO for my delayed flight to chicago. realizing my extra time, i thought i should pull out my laptop and do some writing… you know when you get that urge to express something artful?  whether it be music, or painting or writing, you just want to release that pent up artistic stress before it explodes into something disgraceful.  of course, as soon as i open the laptop, my ideas disappear…lost… but where do they go?  the question brings me back to early childhood… i would draw a picture on a slab of flattened silly putty with permanent marker.  a nice bold image of flowers or unicorns, or whatever little boys usually draw. soon enough the glamor of that image wears off, and is overtaken by the all-too-human urge to destroy.  i fold the silly putty over…and then again.  but then regret sinks in.  i really liked that fucking unicorn and want to see it again.  its too late though, because no matter how carefully i try to unfold that silly putty, the image will never come back.  its lost, gone like bad ideas that dissolve from your mind, like unattainable dreams, faded love… still there in there somewhere, but broken into a million pieces, rendered meaningless. and even in the wildest of chances that it comes together in some recognizable fashion, it will never be the same…

that is one big pile of silly putty

yet in the same light, consider that no matter what new picture i draw, it will inevitably have part of that original artwork in it.  it is not overwritten…but simply rearranged or combined in a constructive way to create something seemingly new.  every new piece of art, every new experience, every new lover…they all have parts of the old ones in your brain. old girlfriends, memories, beliefs.  rearranged and recycled… it’s unavoidable… you can’t just get a new piece of silly putty, they don’t make us like that.  the chemical signatures, the neuron connection patterns, they’re all there, albeit some less intact than others, but there… they’re just rearranged.

this leaves a disturbing thought, however… every time i make a new drawing and mix it up, more and more pieces of shattered pictures are being folded into that bouncy pink matter.  what if i did this continuously for a lifetime?  what happens to these orphaned concepts that are bent and broken and forgotten?  if there is enough ink, and the putty is kneaded enough, can they constructively interact?  combine themselves in new unimaginable ways?  maybe they manifest into pictures and ideas and memories that are not possible to create in any other manner. beautiful or terrible things that exist for only the moments of calm between those of chaos, and will never exist again……
are these our dreams?  places we’ve never been…people we’ve never met…concepts that no one has thought of yet… every dream, every nightmare, a conglomeration of brief experiences, false emotions, and blurred faces…
an entire lifetime of forgotten moments, rearranged daily as we spend our waking hours folding and tearing and kneading, and then closing our eyes to see what resolves…?