Somewhere in the grass and garden

A just-for-arts-sake wall art piece (16"x20") that I did this week while making Curiouser wall art. The line is from some writing I did years ago, about 9 years? So I was twenty or around that age. I did a lot of writing at the time, often on the bus on the way to work at Collins Booksellers, as it took the long way to Knox via the Ferntree Gully back streets. Kind of wordy and over-thought, but interesting in a funny kind of way... I was quite obsessed with definitions, identity and understanding at the time.

"I sometimes feel like I’m in one of the games I used to play as a child. There is a particular direction to my actions, but despite this (or as a result of) there is a certain status quo. It never occurred to us that a direction was needed. The action of the imagining seemed enough in itself. At times the creation became the real game for that was where the intrigue lay.

When I think about it now, remembering school buildings and concrete steps of various heights, haunted by those of various social group denominations, we often made a game of creating traps and limitations for ourselves, seeing how far we could stretch our imaginations within the constraints of an established pretence.

Perhaps this is what I am doing now – creating my own enclosure, the trapping of my role, my definition and place, to entice my imagination out from these memories, to prove to myself, perhaps to the world, that I am not contained by definitions. But have I proven anything? Perhaps to none but myself. In beginning the establishment of my identity, I don’t, in actuality, reveal myself to anyone.

I do not wish pretension - in fact I wish to treat this adventure into identification of the self as a game. A game that I, a child, play for no reason other than to explore my imagination, a universal dimension of the world, Another level from which we live and look and perhaps even comprehend. Conflict only over impossibilities, that they not restrain us.

Somewhere in this game where I can be myself, in the guise of being some invented character, that I need not feel the need to explore my self and who it is to those around me. It is being, simply that. Why let go of the child inside of me? Is it important to be older? Sometimes I think out brains must shrink as we get older, pushed inside by the judgements of others, the consternation that meets the thoughts of dreamers.

Imagination, it is an art. To teach it is to attempt a reversal of “societal” aging, the development of an “adult” mind where it is not knowledge that confines us, but so called standards, norms, assimilation and that perfect word I can never remember when I need to.

Perhaps it is as we forget exactly who was who in those games we played, forget where they came from, whose invention they were. As we lose years, and those aspects of our young personality that faded as society shaped us, as we forget we become less. Less of ourselves, or less comfortable with it, less the seeking, exploring mind which creates growth and art and freedom. We lose the urge for our imagination to surpass our limitations. Somehow it doesn’t seem important anymore.

But it is there that I am hiding, I am sure. If I forget, now, that I am lost, and return to the freedom of my memories, perhaps I will prove it after all. My imagination, self and being, is beyond it all."