~ I am like a midnight watchman, sitting at my post, constructing intricate handheld timepieces. I move in closer, press my nose into the fisheye lens on the watch, make a half-grunt-half-laugh and set it aside. I push my thick spectacles further up the bridge of my nose and enter into a conversation. “So the beginning has passed, huh?” The wind nods affirmatively. “Yeah I remember my first days :-). Wellsprings of energy, the intensity of it all! Equal parts torment and ecstasy. Forms passed in front of my eyes and became etched into the deepest recesses of my mind, the experiences I had at that time casting such long shadows over my personality and, indeed, my artistic output, for the rest of my life.” The chair groans slightly. Whether out of boredom or interest has yet to be determined. “But there was new birth in me yet! All that had come before did not define me entirely. I would say that in those first 20 years, I had developed a kind of skeleton of ideas from which various important emotions and sentiments hung. A framework of iconography, and a well of feelings that I could return to and draw from. Certain deep, indefinable, possibly absurd sensations - some discovered within myself and some without - were very near the center of this skeleton. And it was both a pained, troublesome self, as well as a peaceful, happy self. I believe my goal had been to discover the experience of being alive. Richly, vibrantly bright - sudden, vital, screaming alive-ness. Anything like that is going to have to include the hell with the heaven.” A strange dog comes up to me out of the darkness, approaching my little circle of light on this windy, lonesome eve. She’s a bit mangy and wild, but there is an immediate sense of kinship between us. Speaking to the dog, I continue. “But now that we’ve created the beginning, we’ll just have to continue, won’t we? I only respect someone who can tell a story in its entirety, after all.”
