Starherd’s Mindscape (text)
I haven't had the time to make art of my mindscape yet (or try to, with my limited ability), but here's what I wrote up about it. (When I get art done I’ll post that too.)
When I first walked this planet, my world was houses. The house of my parents, my house, darkened with coal-dust and with metal grates in the splintery floor to sit on when it was cold. When the seasons changed, bats would get lost on their way to and from the attic, flying about the downstairs until caught between caulender and record jacket and released outside - if the cats didn't get them first. My older sister's room, forbidden vault of treasures.
The home of my father's mother, a modern ranch house high on a hill where the tall grass fields all around swept away all sound but birdsong (my grandmother, at the picture window, watching birds through binoculars). Basement larger than the ranch house above and overfull with the weight of history from before I was born. My father's father scavenging pieces from other cars to keep his car running.
The home of my mother's father: the kitchen warmed by a massive firewood stove, floored in faded speckled red and off-white linoleum tiles, the white kitchen table with strange hard-to-open drawers full of mysterious artifacts: cut glass bottle stoppers, foreign coins, wooden matches. (My grandfather, sleeping in the rocking chair in the kitchen, in front of the tiny black-and-white television with its static-laced signal). The house growing out from the kitchen like a plant, first story, second story in pieces that didn't quite match and had steps in between, porches covered over to make rooms. The scent of the attic: ancient wood dust and decaying paper and sunlight through tiny windows. The iron hand pump on the back porch that drew from the dangerous cavern of the cistern. The dirt-floored basement, three gradiated wooden child-coffins leaning against one wall in the otherwise empty room - for my mother and her two older brothers, just in case, but never used. None of the house younger than eighty years and the kitchen as old as the Civil War. A little later on, my world became adventures, and it never turned back. The decaying abandoned house on my grandfather's property, where I slipped in through the old window above the front door to let in the neighborhood kids, and we crept carefully among rusting pedal-cars and ancient school desks with initials carved in them that matched no one known alive. Sagging floors and broken glass and fragments of antique dishes and magazines so archaic that it was difficult to decipher them despite knowing they were in our language.
The woods downhill from my grandmother's house, pine trees so thick they were difficult to creep through bordering the fields.
Being deemed of age to be introduced to the massive ancient house an hour away that was where my father grew up, slowly being emptied, the source of the history that filled the ranch house's basement. Under every hedge a wild fairy kingdom, up every tree a secret base. Reading Bunnicula books hidden in the boughs of pine trees taller than the three-story house. Watching the trains that trundled by only a few hundred feet away, across the street, across the creek, before the ridge. The creek was bordered by stone-and-mortar walls to prevent it from flooding the town huddled in the tiny valley. Up on the ridges, somewhere, the coal mine that was once my grandfather's, where immigrant miners eagerly taught my father to count to ten and say "I like girls" in a dozen different languages.
My mother's eldest brother's funeral home, a well-kept, urbane building more than a century old, in which we were only allowed to explore the lived-in part. My father's brother's farm, with the aging barn that sprouted kittens every spring. My first grown-up paperback: the book on Atlantis that my dad was reading, picked up when he fell asleep reading it on the front porch. I took to sitting and reading with him and he introduced me to our home's attic, lined with shelves he'd built himself, filled with every scifi, fantasy, and paranormal paperback that he'd been able to get his hands on from the 1950s on. I came to subsist on a diet of crumbling paper words.
A little later on, and rather than only finding adventures in places I was taken, I found my own adventures by foot and bicycle. Abandoned houses and empty foundations, the pylons of lost bridges in the river, the island that could be walked to when the water was low enough. The circle of stones in the woods by the creek. The hut made of sticks at the top of the cliffs that were cut out of the mountain for the sake of the road. Camping wth friends in one of their yards and creeping up on neighboring campers to blow wildcat calls. Floating down the river on patched truck inner tubes, catching turtles and realizing that even snapping turtles were friendly as babies. And books, and books, and books.
I found my kingdom and I named it for stars. Between ridge and mountain to the west of town, entrance hidden by the brick yard that was being perpetually dismantled, was a secret valley, and it was mine because I walked it and mapped it. I led others all the way to the swamp from which sprang the stream at the very bottom of the valley. I helped a lost dog drag branches from another stream high up on the mountain until he ran back to his hiking owners that never saw me. I faced down bucks in rut, if you count facing down to include rounding a corner of elephant-grass lagoon and frightening them back into the cover of the swamp. I excavated the tangible pieces of history from the clean fill that the brick yard poured into the valley, setting rows of hundred year old bottles on ledges of stone, shrines to the spirits of the valley. I found the cross-shaped cave with the almost-invisible entrance and slithered inside many times, sitting in jagged comfortable dark and damp with the pale striped katydids. I sat in the glass-leaved rhododendron forest and watched clumsy humans walking about the other side of the valley.
I was of the ridge and valley and mountain and it was mine.
I found the dead space - a patch of the valley where, inexplicably, nothing grew. The standing trees were shattered ten feet up and ghost-white hollow shells that rang like drums. Rather than the deep carpet of broad leaves, the dead space was covered in matted blond grass.
I wandered into the stone foundations of long-demolished houses, overgrown like Mayan temples. I found the curious stone pits matted with plants on top but full of nothing but dark fathomless water six inches down. Echoes out of time and the places that claimed the lost, like the cistern at my mother's father's house. But I was not lost and I was not afraid. I made shrines of colored glass and hanging feathers and mounted a discarded deer skull at the head of the valley to warn off those that would bring it harm. My orbit expanded to include a wolf-eyed bolt of lightning. She was my moon; I'd rather be moon, I thought, but for her I would be sun. Silver must have gold. We traded books, and art, and writing, and food and friends and homes, and I would have sacrificed all and changed the world for her if she'd asked. I thought this was pure friendship. It was love. Strip out the inconvenience of biological imperatives, and it's the same thing, or should be.
To the east of the small town I grew up in was a ridge that ended in a cliff, a small quarry, that tumbled down into a creek. Fossils under my fingers. At the top of that ridge was a square crater, the remains of what had been a house twenty or more years ago. My moon and I scaled the ridge, inexplicably growing more despondent with each vertical step, until at the top we rested on a log and faced a black shadow-man ghost across the crater. We bolted back down the ridge, frightened deer fleeing for the warm summer of the valley and the safety of town, but it never quite erased the memory of what resides at the top of that ridge.
And then, I met the city. I walked away from my kingdom in search of knowledge and found other worlds, concrete and steel and shadows and red and yellow brick, all gothic arches and wrought iron railings. I found new attics and rooftops and basements and sub-basements and steam tunnels and stairs upon which you became heavier as you descended. The city I chose existed in harmony with my forest kingdom.
Things happened. My moon became poisonous and I was snared in the orbit of a blistering remorseless sun. I was trapped in the desert until a supernova lit my way. And when I met the void in the desert, I realized, or remembered, that I was myself made of stars. I was no one's sun. I was no one's moon. With void I could be seen as myself just as with stars, void could be seen as itself. There is no need to be sun or moon when your roles are different but equal. And the mountains sprang up again, and the water flowed again, and I needed no castles for I had overgrown ruins. Carved stone and aged wood for bones, and rain and mist and streams for blood, and forest for skin, with paper breath and the night sky of stars and tiger-void for heartbeat. Sun and moon are absent and a vibrant nebula shines in the sky and from above, much of the ruins shape an eight-pointed star.
This is my self as it feels to me, drawn from what I've most connected to in my life. The seasons paint it different colors, the structures take different forms, the books have different words, storms shake the trees, but the flavor of my Mindscape remains the same.