Pico de Orizaba

Pico de Orizaba
Taken from Huatusco, Veracruz, the closest town to Margarita's family's ranch.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Blog Headings... 2: Memories of a Suicidal

This is the second time I've changed the heading of my blog.  The first time last May, I changed the title and didn't return to the blog.  It was a momentary inspiration thinking about my first girlfriend Francesca and all that happened with and around her or within me before "us" between 1985 and 1989.  I was cooking, probably listening to music and momentarily thinking about those memories.  I thought I would finally write about that...  So, I changed the heading to "Memories of a Suicidal"...  Then I immersed myself in my painting; a much less threatening form of creative projection...  I run into dilemmas every time I consider the projection of the "theme" of my life.  Suicide... Yes, that was a theme.  However, it was a theme and not the theme.  What is suicide?  If I pursue this theme as the headline of my life, the most recent idea that comes to my mind is Suicide is one possible response by a person desperate to change their existential environment.  Back in the mid-80s when I greatly desired that escape I was informed that suicide was illegal; I could be put in prison for trying to kill myself... Sounds a bit absurd, don't you think.  Maybe the accurate legal response would have been for the police officer to "pop a cap in my head"... and put me out of my misery; One less burden upon the society; one less mishap; one less stressor on the public school system; one less mouth to feed; one less risk; one less ill person (mentally or physically)...  One less semi-orphan possible ward of the state...  One less tax burden and possible medicaid recipient...  Put a bullet in his head.  Much more efficient.  Much more cost effective.  I don't believe in the Arian Race fantasy.  But I do believe that the human race should strive towards being truly healthier...  How do we do that?  We let the truly suffering remove themselves from that dilemma...  Back then, back in the mid-80s when I suffered horrible diress, horrible angst and found myself cutting my arms in the symbolic attempt towards releasing the excess pressure; when the blood was spilling on my bedroom floor, I felt a momentary relief...  Well, back then, I was informed that suicide is a blatant disregard of the feelings of those who "loved" me; that if I killed myself, those people would be horribly resentful towards me.  Selfishness.  Did I know how horrible that would be for my mother, for my sisters?  What a horrible thing to do to them!  

Ok.  You endure.  You continue.  You don't off yourself.  You struggle and endure their criticisms, their discomfort with your discomfort.  And then one day you overcome most of your shit and you disappear from their perpetual projection of you upon their minds.  You are dead in their life.  What's the difference?  Well, you didn't kill yourself.  But who's business is that?  Your life and your death is yours and only yours.  No one truly cares as you care.  We all die.  There is an infinite number of ways you may die. And you will die.  How and why?  Well, the why is simple, because it is a factor built into your material/physical existence.  The how?  I guess we'll learn about that at it's given time...  

Suicide:  Repressed Anger...  Interesting idea.  I was angry.  I repressed my anger at times.  Why was I angry?  I'm sure I'm still angry.  At my mother?  My father dead before I reached the age of 5?  My sisters? My peers? My relatives?  Life?  God?  Sounds a bit absurd.  Angry at Life?  At God?  43-years-old angry at my mother, at my sisters, at my peers, at my father dead before I turned 5-years-old and who passed his deep black vein of perpetual genetic risk to me...  

No.  Suicide is the response of someone who sees no "healthy" escape from their horribly difficult life struggle...  Why accuse them; the suicidal?  

The problem is that we don't have time or patience or the energy to ask why? what happened? what's going on in your life?  And maybe we don't have the capacity for responding constructively or compassionately...  Maybe we're not truly interested... Looking back at this, I say to myself that I shouldn't be angry with you for being you...  You couldn't come up with the interest, the compassion, the desire to truly help.  Why should you have?  Who were you; who are you anyway...?  

There was a trainwreck in development.  The reels may have been warped from way before I was born.  This is why I changed the heading of the blog to Perpetual November; Spring Eternal in My Mind; Late Summer Labyrinths...  When you are skiing in the Poconos or in New Hampshire or upstate New York or in Vermont and you begin losing control, falling off balance, there is a moment when you desperately try righting yourself and then you realize that the crash is imminent and you just fall into it...  I was born onto a black diamond slope and there was only one option and that option was to learn about imminent crashes and try righting myself the best I can...  One possible response to living in a purpetual train wreck is suicide.  Once and for all you remove yourself from the perpetual train wreck...

Do you remember the first time you tried standing up on skiis on a slight snowy slope?  Imagine that slope being a black diamond route with moguls...  Imagine that by some strange "miracle" your body maintained itself upright as the skiis picked up speed downhill...  Theres a ledge or an edge or a drop and on that drop there are moguls not meant for slowing you, but for breaking you...  (if you are a small child and not a trained skier) But you are just a small child.  You are not an adult...  

You hear resentment?  No, it's not about that.  It's just an explanation...  Perpetual Novembers... malaise, depression, imminent death, concern, fear, worry...  Spring Eternal in my Mind...  A repeated miracle of hope and positive energy that was a temporary experience repeating itself occasionally usually temporal beginning in February and lasting until late July...  I carry with me this Spring Eternal in my Mind and realize that it's a place we must go...  Somehow we must transform the late Autumn sliding into Winter death into some form of an Eternal Spring.  How do we do that?  Changed perspectives; much depends upon circumstances.  Just as you can convert winter demise into eternal springs, that eternal spring can slide directly into late Autumn's leafless trees.  Everyone understands that a smile easily converts into a frown without warning.  It's frustrating.  It's sadenning when that smile converts into that frown.  We don't want to live that way.  

Yesterday I sold enough coffee to carry us positively into the future.  Tomorrow?  Yesterday I painted what some people would call wonderful paintings, what kept me in enthusiastic awe...  But I had to put the painting aside to sell coffee.  And I sold well.  But then we returned home to a bedroom/studio full of Efforvescence and mold spores due to horrible water damage in the roof, due to blatant irresponsibility by first José "Montaña" (the original owner and constructor of the house) and then by one of the current landlords who promised he would seal the roof before the summer monsoons (there were 3 months in Spring with strong unabstructed sunlight) and waited until we complained of waterfalls through our ceiling midway into the monsoons. In effect Cruz effectively ceiled the water into the roof and ceiling, giving it only one direction to slowly leave the roof and that was into the bedroom/studio.  I developed an allergic  reaction to the mold spores.  For a week we did some heavy cleaning of the ceiling and the residue.  The reaction disappeared leaving me with what appears as Asthma. I haven't been painting much.  However, I am running 3 miles a day, 5 days a week, coughing along the way, although running well.  I trade one positive for another positive, although I would prefer the two positives..., since a day, a week, a lifetime is comprised of time slots we must fill, utilize. Between the fairs, I don't run all day.  I don't cook all day.  I don't read all day.  I would love for positive writing enthusiasm.  However, maybe I've awaked from that adolescent dream.  I paint differently than others.  However, I wonder if it's something that can carry us into the future, like selling cupcakes had and like selling coffee does... However, there is a spiritual journey that seemingly was born through my painting, although I know already existed well before my father died, a journey within which I was born...  Written into my destiny was my father's death and his passing me the gene and all the subsequent difficulties...  There is a pressure within me, ever since I started writing poetry in the 80s, to express the related intensity, the love, the journey, the tragedy...  I can't express that with wonderful gourmet cupcakes that almost killed me... I can't express that with coffee...  I can't express it with wonderful international cuisine...  I can't express it with running towards a marathon. I am not a trained artist.  I can't express what is in my mind.  However, something expresses itself through my crazy painting...  And then I wonder if it's true and what it is expressed...  My painting has become more abstract, probably because who we truly are, how we truly sense the world, what is truly occuring... is sensed and not truly seen or understood...  But how can the painting take me into the future?  One day I will have a house full of paintings (I have a house filling with paintings) and I will wonder what is the point?  I wonder what is the point...  What am I seeking?  However, the painting opened the door to the world of being...  back in 1997... One year later, I still haven't explained that part of the New York City journey...  

Filling time and space...  It's an adult reality.  And then, one day, the sand runs out in the hourglass...  No more time... No more space for filling... And all the paintings... all the poems... all the "exotic" dishes cooked or baked... all the loving experiences... all the inter-personal conflicts... all the concerns... all the memories... all the memories of passion... of creativity of shared experiences of horrors of tragedies of accomplishments of sensed or imagined failures...  Over.  Turn of the page?  No.  End of time and space filled.  End of the filling... End of the hourglass...  

Late Summer Laberynths... is a personal spiritual reality of the complexity of my destiny or life journey or universal perspective or internal perspective.  I am an artist.  I am a social antropologist...  I am a social and political critic a 15-year-old philosopher laying on the side of a hill in Branchburg alongside Peter Coletti staring up at the stars.  A spiritual theorist...  A pretty great cook.  I am a hermit.  I believe in social justice, honesty and truth.  I believe in the spirit and in destiny and in our spiritual connections and our lack there of... I believe in the eternal I or the eternal US....  I don't believe in religion.  This is the laberynth...  


And, yes, I consider myself fortunate having "failed" with my suicidal response...  I've learned a ton about the world, about myself, about others and about "love" during the late summer of my belated youth...  

About death, I believe our bodies die.  But we continue.  

Francesca is married, lives in Long Valley, New Jersey (a region I explored in 1988 as a Kirby Vacuum Salesman towards the end of our tragic relationship that erased itself as oceans erase sandbars and salt deposits...) She has 3 children.  

Who knows?  Maybe I'll return to this blog.

2 comments:

Sheri lynn said...

AabackYou are amazing. and a little of everything. I'm glad for your "failures" but that word is too harsh. Its like you wrote. Things don"t die and disappear. They change form and become something. you are something. you are someone. Your paintings are masterpieces~without "proper " training like u mention. They are full of every type emotion going. They are part of you. You are gifted to be able to put that beauty and emotion out there to reach others.

Ross said...

Sheri Lynn... It's very rare that someone leaves a comment on my blog. I truly appreciate your response. There was a reason I directly shared the piece with you. Although it wasn't written to you, I was thinking about you while writing it. The first thing I did when I finished writing it was paste it onto the message to you... At this point I don't believe we were born into this life to do anything more specific than what we've done and what we are doing, what we have learned and what we will learn. What we can share with others and enjoy together or alone. I don't know why I paint and truthfully why I don't write. But if I dedicated more time to writing I probably would make the same comment about not understanding why I do it... Every day that passes I move further away from my fantasy about creating a business involving my cooking or baking... However, the fantasy of making a living off my creativity remains strong in my mind. I guess it combines two stronger necessities: 1) the desire for recognition/acceptance/reverence; 2)the desire to be financially independent. The problem with being born onto a slippery slope is the risk that nothing you do is balanced and can have a planned follow-through. Think about a wet pitcher's mound after a shower in the middle of the game... While the pitcher may have been pitching an almost perfect game, the second that the game is renewed and the pitcher goes into his wind-up, he runs the risk of slipping upon placing his lead foot upon the ground... with the slip he may tear a ligament in his knee, removing him from the season... or he me lose control of the pitch, leading to a hit or a home run... At the very least, he is thrown out of momentum giving the other team the chance of pulling ahead, wrecking what was originally wonderful... This is not a complaint of mine. Actually, it's an observation, because I continuously struggle for placing under wraps my concerns and with understanding what's happening and placing it in perspective. However, it's difficult placing things in perspective when you don't know where or when you will slide...