The Interview
I can not paint the way I see things, obviously. A painting doesn't include taste, physical sensations, or sound. Paintings are static, even if there is some sort of movement, I can't make the motion I experience in 2 dimensions - or three. I have tried, many ways, just to get as much of it as I am able. I got some, through impressionism and pointillism, of the shifting essence. I got some of it through transparent layers. But, there remains much I am only able to allude to. Additionally, there are patterns- triggered by sensory information which I experience in the back of my head. I can not explain it any other way. It is a transparent layer running concurrent to "reality". During an entry interview for a study many years ago, I tried desperately to explain all this to three people sitting on the other side of a folding table. I tapped the table, and said it looked like wood and metal with a form that was stable. I could tap it and place things on top of it. That's one level. On another level, it is an assemblage of tiny things that are constantly moving, like dots- but not dots, exactly. They take differing forms. Gathering to make a table, but they move into and out of it and through it non-stop. When I tap it, some of the dots that make me become the dots that make the table, while others move through it and continue on, scattering here and there. Some of the table moves into my hand, as soon as I know there is a table. In some cases, I know there is a table before I enter the room. But, I may not be aware that it is a "table." I know it is a form, a structure, of a certain density, because I feel it as an assemblage of these "things" that are alive. They are not conscious, but they form awareness in that they are directed by a conscious awareness. They are not directed solely by my awareness. There is a unity is attraction and repulsion, creation and destruction, that I observe through all of my senses. It is only interpreted through my consciousness. There is a lot of it that I do not understand. I can't get information from it because it never stops moving and changing. I can only recognize patterns in the movement. But, even that is so diverse and random it is sometimes impossible to know what it might mean, if it means anything at all. I think it might not mean anything to me or to us, here. It's part of a larger pattern that we only see a fraction, I mean a very small fraction, of. They had questions. In fact, I filled out page after page of those questions. Is Tuesday always orange? Does Tuesday sometime appear blue? Do numbers have shapes? Do shapes present with color? Do I hear things in association with certain flavors or shapes or colors? That was the one and only time I really tried to explain everything. It was a good exercise for me to find the words, but in the end it was a study and a diagnosis that told me nothing of any real value except that I was not hallucinating, and I was not alone. There were others like me. I got to talk with some of them, after the study concluded, for an afternoon. When I left there I stopped talking about it... until recently.
