I was washing dishes, preparing my world for the sunrise. Everything becomes symbolic in winter, you see, as we plunge into the inner depths of things. And so I cleaned while the outside was still blue as a bruise, before it had been soothed by dawn into exhalations of pink.
This week, I have been practicing self-examination from a distance, as if I were a foreigner to my own life. This sometimes reveals difficult truths, like all the time spent doing less-than-essential things. But sometimes it reveals new cracks into the inner being, gaps where realizations may invade.
As I washed the dishes, I attempted to notice my thoughts. Images seemed to invade of a white home struck by slanted sun-rays, some clusters of palm trees, a blue pool outdoors and wide windows which perched from the home to reflect it. I recognize the images as recurring ones of a house made by an artist in Israel. I had seen the home on TV over a year ago, and the images return and return. A home can be the body of a certain kind of life. And our surroundings influence us more than we know. I have always believed in beauty as a moral good, and as essential nourishment for the personal and collective soul. Perhaps the recurring image points to some longing to externalize my inner world, to make things match.
This is the sensation of harmony, the stitching together of a disparate mind and body, a disparate self and society. This is why many people self-harm, to inscribe the inner pain outwardly. The physical pain is nothing compared to the pain of inner-outer fracture. And this is why we artists create: to let our thoughts spill into the world, to see ourselves as things situated in a collective space and time, freed from the unseeable depths of private space.
Perhaps there are always images brooding beneath the layers of my consciousness. Perhaps they are each resplendent with meaning if I could stop for a full moment, long enough to see.
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