I was born with the ability to slip into a hypnagogic state seemingly without effort even while fully awake. Where did the last hour go? What was that I just saw? Oh, shit, I did it again.
I used to think I just wasn't quite real in the sense that other people mean it.
It worried me a lot back when I was a kid.
Now I see it as a tool for what I truly seem to have been born to do. It's a bit like being an ocean current that dips and ascends from warm to cold water the end result being a change in emotional weather. Usually I spend at least an hour after awakening with one foot in two different worlds. A fair amount of creative energy seems to be manifesting itself at times like these. I don't have classic insomnia, but rather a strange urge to experience this state of mental freedom, that has become as I grow older a sort of addiction. Right now, as I write having been awake for well over two hours I am still imagining absolutely unrelated sensations and scenarios that have nothing what so ever to do with what I am actually doing.
I should have put quotation marks around the word: actually. Truth be told I wonder if I am actually doing anything.
Lately I have spent a number of mornings castigating myself about the utterly odd and un-Michael things that seem to be manifesting themselves in this state. Believe me when I say it gets a tad unnerving to almost actually see and experience things that are fabulously alien to the things one normally imagines. I am beginning to believe that this is signaling a very profound change in my creativity. Just what and why has yet to make itself known but I find myself growing increasingly impatient for it to do so.
My long standing obsessions seem to to giving way to new and unexpected things as yet hazy and veiled. I can only hope this signals an advance in perception that will usher in a new and more interesting set of paradigms. I have been in my "comfort zone" as an artist for to long and very much look forward to any new surprises my inner currents may bring.
I have to wonder if in the process of making "Boy", I've simply outgrown the Michael I once was, and for the last year and a half since I finished it, I have been treading water.
No wonder I have been edgy and basically unsatisfied with my work of late. Of course I can't imagine that I will simply toss what I know in the waste basket, but rather it will mutate in a direction that is as yet unknown to me. What A fabulous idea! For a very long time since starting out in the business of doing comics and peripheral subject matter I have been,( the the necessities of the market place and the culture that surrounds it.) to hoe a furrow in the ground marked, "Zulli". That is almost gone now. Re-invention on a scale that used to scare the shit out of me to be frank. I find I like the idea of no boundaries or restrictions.
The only rules of art are technical and once mastered can be bent and sculpted into any form.
What strange and wonderful fun, if I really have the nerve to go there. I suspect there will be tears, soul searching and a lot of shit thrown away in disgust, but emerging from a cocoon is always a struggle. What a life.
M.Z.
No comments:
Post a Comment