Camus and the End

Last night I started to read Albert Camus' Exile and the Kingdom.  The first story is called The Adulterous Woman.  The main character of this book is a woman who is very unhappy with her marriage.  She longs for adventure and newness.  Her husband showers her with money, which it is implied is the main drive in his life.  The woman finds that she must escape her life, she runs to the highest parapet in the small town that she is staying in during the middle of the night, leaving her husband behind asleep in bed.  She experiences the cold and biting air of the desert ripping through her lungs from the top of the parapet but also witnesses as far out as one can see, where the desert met the sky.  She was free of her constrictive love.  She returns to bed but has found another energy which actually expresses her love more.  Her husband has been cheated on.

Sometimes when I go to studio at night I feel an energy not unlike this one.  It is by no means that I am cheating on my wife.  We do not share such conservative views on the world as this couple, but it is as if there is a life of freedom and a vitality of breath at the studio which is not present in the regular everyday family experiences.  There is a rush, a pit in the stomach, a resistance to thirst and hunger which do not exist in the home.  All sense and all knowledge sometimes leave without any conscious effort.  Movements become fluid and intent becomes only creative.

There were many times over the past several months that I experienced these feelings while working on this series of totems.  The totems have evolved in such a way that they are now individually spiritual.  Each totem is imbued with an emotion felt through the act of discovery.  At first I felt lost as to the characters and which characters would work in my cosmology and then I felt lost in how to make a pattern.  Last I found myself lost in color again.  I feel I can always become lost in color.  It is a dilemma that I search for and a mystery which I find comfort in.

I cannot do any more totems this week before Picnic.  I have run out of gas.  There are 67.  It is notably less than the 100 that I had planned on, but I did gift one to my mother and traded two for a haircut, which brings the total to 70.  I gave two to the midwives after they helped my wife and I birth our son, so that is 72.  It's been a lot of work and the discovery still allows more, but for now, I am done.

                                                                                 

It is time to run down the stairs of my parapet and return home to the comfort of my wife's embrace.  Tomorrow I shall climb again.

Peace

-Mike