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M

astering my craft was the focus of my life. On leaving Florence for my homeland, I was still beset by ideas for execution and improvement. Salome and I had come achingly close. I had but to refine what had been learned and then advance a pace or two. There would have been no shame should Salome have gazed out upon a gallery floor.

Seven years after putting Italy and poverty behind me, I had made no art. I had made neither attempt nor pretense at art. I was finished.

A part of me was no more. Life though was lived. Returning to the soldier's vocation, I made certain progress in that profession and rose quickly through the ranks.

It would not be correct to say that I applied full passion to that career. It was not a transference or redirection of my creative energies. Nor though did those humours require employment. There were no active energies that required such dissipations.

One might cast disparaging glances upon the sofa surfing masses and wonder aloud how those unfortunate people could bear to so abide. How could they endure their days but with only work, food, and television to occupy them? Have they no ambition? Have they no desire to create and use their imaginations? We imagine it to be the dreariest of ways of life.

My experience informs my belief that there is no hunger to be hungry. Creativity is less an energy than it is a void. To be possessed of a creative urge is like being ravenously hungry. I was sated.

And we imagine somehow that people who live their lives without this need are inferior. We though think the same of those who do not lust. I have had fewer friends encourage me to become creative than have tried to develop in me a want of alcohol.

Cigarette smoking, being a taste that must be acquired, is similar to the artistic habit. At some young age we see the cool kids making cool things and acting cool. Some will even starve themselves for their art. It cannot be helped but we yearn to care for something that much. Some see the same example set by lovers and decide to undertake the lover's journey in their quest to find a purpose. For others, the guiding paragon is a stalwart for family or charity.

The contradictions in these arguments are clear. How is wishing to find one's life's meaning through passion, that is yearning to yearn, different from hungering to hunger?

When a youth undertakes to inhale tobacco fumes, it surely is not because they are aspiring to achieve a respiratory failure and nor are they inspired by the allure of possible addiction. They are not hungering to hunger cigarettes. But would anyone be smoking if there were no consequence? No risk? Smoking parallels tattoos, body piercing, and early and unprotected sex among young people: It is done precisely because it is bad for you. They can prove their rebellious nature by doing so. It is the appearance of rebellion that they yearn for.

When undertaking my Tuscan adventure, I went yearning to create beauty. I wanted to be hungry to thereby prove my commitment to art. Starvation was never the end. Proving what I would endure to attend upon Beauty was my subconscious goal. I yearned to hunger that I would know how much I truly desired Beauty.

I though yearned for nothing. I hungered for nothing. I neither hungered to hunger nor yearned to yearn. I was quite content in my apathy. I was languidly at ease with my lethargy. I cared not that I cared not.

Thus did I, in futile contemplations flounder.

When I had been schooling my craft at the University, I was mocked and I was ridiculed for my affection for allegory.

Were I to paint two nude maidens entwined to each other in a pool of glistening sweet honey with one made to be proportioned marvelously and the other a wizened giantess, it might either take the title 'Beauty and Desire' or equally aptly 'Rumanian Oil Wrestlers'. When some insensitive critic labeled my 'Death and the Maiden' as 'Ken and Barbie go to Hell', it is not directly an indication that the allegorical work has failed. Painting, afterall, is not a medium for communication. What is the point of allegory if indeed no philosophy is trying to be uploaded?

Allegorical narratives are but hooks to hang an image upon. One doesn't… I don't… I didn't step up to a square of paper to begin musing upon the best way to depict the relationship between beauty and desire. The notions are too vague and transitory. Beauty can one day be a virgin farm girl and the next a refined, dandified dame. Throwing Judy Dench into the honey pot fight might be counterproductive.

No. We approach with a vague image and then seek to solidify it through the application of a narrative. If I wish to find good cause to capture one woman grappled violently about another, there are a myriad of ways to go about this. Each choice though shifts composition, colours, energy and every other aspect of the project.

Is it then ignorant artifice to determine an allegorical concept upon completion?

A painting is an argument and the artist's conclusions must follow upon the premises with validity. It may well be that when looking at some painting of Eastern Bloc mud wrestlers, the viewer might take an allegorical meaning form it but in order to do so they should seek for consistency of philosophy on the canvas. But, as a painting is not a communication medium, it matters not the least if our viewer takes an unintended narrative.

Allegory is a game that anyone can play. It is a powerful psychological tool afterall.

The power and fallacy of allegory is that it assigns human motivations to abstract notions. Literally, it removes them from the abstract.

Allegory allows us to ask what Beauty desires or why Lust pursues us so doggedly. Perhaps more importantly, we can employ allegory to identify relationships between otherwise seeming disconnected ideas. It is not the case that this allows us to come to any sort of universal scientific truth or even real philosophical perspective but the process invites us to see how precisely we see things.

Through anthropomorphizing my envy, I can describe it. I can engage Love in a dialogue and seek to wrestle with Temptation.

Moderation in all things.

Though a fool might follow allegory to insanity, it is but one path. We need not lose sight of a thing's nature as we seek to define it. Gazing through a telescope does not shrink the universe. Indeed, the cosmos is in this manner expanded.

For seven years I mused and moved through life with directionless meanderings. I never ceased to contemplate things greater than myself but I never acted. I acted the part of a person without ambition. In doing so, I was sensible. This sober sentiment was not one that I had selected. If my back was turned to art it is only because it was behind me.

I was Prince Myshkin, formerly known as an artist.

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