In my twenties, I was an artist's model. There was a course of change at that time where I became easier to draw. I posed less my (unmeetable)need for certainty; more, my reconciled fears. Everything in my life came out on that model's stand. I carried it there to let it out. I wrote less during that time. I was using my form and letting the artist's dictate - or translate from my language to their own and whatever they thought I'd said was ok with me. As my life became better - not easier or happier - but more aware - I became a better model.
I moved out of my cracker box apartment and a handful of other confinements, real or imagined, into an open handed, high ceilinged, ugly linoleum-floored (unforgiving to my many bare footprints), apartment. It was above an art gallery and just across the viaduct from the bookstore and Art Student's League; an old part of the city that had yet to undergo "progress" or renovation. I walked to work over that viaduct almost every day. 20th street; part of a loose weave over the highway, wide spaced from others, all rattling truckspeak; clattering angry machines. Above the trainyards with clusters of uncoaxable tracks, as stubborn about destiny as I was about watching the stars and believing in something I couldn't fix my gaze or mind upon directly.
I'd walk home under the bridges, picking up railrod spikes and stones; wondering at the dice-scatter of homes here and there made from torn insulation and crates and cardboard. Better building material near a trainyard, I suppose ... and always the stray shoe or pair of pants. Once my friend Meg, who also liked to walk down there sometimes, found a bag of onions: "A perfect bag with that red nylon netting. You know the kind? Ten pounds! Isn't that weird? Maybe it fell off a freight train. Wonder why street people didn't pick them up. Yah. Enough tears already ... huh."
A few abandoned buildings. Industrial is the only word I can think of. Industrial buildings. That flavor to them. Once factories or textile warehouses - something like that. Now, all the windows broken out; blind and leaning. It felt risky to wander in on them alone but - but they were covered with stunning, intricate art. Amazing what a can of spray paint can yield. The artists were called "taggers;" presumably gang members. Spray painting art on old buildings is technically against the law. Posting billboards filled with lies about politics and products and progress to go ugly against the sky, is not. Politicians and corporations have their own gangs. How are they any different? How better? Their ugliness is legal and fully approved.
These buildings and artists were different. Something organic occured to/with them. Something good. Property and people abandoned by pseudo-forward motion. Intricate murals I'd walk beside, turn a corner, walk some more. Lost outside a crumbling square. A great cubed canvas - wide and tall. Best use for an industrial building I've encountered. I fully approved. My heart and eyes grew bigger. I became easier to draw.
Accidental beauty (a term originated by Milan Kundra). Accidents where decay and neglect collaboratively become something other than ... - The wires bent out and branched into a rhythmic circulatory system for this undercurrent underworld. The rusty barrels piled high toward their own harsh yet poignant aesthetic. Junkyards filled with sunflowers and places for dusk to spill its buckets and glow in spreads. There really are junkyard dogs. I met one. He used to bay at the moon and at me in equal turn. He had a beautiful voice.
Amongst abandonment and enthropy. The hallowed accident; that I might fill up with whatever it was in me already, then fill up yet again. This overflow was necessary; it loosened an untapped sense of urgency in me. It gave me renewed givingness ... whatever it was that looked out from me to fall in love with this place, unadulterated and stark. I saw in ways I couldn't convey with language. It found its voice through how I moved through the world, and for the artists. In response to jagged edges, something in me smoothed, eased and opened. Something of spirit. Things find their way to speak their ineffables; to stand as testament for the Indomitable Creative Process and healing. If not because of circumstance or care or tending, then in despite of its absence.
