In the midst of drawing I sometimes (today being one of those times) feel like I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown (although I've never actually had one, but I imagine this is what it feels like). I can’t really explain the feelings aside from that I feel like I’m going insane, an intense feeling of anxiousness and awareness, awareness of what I don’t know, a looming insanity, it’s a time when the act of drawing can be a pretty intense experience and all I can do is try and channel these energies into something creative, hoping something good will come of it before I pass out. The feeling probably lasts no longer than a minute or two, and unfortunately I never pass out. This is why I don’t smoke pot or take hallucinatory drugs anymore. I feel like I slip into this state on my own sometimes (always for some reason when I listen to The Beatles’ Revolver) and any help from those types of drugs will sink me deeper into myself into a place I have no business being. Luckily alcohol seems to have the reverse effect, and I can’t afford a coke habit. Sometimes I wish I had some cool disease like epilepsy to explain these thoughts, but I chalk it all up to the creative storm. All I know is there has to be some reason I didn’t take any pictures between this stage of the drawing and the last. This is some leap. I know I’m a little behind on updating this blog, but come on.
“He pondered, among other things, the fact that there was a stage in his epileptic condition just before the fit itself (if it occurred during waking hours) when all of a sudden, amidst the sadness, spiritual darkness, and oppression, there were moments when his brain seemed to flair up momentarily and all his vital forces tense themselves at once in an extraordinary surge. The sensation of being alive and self-aware increased almost tenfold in those lightning-quick moments. His mind and heart were bathed in extraordinary illumination. All his agitation, all his doubts and anxieties, seemed to be instantly reconciled and resolved into a lofty serenity, filled with pure, harmonious gladness and hope, filled too with the consciousness of the ultimate cause of all things. But these moments, these flashes, were merely the prelude to that final second (never more than a second) which marked the onset of the actual fit.”
-From The idiot, by Dostoevsky
It's like this minus the illumination.
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