Oils on canvas 120cms high ish...

It’s not really just that we have no idea what exactly the fuck we are supposed to be DOING, what acts are we to PERFORM, precisely, in this magnificent and small, relentless and fleeting life.
Each of us is trapped, each day, in a universally commonplace, utterly human crisis of freedom. We can only ever be sure that we will never know. Certainty of uncertainty.
I dunno if I am convinced. Do I have muesli? Toast? And even if I go into the kitchen and find out do I end something colossal and incomprehensible by choosing. And this is all made so much worse because I don’t have any muffins. I mean. Not even ONE.

Of course, well as everyone knows -
Every time we wake there is a vast, exquisite world. Endless and breathtaking. Deadly.
Within it lies our doom. And choice opening before us like blooms or wounds. Our every breath a mark in time that one less separates us from death. Each choice annihilates other choices as time forces us forwards into the conviction of uncertainty of life and the certainty of death.
Each nerve has hurt us, each loss… and each step, the cells in the joints of each finger forged and folded by ancient and forgotten beauty and pain: we have been wrought by billions upon billions of deaths a war endless and endless in its creation - “nature red in tooth and claw,” - destruction creating and shaping us. HUMAN and alive. Even Tennyson, who wrote that quote. Most of his other stuff was just crap.
I still can’t decide about breakfast. I already know. Coffee. Cigarettes. Sullen glance at food.
This miracle of chance that something, anything like us should come to exist! That we can know that is what we are.
We are a wonder of improbability! The processes that opened this world to us.

We are burned so deeply by what we are. Branded, yes.
That we can know that we will all die. That for each of us, under every ambition, love kindness and wisdom there lies this certainty. Cruelty and violence unfolding into our brimming dying minds.
We are such creatures, forever acknowledging that we must end, hard and real beneath the softness of skin. Thrashing and fighting with our foreknowledge with every action we take. Held against us in the deepest reptilian core of our wondrous hearts and minds. HELP!
WHAT DO WE DO!
This bright world where we know no place.
I came up with a maxim when I was 15, in the colossal conceit of youth and vicious, irrefutable perception. In learning the terror of choice. Cradling my weakness before me, newborn and as beautiful as any perfectly wrought weapon, filling choice and time in soft acquiescence. With small failure. As a collapse of possibility into probability by fear, sealed mute into certainty by terror.
I thrashed and bled my way through puberty; a kind, angry and sad child growing crippled and skewed.
So tired so young, exhausted by fighting too easily. Becoming less, losing mass.
Stepping away from choice and love and into unfettered shame. The scale of a life a wonder before me: a true god, a crime of choice. The most pure kind of terror; so heavy with the pressure of promise and hope. Intricate for each of us. The only scale we can know. What we have.
The aphorism:
“(In life) No-one, not one of us knows what we are doing.
And anyone who believes that they do is a fool.”
I abandoned it almost immediately as I began the slow fall: kneeling in desperately sincere humility as with each breath I inhaled, quantified, examined and accepted shame. I was blistering with the sickness of conviction, a zealot and fanatic, evangelist and prophet, a bitter freak in school uniform shorts. I believed with brutal passion in the depth and extent of my cowardice, the ruin I made of each moment, this forever frozen frieze composing us. Turning my hate filled eyes swollen and filthy with time.
My bloody knees cracked and I was prostrate before and beneath every individual that grazed my senses. I could not conceive of a cowardice and weakness that would place any human beside me, and I could not imagine any place beneath where I belonged. The crazy boy cutting his fingers, hacking at them with some blunt junk pocket knife 12 years old and in love with blood. A flood of hot shame crashing and pinching through me as I woke each day. The circadian rhythm of life forcing me awake, aware again and again aware actualising . Guilt in my blood, my heart, my heart.
I saw myself poisoning the real people. The others. The brave.
The angels of courage and will that I saw in any step that was not my own.

A leper of panic. A betrayer. Life eater. The brilliant, the beautiful child. The fool who was too afraid to use anything that had been laid before him.
And I began with such Gifts! A lifetime of love and care. A flaring wild mind crippled, yes, but quick quick quick.
WASTE IT FOOL! Guilt
So. I. opened. the bottle. I drank for a decade.

And when I was twenty three I fell in love. I painted for the first time. I fell in love with the PAINT. Three years later I stopped drinking forever more forever for me not a gulp never and nevermore.
I used to call it “In sobrietium requiem.” The death song of sobriety.

It took me until I was thirty before I began to believe… that my life and mind were not sick and selfish lovers in a wasteland of cowardice:
I have seen this - many, many times. My work and words move others to tears. It still makes me cry, too.