Git yer Christmas Engines in gear
Oh, my subconscious. Always up to some sort of gimcrack.
I had an odd dream a few nights ago, and in a not-entirely-uncommon occurrance, I woke up with a single name bashing off the walls of my skull. He called himself Hieronymus Bosch. I had no conscious clue who Hieronymus Bosch was--it sounded familiar, but also just lyrical enough (say it, it's fun) to maybe be something I made up, a la 'Tangible Mandible,' my future band name. I asked friends if the name meant anything to them and got consistent "no"s, and I scoured my memory clean trying to remember who he was. Finally today I gave up and asked Google, which turns out to be a much better friend than anyone else I know.
Hieronymus Bosch is credited as the first surrealist, and being the Joe Northern Renaissance he was, he can be placed roughly 400 years ahead of his time. He painted The Garden of Earthly Delights, which has always been a painting I think is cool. Flipping through some of the online galleries devoted to him, I saw a few paintings I remember seeing in-person when I got to go to the Prado freshman year. Still, I hadn't thought of any of those paintings probably since freshman year, much less the name of the artist who painted them. Yet I woke up that night and was able to spell his name exactly right, even if I had no clue who he was (a fallacy, I suppose: some part of me apparently knew, but it sure wasn't telling.)
That Hieronymus specifically would randomly surface is oddly accurate: his paintings seem to be closely-thematically related to the latest scene I've been crashing out on the keyboard. For sake of illustration, I know very well that a good deal of what I write is uber-dark, but I usually look at such pieces with a kind of "eh, so it goes" mentality. This current scene, however, marks the first time I've ever been frightened by something I've written. It scared me to the point where I actually toned it down on purpose, worried I had gone overboard.
(And, in what will be a most anti-climactic ending, it's unfinished so I'm not going to post it yet...sorry if I got anyone unnecessarily interested.)
Scary or not, though, it still feels amazingly good to write again. Better than drug-dealing, even.
I heeeeeeeeeart Ralph Ellison.
I had an odd dream a few nights ago, and in a not-entirely-uncommon occurrance, I woke up with a single name bashing off the walls of my skull. He called himself Hieronymus Bosch. I had no conscious clue who Hieronymus Bosch was--it sounded familiar, but also just lyrical enough (say it, it's fun) to maybe be something I made up, a la 'Tangible Mandible,' my future band name. I asked friends if the name meant anything to them and got consistent "no"s, and I scoured my memory clean trying to remember who he was. Finally today I gave up and asked Google, which turns out to be a much better friend than anyone else I know.
Hieronymus Bosch is credited as the first surrealist, and being the Joe Northern Renaissance he was, he can be placed roughly 400 years ahead of his time. He painted The Garden of Earthly Delights, which has always been a painting I think is cool. Flipping through some of the online galleries devoted to him, I saw a few paintings I remember seeing in-person when I got to go to the Prado freshman year. Still, I hadn't thought of any of those paintings probably since freshman year, much less the name of the artist who painted them. Yet I woke up that night and was able to spell his name exactly right, even if I had no clue who he was (a fallacy, I suppose: some part of me apparently knew, but it sure wasn't telling.)
That Hieronymus specifically would randomly surface is oddly accurate: his paintings seem to be closely-thematically related to the latest scene I've been crashing out on the keyboard. For sake of illustration, I know very well that a good deal of what I write is uber-dark, but I usually look at such pieces with a kind of "eh, so it goes" mentality. This current scene, however, marks the first time I've ever been frightened by something I've written. It scared me to the point where I actually toned it down on purpose, worried I had gone overboard.
(And, in what will be a most anti-climactic ending, it's unfinished so I'm not going to post it yet...sorry if I got anyone unnecessarily interested.)
Scary or not, though, it still feels amazingly good to write again. Better than drug-dealing, even.
I heeeeeeeeeart Ralph Ellison.