What it is about a painting that I painted that I love is that I love it even though I may not know it as the thing I came to love. Because sometimes I change and the things I love change too. And that is what I love about all things. What I love is that they change themselves, all the time, all through time, and that I change, that you change, and that we change, all the time, all through time. And that makes us want to keep some things from changing at all. Especially the things we love. Especially, especially, the things we know we love.
Some things I do know. I know when I love something. That is something I know I know. But if I think about the thing I love too much I may change it because I may want it to be something more than what it is and that something is why I loved it to begin with. I don’t want to think about things too hard and then waste them. I just want to think about them enough to have known them, or to have come to know them.
You know, it really just might be human nature to want to keep the thing we know we love the way we know it and love it. It really is just that it just might be human nature. When you love something you think it’s beautiful and people want things that they think are beautiful to be near them, to be around them, to surround them. So, it really is that it may just be human nature, really.
When something is loved, it gets loved in one moment. It does not matter how long that moment lasts or how long that moment doesn’t last or if that moment stops and starts again and again and again. It is always one moment. It is always this moment. I do not always love this moment, but this is the moment that I have and you have it too, and whether or not you always love it really does not matter because you always have it and you always will have it and so you can always decide that you love it later.
Writing this is like making a painting. The faster I do it the better it is because the closer it is to what it was that I originally felt that caused me to start the doing of it in the first place. If I get too thinking about the thing then I end up with the beginning of a new thing and not the original thing I set out to do in the first place. That is part of what it is for me to make a painting that I love. I love it when it has the thread of the way that I think about something that could be anything but that is usually the way I want to keep everything I love in some way forever, as forever as forever I can get it. Something that is painted will be the thing that was painted forever in that moment that it was painted and that moment, like I said, is always right now. Even though it may have been a million years ago or a million thoughts ago or a million people ago or a million things ago, it is still what it was when it was as it is right now. It changes only because we change and sometimes that is good and sometimes that is scary because it necessarily always changes everything about the moment that is right now.
And when it’s the frozen forever version of something that only lasts a little while like a flower or a bird or a leaf or a twig, it is the most peculiar thing to me. Because what could a thing that lasts for only so long become if it were to be made to last forever? Is it the thing that it always was or does it change because I prevented its inevitable change from happening? That is something that I do not know but that is something that I love. And maybe it makes no sense that you can love something that you do not know, or that you may not know the thing that you are loving, but that does not really make a difference to me. I love it and I know I love it and that is better than thinking I cannot love it because I cannot tell you why it is that I am loving it even though I think I am, right now, right at this very moment right now, which is always right now, because it is impossible for it to be not always right now.
So then really what happens when I stop the thing I love from having change the way it should or would or really could if I did not do the stopping of the changing that it was trying to have? Is that something other than loving? Does the loving turn into something else once the thing gets changed into something never changing? I mean, it still does have change just not the change it would have had. It changes into something that will never change unless I change and so it becomes dependent on my changing in order for it to do any changing itself. But not really changing itself just changing the meaning of itself as it presents itself to me. Changing the meaning that I loved it for. The meaning that I loved it so much for so as to stop it from changing into anything else because what if it changed into something that I didn’t like that much? Then I couldn’t love it because, well, I wouldn’t even like it. And we usually don’t love the things we don’t like. I mean, you kind of have to like the things you love.
But, is that just mean? I mean, could that just be so very mean? Oh, gosh. I really don’t want it to be something mean because it comes from something very nice. Or at least something that I think is very nice. Maybe sometimes you get crazy when you think something is so so nice, so crazy that you end up doing something really mean because that’s how nice you think it is. But this isn’t really about that because this is about this. It’s not really about that. This is about this. This is about the idea of stopping something from changing by painting it, which isn’t really stopping it from changing because a painting of a bird never really was a bird really. It never had real feathers or real wings; it’s always been just a representation. And representations do not have living organs that beat and breathe and writhe around inside of you. They have symbolic ones. Symbolic organs, a symbolic liver, a symbolic brain, a symbolic heartbeat that beats and beats and beats but only as a symbol of what a real beat really is.
It’s like what that one song says over and over again: I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign. No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the place where you belong. But where do you belong? And then it says it again, a little later: I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign. No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the place where you belong. But where do you belong? Oh. Oh oooh. And then it says it somewhere else again: I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes I saw the sign. No one’s gonna drag you up to get into the place where you belong. But where do you belong? Oh. Oh oooh. Oh, and it says some other things too but mostly it just says that. And now the hard part is to figure out why that has any sort of significance, the kind of significance that makes it necessary to include it in this writing I am writing that may or may not have any significance at all.
But maybe actually that is what I love about the paintings that I painted that I love most of all. That sometimes you just put things in and they just sort of come out and you still don’t know why but they have significance because they came out, just that way, the way they came out of you. And sometimes they are coming out of you all of the time and you can’t stop all the comings from coming out of you as they just come and come. And sometimes they never come and you can’t get the comings to come. And you just have to wait around for it to come again. And sometimes in that waiting you figure out what some of the comings that had come out in the past really were. What it’s really all about, but maybe really what it is just maybe really all about. Because maybe you’ll never really know what it’s really all about, because it changes, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, when the new things start their comings out again.
