Monday, August 31, 2009

Beware, beware, beware.

I’m painting the upstairs now. The colour I chose was the one that I felt best suited the room. If I chose blue, it won’t have meant I was sad. If I painted it yellow, it won’t mean I was feeling bright. The same is true when I write. The mood or tone of the piece doesn’t necessarily reflect the mood I'm in when I compose it, only what I feel will best suit what I’m trying to relay, or how the character would feel. The emotional state I choose to put myself in while putting the words on paper rarely reflects what I was feeling when I sat down at the desk, or what I feel when I get up and walk away from it.
Our interior world has many rooms and every emotion unlocks a different door. I like to go exploring through the whole house. Sometimes even in the darkest corner of the cellar or up the creaky attic stairs, through the locked door at the top, terrified of what has been sealed away but curiosity forces me forward while I pray that I have better luck than the cat.
Sometimes, when I am feeling particularity daring, or I hear a story that begs the question why? I'll go rummaging in someone else's attic, or at my most courageous, into the dark corners of his or her cellar. But on such expeditions there is always the risk of not being able to find your way back out, or, that the person who comes up the cellar stairs won't be the same one who went down them.
In the interior world of the subconscious, in the land of imagination that often speaks in metaphor, all the ghosts, bogeymen, vampires, werewolves and creatures of the night that you buried as a child, are alive and waiting for your return. Sometimes they follow you back out. And once you see them again, remember what they looked like, their true faces revealed, you'll see them everywhere. Appearing as things that haunt you from the past, people who prey on children, others that suck the life’s blood right out of you with false charm and a constant hunger, people who seem fine at first but then turn savage, and so on. And now that you can spot them, they become aware of your vision and will seek to destroy you as to not be discovered.
So beware, beware, beware of the creaking attic stair and the ones that descend to the cellar. It's best to stay on the main floor, on the comfy couch in the living room and forget that there are other rooms and houses to be explored.
Now back to painting. I went for a cream colour with a deep red-violet trim. It's cheerful with just a hint of menacing. I think that's best, don’t you?

Copyright © Colin Frizzell 2009. All rights reserved.

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