Temporis Loci
pixelated glades
In times when the stress of the world reaches inevitable heights I am drawn most intensely to draw in the mystery of the natural world, primarily filtered through the lens of a favored artist or virtual space. Where I live there is plenty of nature to be seen, but rarely to be touched and truly felt, always a car engine just a couple feet away. When I lived in the country I would take long walks out in the wood, each day coming back with new ideas and excitements, but more than anything with a renewed sense of being at home. It felt, quite intensely at points, that my home was out in the trees, not in this little box I was renting (however beautiful it also happened to be). I began to understand why sometimes those with diseases of the mind are found out in nature, resuming their more familiar duties as animals.
To really be in the woods is to face the immensity of nature. To realize that, unlike the anthroposcenic enormity of a city, the vastness of what is before you lies both in time and space. There is a gentle past, an inviting history to an area of old trees where the animals flit and flutter as they always have, inspiring you to maybe find it in yourself to try. And in that history it becomes much easier to feel at one with it, to recognize that you are not solely a floating eyeball digesting the world but instead a fully embodied being within it.
Now that the forest and I are separated, I return to the feeling of separateness that defined my time before. I stay inside more than I'd like, I spend time with a select few people, I virtualize my very existence in order to feel, like I did back then, like there's somewhere for me to be. And, while I am lucky to have found the people I hold close to me, there is still something deeply missing. I find it in old paintings.
There is an isolation from the cruelty of the world. There is a sense of being enveloped in existence, of being deeply safe in a familiarity that bridges the gap between the conscious and unconscious. The domestic is elevated here to divinity, there is no loneliness and longing in these spaces as there eventually was in my retreat to nature. This is a world unto itself, a terrarium within which my battered mind can recover it's hope and good spirit. Even though it isn't real, I have to believe that it can be somewhere, that there is some way I'll someday reach the peace that these images evoke.
I pull on the pacifier harder and harder to get me through the brutality of modernity. I fixate, I become compulsive and rigid in my ways, I fret and fret. There is a feeling of futility in just making it through. What if peace is nowhere to be found but in simulation? Is it enough to play Skyrim - to get my dose of feeling at home by putting paintings on the walls of this place devoid of any real history? Perhaps the answer is in the question - to build that home is to create that history, that love that animates the domestic into the divine. Less focus on searching and more on creating. Even when divorced from the spirit of the old world we cannot live without following it's form, without connecting ourselves to it through action and through belief, through hope and through love. Or, at least, I cannot.