Kosmic Egg Projects: The Murky Unconscious Fish

Kosmic Egg Projects: The Murky Unconscious Fish: Walk, Oil Pastels on Archival Paper, 2013 (c) A.M. Johnson Lucille and I had a nice walk this morning through suburban nothingness. Sh...

The Murky Unconscious Fish

Walk, Oil Pastels on Archival Paper,
2013 (c) A.M. Johnson

Lucille and I had a nice walk this morning through suburban nothingness. She’s been curious about things that I’ve denied her, so we did some of them today. We walked around the mall, behind gas stations and by Walmart’s endless parking lot. I thought about how much effort all of the wasteland entailed, and made peace with the list of 20 things to do today as a delusion that all of this is a necessity. Getting by is just that, and still I’m searching for the right choice. I am overwhelmed by my options.

***

I wish I’d discover something in my dreams to clue me in but five hours of sleep is not leading me to anything but derivative dreams about the TV shows I watch with my husband in an attempt to “veg”. Last night I found the Emmy-winning show entirely unbelievable and annoyingly full of delusional characters making stupid choices. I have found lately that this bothers me with most dramas. I want to stand up and shout, “Just stop it! Stop for a moment and look fucking around, you idiot!”  I suppose that means that I feel delusional, and that stupid choices abound.

On our usual walks, birds and water are regularly on the way for Lucille and me. I watch them like I would watch a dream, and maybe this is my mind’s way of making up for the fact that I can’t sleep as well. When I see a hawk fly above me I am lost in thought about how to get perspective on my situation. I fly out, like a hawk, over the lake of unconscious goo, and I don’t see much to make me happy. It is a mess down there, dark and foreboding.

How could it get any darker than what I already know?? What have I contained and hidden there that so stirs the waters of me? I feel nauseated and, if I am a hawk, then merely getting across the air above, the thinking-about-it part, is such an ordeal that I want to hurry to the other side even though I know resting on a branch will not assist me except to give me a moment to catch my breath before I fly over my unconscious again in my search.

Break Through, Digitally Painted,
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/5-amanda-johnson.html

Transform me, now, into a loon, yes, an odd bird, aptly named. I will race up as high as I can into these thoughts, to the pinnacle of self-discipline and control, knowing all the while a breeze of circumstance could throw me off my game in a second. I will fly over this disturbing cauldron because I know therein lies my nourishment. When I reach the top, and pause for a moment feeling my hunger fully, I will let it guide me like a missile into the pot, towards the little fleck of something that I saw in the moment I turned to dive. I hope that it is a fish, a message from the deep, that feeds this desperation to understand the illusion I live by.

Plunging into the unconscious mind, it is deceptively warm on the surface, but I am not fooled by reflective light, and feel how icy and even more murky the immersion becomes. I cannot open my eyes to see my answer as it is too tenebrous. The only way to feed is following some sense beyond the obvious five. Deeper and deeper I am propelled and compelled to keep going by near starvation. There is no bottom and the meal of awareness that I am looking for seems to have betrayed me.

My choices fall away, as feathers from my wings. If I do not catch the thing, I don’t know if I have the stamina to do this dive again. I feel how ravenous I am to know what I know. I cannot go back to not knowing and expect to survive out there. I am running out of breath down here to the point where I don’t remember how this all started. I only know that I can feel I may be getting closer than I have ever been before...