Diary of a Madman, XI: Momentary Relapse

There are particular moments when I engage in art, media, or literature in a highly palpable way. My mind, for whatever reason, is sensitive in those moments; its surface layer trembling, fresh, and throbbing to interpret vastly intricate concepts, like layers of smoothly shaped wood on elaborate frontispiece bas relief. In these moments, my mind floods into different aesthetic constructions, filling in each intended curve, cut, word, sound, space, punctuation, or expression. They inflate with life and exist in a highly symbolic separate entity, a distinct existence corrugated with scent and hot breath, a confluence of fictional genius and strict reality.

During these experiences, the emptiness of words becomes apparent and the futility of explanation becomes distinctly obvious. In those moments, there is a non-participatory relationship between the work and the mind, the latter becomes passive, recessive – dominated.

When the experience ends, the mind settles down into a dormancy resembling spiders hanging from cobwebs. The memory of the experience siphons out into the subterranean subconscious with the bittersweet aftertaste of waking up from the most transcendental dream. In my duller state, I grip but do not feel, I speak but do not communicate, and think with a transience that verges on the existential.