Erassimagio

External voice: Ah yes, the search. The journey merely for itself, how trite. The inner search for meaning, and the importance of the search, is the journey itself because the search always ends up back at the start, here. Thus the search is only for the truly naive and insignificant minds, for they could have bypassed such a waste of time and spent their energies creating wealth within the material world, the ultimate reality. But no, the search must be made, for what, you ask? They're not sure, that's why they're searching, and then there's always some lackluster finale in which the epiphany provides the insight that life is here, in the world, and the angels sing in triumph when the discovery is made. But real humans merely shrug and continue about their business, already understanding that the real world is where the real things are.

Erassimagio

It is not very interesting to read your visual diary that symbolically illustrates the mental journey that you underwent through the darkness of insanity and the loss of reason. Because, nothing actually happened, and as a narrative for me it is simply boring, and a pursuit only fit for self-reflection. And because self-reflection is a waste of energy then the whole illustrative exercise is a waste of energy. Now all you find is that you are unprepared for the reality and clinical desperation of the business of the real world, and that you must learn new things. The empathy and sympathy that so idealistically clogged your neural pathways up until now has yielded a big fat zero of reward, and what is work without reward? Idiocy. The material world is not some Spinozan hypothesis, or some other metaphysical system that may be grasped. It is the experienced world, beyond even an empirical theory, beyond all descriptions to the final point of ultimation, you, here, now. So what are you going to do, go on a little metaphysical journey?

Through the doors

Artist: So I searched. I searched with the logic and multi-faceted reason that the emerald symbolizing my mind contained. Pros and cons, pros and cons. But there was also intuition, and the intuition needed no reason, it simply felt answers, a finer mesh, yet it couldn't be substantiated or described, or reasoned enough to be believable. Intuition could only be intuited. An attempt to describe it would state that it is simply an answer to those equations that are beyond the ability of consciousness to grasp sequentially, for the variables are too fine, yet there is still an outcome, an answer, to the complex human equations, and it can be felt, intuited.

Searching through the storm

Searching over the hills

So I began searching, searching, maybe for years, maybe a few minutes in total, the amount of time is unknown and irrelevant, needless to say that being lost in one's own mind is a confusing and at times terrifying experience. Watch the clock tick, tick, tick, tick, I don't want to go to sleep, that's where the end lies, I don't want it to end, I don't want to die, tick, tick, tick. There were darker areas, full of fear and paranoia, unhappiness prevailed in those places. And they are indeed places, there are many places that consciousness can be found in, and these places are not very different from person to person, and the reasons they are there.

And finally I decided to choose life. The searching had been redundant, all along it had only required a choice. And I made that choice in the deepest of darknesses, I chose love, and I immediately began to grow lighter and rise, though it was slow and painful. The ascent was interminable, with the broken parts that I had to fix on the way, mend them and keep going.

At last I was feeling less grim, and my gaze began clearing and looking upward, and then some happiness returned. And then all of a sudden were in front of me two enormous doors. And through the doors the light streamed, and I stood in that light.

At the doors

But the doors were very big and black, and they didn't seem to be working. So I scratched at them, and through them I could see the yellow light that I had painted behind the doors. So I kept scratching, and made patterns on the doors, and as I did so it occurred to me that I could use this technique to scratch through paint and create pictures by 'drawing' through the paint to another colour. (This is, in fact, called  "sgraffito" and has been around for an extremely long time.) And the picture that I wanted to create with this newly discovered technique was.... a forest! 

A golden forest!

The first golden forest

So it turned out that "through" the doors was a golden forest, and that was the light that streamed through the doors, which revealed itself by my desire to get through them.

After I had created the first golden forest, I thought that it would look amazing if it was real gold. 

This would initialize a six year journey to discover the material ways of achieving such a result...