Found Love
I only have a secondary school education, so I hope you can forgive my poor delivery of text. I grew up during the 1970’s in Lancashire, a pacifist and Christian education from my parents with the view that I should choose a Religious conviction when I reached adulthood. My mother is a lapsed Roman Catholic, my father an Atheist. An emotional child with a very active imagination, good at Math but poor language skills (I suspect Dyslexia), coupled with a mild hearing problem, presented as inattention or daydreaming. I would watch as much Science Fiction as I could with the emotional outlet focusing on classical ballet, eventually leading to nearly seven years training at The Royal Ballet School, where I attended church every Sunday and a member of the school choir. However, confusion surrounding my sexuality during the paranoia of the nineteen eighties arrested my social sexual development and instinctively spent my pubescent years in a spiral of depression as my contemporaries expressed an opposing spiral of ostracism. Mocked for my naivety and gullibility, which increased within the desperation of loneliness, I found underground gay culture gave a sexual relief, along with the masculinity of “the hunt”, without the complexity and sophistication needed for heterosexual relationships, and used arrogance to hide an increasing fear of the opposite sex. Five months before graduating into a career, as my sexual addiction began to exhibit the psychological problems that accompany truancy, my parents were told that I was to leave the school, and after six weeks in London, was brought back to the family home. I met a plumber, who was enrolling in Theological College the following September, and as our fondness for one another soon became apparent, I neglected to pursue any potential career openings in favour of menial shift work in a factory as a ”Seamer”, the highlights being more money than I had ever had and managements encouragement to listen to music on headphones as I worked. Within weeks I started attending a local nightclub which played my taste in underground dance music and found music to be an additional source for “the hunt”, the content of which I absorbed underneath an increasing arrogant cynicism, eventually using illegal drugs to manage the contradiction of my experience with the plumber and the confusion I held for masculinity and maturity. After three years of minor and deluded recreational drug use, greater arrogance, social ostracism, and secrecy, I suddenly realised the self destruction my instincts had caused, the depth of my apathetic belligerence, and the shocking realisation that my emotional connection with music had developed into the musicality of language. My professional identity had become a “Seamer” with the words “Seams” and “Seems” melting my existence into the revelation of my own mortality, the depth of transparency on which a mask of maturity had been built on assumptions, and a profound sense of genealogical grief. Masculinity was suddenly irrelevant as the contributions of individuals to culture revealed that maturity is the sophisticated use of knowledge and that wisdom is the application of moral judgement.
An Idiot
That moment when your emotional investments become the vomit of abuse, the last drop of concern has been sucked from your soul, and you know you’re living “The Thug Life”
Agostino Arrivabene
c o r n u p a r v u l u m
(antichrist)
oil on linen canvas
cm 90 x 80
aggressive, disturbing, engaging
