(Part V):
Until the first time he picked
up a pencil, which saved him, and after failing out of secondary school, even a
miraculous honorable discharge from the Armée
de terre; Gabriel didn’t draw, paint, or visualize art at all. Instead, he
suffered for 5 months under fumbling, misguided, veteran’s socialized medicine;
mostly sleeping, in a bewildered confusion brought on by prescription drugs—numbing
his senses and drowning him in a haze of disorder worse than the fog of war.
Gabriel almost didn’t make it
out of the fog, but he made it to Paris.
I’ve labeled this chapter in
his life the Paris Pivot, because it turned Gabriel’s life around.
Concentrating on art as behavioral therapy rivaled whatever stimulant drugs (Ritalin), or psychedelic, organic tea had done for him so far. The tiniest details of his penciled drawings allowed
him a portal to an awareness only achieved while meditating; but I experienced
also the delicate social interplay between us focusing him intently, enlivening
and stimulating him. Loosely called “flirting” in America, but very pedestrian
in France, I didn’t know at the time whether a well-groomed American girl with
a guitar could pull him out of his shell, but we recognized in each other an
attractive detour from our pre-planned escape routes.
I represented for him a normal
experience he could not have hoped to achieve while medicated. His depressive
dullness kept him out of the cafés, and he was not self-confident enough to
approach me at the time; even though his devilish grin and colossal frame, on
the surface alone, made him radically gorgeous to me. I was falling backwards,
spinning around, light-headed, over the moon, whatever you want to call it.
Out of the chaos of a mixed-up
mind, he began to see eternal patterns. He drew the same self-similarity, or
scaling, that is common among the seed patterns of flowers or trees. Even
though Gabriel often seemed like a bumbling professor, or starving artist; his
mind naturally pictured this famous ratio, with a long and honored history in
mathematics, from Euclid and Aristotle to modern computer calculations. His
black & white pencil drawings reflect the simple but divine “proportion” of
Leonardo da Vinci, considered the
most beautiful and important of mathematical standards.
Gabriel even sought the medicinal effects of mind-altering tea that has been brewed for centuries in the Amazon River basin. He found an underground tea-shop on the Left Bank, conducting ceremonial "tea-party" healing sessions where an Ayahuasca "potion" was served for many searching, tortured souls. Made from a blend of two plants, containing the hallucinogen "DMT" -- the psychoactive compound of organic elements provided a powerful, transformative, upending, "high," good for the ameliorating affects on numerous psychological conditions. Unfortunately, his brain activity changed little under the influence of ayahuasca, and the tea ceremony was anticlimactic. Gabriel's treatment-resistant depression was best fought by pursuing art.
He studied the nature of these
forms and their relationship to each other (ratio), giving Gabriel a greater
insight into the scientific, philosophical, psychological, aesthetic, and
mystical laws of the universe. Natural inquisitiveness instructed him more than
formal schooling; in fact, these symmetrical images opened his life onto a new
path, resurrecting his future. During hours of meticulous sketching, grappling
with all he had lost, fighting against the misunderstanding that dominated his existence
before now; Gabriel used science to cure himself of dysfunctional mystery,
reinventing and reinvigorating his soul. Detailed drawing was a small, simple way for him to express truth, and as deep as were his wounds, so deep too
was the healing.
Failing to bring up the
utility of studying law, nor my dusty, unstable ambitions of helping incubate
struggling African democracies, we rarely discussed the chances that Gabriel
could make a living painting, any more than to contemplate the average signing
bonus for a beginning US “junior-lawyer”. His confidence, now rooted in his journey
in the arts, also buoyed an exceptional faith in the rightness of his journey. Realistically,
because I did not completely sell-out to my artistic abilities, instead falling
back on my training as a lawyer; I was playing it safe while in Paris. But
Gabriel didn’t have any other options, and I’ll admit to you here, that the
question of whether his talent could carry him into his future, produced an
unspoken tension between us. ##
Fiction 2018©Mark H. Pillsbury
