When he was six years old, a woman with three fingers on a hand she used to hold a cigar to her mouth stopped on the sidewalk just short of his chalk drawings. She pulled the cigar out of her mouth to reveal a brown, pulpy, gnawed end and a lingering trail of smoke. She sucked her teeth and spit, grunted as she bent over and picked up a green chunk of chalk. Then she drew a triangle. “What is this?” She asked him.
“A triangle.” He said.
“Wrong, it’s chalk on pavement.” She laughed, then as she continued to walk past him she put one chalky finger on his forehead and paused for a moment saying, “So where does the triangle come from?”
As he grew older, he stayed connecting pencils to paper. Friends and family members craned their necks to see what strange fantasies he was cooking up. He found a difference between imagination and creativity. Imagination had limits, whereas with enough practice the creativity he was able to tap into was unbound. He could simply put pencil to paper and let extravagantly detailed scenes spill out. Some were familiar but with meditation on this creative influence, and enough practice, they became extravagant and incomprehensible.
His art quickly took over his life and he treated every spontaneous thought as sacred. His family found he had little notebooks stationed everywhere that life necessitated a break from work. The toilet, the kitchen table, his nightstand, all covered in scraps of paper with words and phrases that only meant something to him.
He believed that every idea was a gift, from somewhere or something, and by drawing he was honoring these gifts in some abstract way. He found that the more he drew, the more spontaneous ideas he had. He worshipped the idea of creativity, and through him creativity grew. As though he was a sort of conduit.
Through incessant drawing he perfected his craft by the age of sixteen. At eighteen he got a tattoo. It was a skeleton in a locked cage with a tree grown around it, on his right forearm. A reminder to produce rather than consume.
He chased the spark of spontaneous creativity to the end of his sanity. Soon his work began to exhibit strange cryptic patterns, popular at first but soon too occult seeming for the general public and even his benefactors in the art community. The more creativity he gained the more he was forced to retreat from polite society. Speaking to others became a chore, as it was obvious with every spittle-laced sentence a person made that they hadn’t the insight that he had gained. They didn’t understand what was out there, or what it took to commune.
It was almost physical, the surge of connectivity between his frontal lobe and the ether of his ideas. The longer he kept himself open to this cosmic creative influence, the stronger the urge to fall into a chaos that only he could see the order in. What he had perceived as the power of creative genesis clearly became more sinister. He wasn’t just opening himself to abstraction, he’d been learning to understand. To speak an unspoken language.
The same genius and beauty he managed in his earlier public works mirrored the sadism and horror of his private library. He refused to let anyone else see them. That’s what they wanted, an audience, a consciousness through which to propagate.
As he withdrew from society, he only drew for himself. His health deteriorated as he neared his 30th birthday. Towards the end, the lights of his house were permanently turned on, music played nonstop, and his recycling was full of liquor bottles. When he was seen, he was always speaking to himself. He recited episodes of television shows, stand-up comedy bits, and pop songs. It was as if he was lost in desperate distraction.
It was when the late night screaming sessions stopped that the neighbors called for a wellness check. They found his body propped against the wall opposite his desk. The tattoo of the cage, skeleton and tree had been carved out of his right arm and the fingers on his right hand, his drawing hand, were chewed to nubs. He passed away in a pool of his own blood, his bloodshot eyes wide open and staring up at the ceiling with horror. His last notebook lay open to a drawing of a non-descript triangle with “let it stay chalk” written inside.
Beneath the triangle he had written the date of his death, and a note. It read:
In our minds we harbor the things that we feel and the things we think. Creation is NOT a one way street. Please burn the black bound books. Do not let the idea of them spread. They need you to know of them, but I beg you not to.