“The man who has lost the way of desire can hardly be straightforward, for it depends on the ambiguous desire of the other”.
- “Hamlet Without Hamlet”, DeGrazia
For this plate, I assumed drawing Zentangles are supposed to be relaxing, because of the word “zen”, but what I came up with is anything but. There is no focal point or harmony.
When I painted this, I was thinking about how I always wanted to be everything, because I didn’t know what I wanted to be, much less why it mattered. That’s why it’s called, “Divided States of the Mind”.
There was this scene from “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter”, where the protagonist, David, prayed, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want”. But then he goes on to say, “But I want!” And it’s that “but-I-want” moment--I would imagine--that it must have felt like. On top of that unmet desire was his shame for even wanting in the first place, because to do so would be to admit that he wasn’t complete and he was afraid, which completely flies in the face of how godly men were supposed to be. And just how does one reconcile that?
He never did say what he wanted. It was only revealed after he died of a heart attack the day he wrote his confession.
In trying to keep others from getting hurt, he had left them wanting.
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