The Romantic (Issue #8)

What to do with your dreams

The Romantic

It gave me the play of adventure
In the woody creeks that wound through our neighborhood
My brothers and I could escape what were sometimes painfully boring Summer days
I was Indiana 
We built a rickshaw out of plastic pipes
I remember the longing for our play to be as real as possible.

Teenage me,
Instead of doing homework
Could sit at the piano and teach myself 
It gave me dreams about kissing my school crushes and fantasies about rising to fame
I neglected chores, responsibilities and my own health
Then too, I longed to be somewhere else

Prestige became my obsession
My relationship to making art grew past its honeymoon
In Latin, puer auternus means eternal boy.
I broke promises, so I could imagine myself never doing so
Defaulted loans, so I could live "tomorrow"

Reality held less and less that could compare to The Romantic's promises
Sometimes I found careless ecstasy
Other times only melancholy
But always longing
Forever almost 

There were periods of brief recovery
Sixty hour workweeks
Extensively rigid routines
The psychotic most heavily relies on reason
Resigned from dreams of any kind
Hoping only to stabilize
To get control
And to please
To show everyone I could play by the rules

I only thought I had banished fantasy
Instead I'd seen the truth
Get life over with
Because that's the ultimate goal for The Romantic
Death is the only end to the longing

Today I better understand
To balance is to banish neither
Both are necessary
Experiences that offer glimpses of the infinite
Dreams and prayer
Solitude

I still escape from the world everyday
But with new intentions
Bringing back gifts
Time in darkness alone is incomplete
Turns one cynical, disillusioned, and hopeless
Ellison's underground Man
But bring something back
Into the light
With respect for the ritual of the mundane
And honor for practice 
So it can take shape
And be shared
Its better to weep from the overfullness
Than to long from discontent

Welcome back to Imagination Illustrated! Here, you'll find graphic memoir, poetry and prose. The images (above) chronicle my practice with active imagination. Think of each art panel as a collage. Manipulated photographs depict imagined scenes. Then they get outlined. Finally, I fill them in with a technique similar to grisaille. The images above are the finished product.

None of the imagery from Issue 7 - The Hostage was taken from active imagination.

Instead it was inspired by Linda Leonard's book, Witness to the Fire.

Making it, I explored my experiences as a hostage

To addiction,

During an actual home invasion,

and as a willing hostage to the creative process.

Thank you to those who messaged with your opinions!

Issue 8 is a response to "The Romantic", the archetype Leonard describes in Chapter Four.

Thanks again!

Damon Bailey