the timboucher experience

As far as I can tell, Picasso’s 1901 painting, Harlequin and his companion, depicts people I have met, lived with and tried my best to love. A man in white face paint and checkered garb sits physically close to but psychologically distant from his female companion – maybe the only person in the world who could ever understand him, or at least put up with him and put him to sleep when he crashes, drunk again on the living room couch. She sits with sullen eyes, her head resting forlornly on her hands. I suspect these archetypal figures either recur throughout history or else exist somehow as shadows cast outside of time. Under the slanted moon of California’s Lost Coast, I found myself an outcast among outcasts. Clowns, I discovered, are some of the saddest people you’ll ever meet – so sad they must paint smiles on their faces and stand up in front of crowds to announce how happy and carefree they are. People who ostensibly dedicate themselves to Joy, but who fall into the false ecstasy of near constant intoxication. And yet people who I somehow admire and sympathize with in my bohemian heart of hearts.

Where others have fallen down in their lives, what hardships lead them to the choices they made or didn’t make, one can never know. A friend of mine has a theory though, that all people in this life are allotted – on some mystic, unprovable level – the same amount of suffering in this life. But that we choose to use it differentl, this common inheritance. Maybe this is our only true Original Sin (if there must be any at all): simply, that we have a natural capacity for suffering and that we must find something to do with it.

Most people, I think, suffer for no particular reason, with no specific purpose. Their suffering lies like a diffuse haze across the oblivion of an everyday existence devoid of any sense of Quality. They find small passing pleasures in their habits, rituals and addictions and maybe nothing else. But the artist hangs himself daily and publicly upon the cross of Beauty. The creative person suffers for his Art, submits his passions to the crucible and the yoke, struggling for the Great Work of alchemy. The Old Masters formed guilds dedicated to the protection of their craft and the perfection of technical and aesthetic forms. The alchemists experimented in secret, seeking to change the subtle essence of forms, objects themselves, and in so doing turn their leaden hearts into that Philosopher’s Stone which could transfigure any substance into wealth unimaginable. The Magnum Opus, the Great Work.

• Alchemical Kubrick
• The Chronicles of Working from Home, Volume IV
• “Let’s do this like Buddhists”
• Hwah!
• Another time I held a sign