Spying for future generations

I have this little box that contains a small book and some cards.  These items collectively are called The Observation Deck, which is basically a set of writing exercises for stumped writers.  My son Jarvis and I yesterday were eating lunch and he noticed it on the shelf.  He asked me what it was.  I explained it to him and then he asked me why I had it.  I told him that a friend had given it to me a few years ago because I'd been talking about wanting to write a book but had been having trouble and so of course Jarvis then asked me what the book I wanted to write was going to be about.

I had to consider the question for a moment because I'd quite honestly forgotten ( I never did write that book), but when it came back to me I smiled, struck by the moment.  The book I'd wanted to write, I told him, was a story about my life, addressed to him, to help him understand how I became the person I am and to give him a sense of where he comes from.  Then I told him that I decided not to write the book because I realized that there are a lot of stories from my life that he might not want to know, but that anything he ever does want to know I'll gladly tell him if he asks.  He gave me that little nod he gives when he's filing something away for future reference and went back to his lunch.

I've been thinking about that exchange since yesterday.  I'm leaving tidbits of my life strewn all over the internet and I've sporadically written in journals and diaries and sketchbooks throughout most of my life.  If he ever gets really curious about my past there'll be a wealth of material for him to pore over, but the deepest darkest moments in which I've found my greatest weaknesses and from which I've learnt my hardest lessons are times that I'll likely never discuss in places people might see.  

This all ties in with another line of thinking that I've been coming back to over and over again for the past week or so, so please forgive the seemingly incongruous jump.

A love letter

One if my greatest obsessions as a kid was cryptography.  I loved breaking codes. I got a couple of books for kids with code-breaking puzzles and strategies. I started eventually to write messages in simple substitution codes and hide them among my things to be found months later.  By then I'd have forgotten the key I'd chosen and hopefully the message itself as well, so I could make a game out of decoding it.  I started getting into more and more complex ciphers and focusing on memorizing certain ones.  Later still (by 7th grade or so), I had developed a new, entirely memorizable cipher that by any means I'd learned up to that point (which, let's be honest, couldn't have been much), was unbreakable if you were missing certain key points about its construction that I still have yet to see elsewhere.  I like to think it's because of all those years playing with these sorts of puzzles that I'm so hard to beat at Mastermind.

The symbols have changed  slightly over time, but I still use this cipher to waste time and entertain myself to this very day, and I still leave little notes for myself to find later on. 

When I was in high school, if I were sitting in a study hall and unable to think of anything except how very much in love I was with whomever I was in love with that month, I could sometimes do nothing but fill pages of notebooks with line after line on the subject.  Imagining the horror of my classmates peeking over my shoulder and seeing what I wrote I would do it in code.   I could (and still can) write in code as fast as I could in English (although I'll admit it takes much longer to read), so it probably didn't look all that suspicious. 

I've been realizing lately that this proclivity has over time exhibited itself in other ways.  My natural state is to wear my heart on my sleeve.  I can't seem to help it a lot of the time, and this has many times in my life created miserable situations for me.  I've learned to disguise many aspects of myself for safety.  I always look at my clothes as costumery.  On an average day, I usually dress all in black, ideally with sunglasses and a hat.  This is something I sort of consider to be my armor against the world.  Dark, mysterious and unapproachable, the chances of human interaction greatly diminished, I feel capable of dealing with the world.  There was a time when I couldn't do an art show or even go to a bar unless I was in full Halloween-type makeup, complete with stilts and coloured contact lenses.  I needed to disguise myself as thoroughly as possible to even think about being able to speak with another person about something as personal to me as my art. Even now, I find I need to have a pair of headphone jammed securely in my ear canals to comfortably ride the T.

When Jarvis' mother and I first started living together, I stopped painting.  At the time, most of what I painted was dark and involved monsters and violence.  This was for me a way to identify and exorcise personal demons, but we had this big fight once because she felt that this indicated that I was unhappy with our relationship.  I couldn't paint after that.  Any time that I tried to, I was stuck, because all I wanted to do was black out a canvas and paint a contorted, skeletal demon with a giant penis stuck in a box, but knew if I did I'd have to bear the wrath of Jenn.  So I stopped.

I didn't start painting again until I found a way to disguise my intent and the emotions involved.  I started throwing paint.  It was a very kinetic and violent process. I would come home from the studio exhausted but fulfilled and when I'd bring a piece home to hang on the wall that had born in a fit of primal rage, she'd look at it and say how beautiful it was and smile.  And this was even as our life together was crumbling. 

These paintings are a code for me.  For as long as I've been painting them I've been leaving little notes for myself to find and decrypt later on. I'm often left wondering lately if much like the cipher I created in middle school, I'm the only one who can decipher them, but at this point, they may be the best way I have to communicate how I am and how I see the world and why. That book I never wrote?  Perhaps I'm painting it, Jarvis.  And just as I'll teach you to kick your classmates' asses at Mastermind, I can teach you how to read and write my codes, if you ever decide you want to, and maybe then you'll have the tools you need to understand my past and yours. Of course, maybe this blog is the book, and the paintings are simply illustrations. Despite my best efforts, after all, I do seem always to wear my heart on my sleeve.  Those girls I wrote about in study hall?  They probably knew.