I suppose I cannot avoid writing this post anymore. This is the last one in this series but hopefully not the last one I will ever compose.
We are expected to write about this course of Songs & Places and what it means to us. Well, to be quite frank, this course means everything to me. It was a purging I never expected to have and a cleansing that was more than necessary, and it makes me terribly sad to see it come to an end. In a way this final post frightens me because I am afraid that with its final words, my journey of transformation will be over and I am not ready to for it to cease.
My journey began a few weeks before I joined the class. I was sitting in my architecture review jotting down notes from comments my professor gave when I suddenly became very aware of myself and my surroundings. I looked down to my sketchbook and saw words upon words, hardly a single sketch from any of the projects thus presented. In that instance I looked out the bay windows and saw the campanile and I reflected my place in this campus.
Here I was, supposedly learning line weights and about creating space, when there were students writing, learning, asking questions, discovering answers…existing. I did not feel like I was existing and in fact I actually felt quit the opposite. Fingers felt foreign, thoughts always questioned my worth, body just kept deteriorating. I was finding it so hard to simply be alive and this studio class was worsening the situation.
This was not what I expected coming to college. This was not the place I expected to be. I wanted to be reading and trying to solve problems and be surrounded by books, not computer screens of 3D modeling. I did not come to this place to throw my sleep, health, money, and sanity away just to learn line weights.
Nothing mattered to me anymore. I did not care whether or not I was skilled at the work I did, it made me feel less human than I already felt and one Wednesday morning in the early hour of 2 or 3am, after working unproductively for several hours to currently find myself hunched over making a site model, I dropped everything. Maybe it was because I reached my point of exhaustion, or more likely because the numbness that was steadily creeping suddenly took hold of my body and my fingers could no longer function, but it did not matter. I stopped working and stayed awake all morning waiting for the advising office to open at 10am to walk in and say that I refused to live in Hell and wanted my sleep, health, and sanity back (money was always a lost cause).
At that point I was hovering in nothingness. No ground felt like mine to walk on - I felt very much alone and extremely out place and out of mind.
But I still sent that email asking to be admitted into Visual Studies 185X, this course of Songs & Places. I guess my desperation was alarming enough to allow my admittance, but no one at the time, not even myself, would know how much of a savior this small act would be.
Thursday night: 6pm. My feet had apparently found their way to the classroom. Holding my artwork firmly in my hands, I waited nervously to go inside. Helen and her art were the first people I met. I say people because her work was as much of a living human creature as you and me. That was my first impression of the class and it was striking.
From sheer exhaustion I feel asleep in the class. The class was 4 hours long and I had not slept in who knows how long (I would later find out that it would take a semester the least to restore my body to its original state after two years of studio). During the moments my consciousness returned to me I awoke to people singing. Let me tell you that I was terrified. Who were these creatures, what were they doing? They all seemed so nice and friendly, but they were not the people I knew from studio. These were strangers and that night I abhorred everyone (me included). When the class ended I rushed out, ran back up to studio, and nearly cried.
"I had left architecture for this?!" My heart felt sick, thinking that I had made a terrible mistake; but it was all denial. I would not come to look forward to the class until a little while later, however.
I kept trying to make 3-dimenstional work and found myself hating it each time until I was told I had not produced my kind of work yet. My kind of work? Confused, I tried to understand the statement until I realized the reasoning behind it. To aid the decision to admit me into the course, I sent 4 different artworks done by me, none of which, by the way, were 3-dimenstional. They were color pencil drawings and paintings.
So I tried my hand again at something I thought I would never return to. It was the week of Leadbelly and I remember the joy of painting again. After that I never stopped painting and my feet found their place on the ground.
I went walking on this ground, started taking notes and writing down whatever came from my heart and mind. I started singing again. I would sing the songs to myself over and over again, falling in love with the feeling of my voice calming my soul. I fell in love with my hands that wanted to do justice to each song and artist it chose.
They were not always easy to paint and understand - some songs were puzzles within puzzles to figure out. Somewhere along the week of studying Woody Guthrie was when I began to really understand the correlation between songs and places. It was the places themselves that drew out the songs and the songs that verified and told the stories of those places. Throughout my life I traveled very little, but I visited more places in this class that before in the 20 years of my life. This is meant both figuratively and literally.
Traveling from the east coast westward in the songbooks, I traveled a great deal within myself as well. The songs taught me what it meant to be human, my fellow students taught me what it meant to be human, my artwork taught me what it meant to be human.
I am not sure if it is evident or not, but I struggle a tremendous deal with the notion of what it means to really be human. I try to calculate my existence and reason the purpose of my living in this world. As embarrassing as it is to admit this, I have to say that at times, I wish to be able to just be, to breathe without having to prove why I should.
It was one of Baylor's own songs that made me realize how very much alive I am but how constrained I have kept myself.
The title of my blog was originally the.black.lamb, a reflection of what I felt, what I thought was, what I only knew; but after his song, I asked myself "what reflects my very much alive existence?"
And the answer?
Seeping Ink
Just like the songs we sang, the places we visited, the stories we told, the tales we learned, I am always growing and expanding; ink seeping further and further into the chipboard that I have grown so fond of painting on.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight. The sun sets on this journey of ours, but it will rise again.
It always does.
With much love and thanks,
Arami Matevosyan
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