Chapter 5.4 - The Feelings of Trees

Our muddled mess of emotions is there to remind us that we are not singular beings, we are collections of selves, as different from each other as we are from other people. The job of these impartial judges who dwell right below the surface of our consciousness is to arbitrate the arguments between our different selves and alert us to our internal conflicts. They establish hierarchies among the selves and decide which you is allowed to come out to play at any given time. Claire’s emotions were delighted that she’d given them a canvas to express themselves, so to speak, and collectively decided that none of her selves was allowed to come out except for Artist Claire, a sub-personality which had lain dormant for ages and was quite maladjusted to the real world. Artist Claire made misfit Claire look even weirder. 

Sometimes she’d stop and look at a flower for minutes on end, trying to see inside it, looking for something in there that she never seemed to find, an activity which looked odd from the perspective of an uninvolved observer, to put it mildly. When she got tired to stand and look at it she sat herself down cross legged on the ground and waited patiently for the flower to open up to her and share its spirit. It looked surreal, this silent dialog in which the plant responded in its own time, a much slower time than a human’s; the need to adjust to the speed of this interaction turned Claire into a frozen statue, bereft of thought.

Her grandparents enabled these increasing oddities of behavior with indulgent love and witnessed, amazed, how the flower finally responded to Claire’s calling and fell gently in her lap, asking to be acknowledged like an affectionate pet. They didn’t question the way Claire smiled at it and held it gently, to let it know she was fully committed to this emotional bond they shared.

No one could understand this relationship she had with the plant world, but it showed vividly in her art and elicited the kind of feelings people usually don’t have names for, because they are too strange to talk about. She even painted some which were not recognizable at all, because they didn’t come from humans. She painted the feelings of trees.

Since Claire had rediscovered her passion for art every corner of the house was filled with pigments, brushes and jars of linseed oil, all primed to be spilled or scattered by a distracted family member whenever an opportunity presented itself. 

“You’ve built up quite a collection,” Grandmother commented, careful not to snag one of the jars of dry pigment with her apron. The jars were bunched together with the lids off on a rickety table which Claire had found in the attic and which looked like it was ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. “What are you going to do with them?”

Claire turned her head and looked at her grandmother like this thought had never dawned to her.

“Are you going to look for a gallery?”

Artist Claire stopped suddenly in the middle of a brush stroke and turned her entire body to face her grandmother, brush held high like an extension of her hand.

“I don’t know, I never thought about it.”

“Surely you of all people must know where all the good places are, you’ve been working in this field for what, six, seven years?”

“I surely worked in it long enough to watch all the bridges to those places burn down,” Claire thought, then continued out loud. “Those places are too far away. Maybe somewhere closer, if I’m going to do it.”

“Closer to where, here?” Grandmother protested. “We’re a thousand miles from nowhere in every direction!”

“How about finding a place in town,” Claire suggested.

“Who is going to visit your gallery in town?”

“I don’t know, people?” Artist Claire replied with the mature conviction of her fifteen year old self. 

“I simply don’t know what to say, bebelle, other that you seem to be drawn to squander every chance life gives you. Why are you making art nobody will ever see?”

“Because I can’t help it,” Claire thought, a thought that seemed to emerge from a much deeper layer of her mind, a thought she wasn’t entirely sure was hers at all. She stood still for a second, to contemplate for whom all this art was really intended. 

The air felt heavier and a cloud passed over the sun; everything turned dark and then bright again, like a giant sky blink. If she closed her eyes Claire could tell there were a lot more people in the room than the two of them. “Why bother taking the paintings to the gallery, it looks like the gallery is all assembled here.”

“Claire!” Grandmother snapped.

“Yes, maman. I’ll start looking for a gallery.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, Baton Rouge?”

“What’s wrong with New Orleans?”

“And here I thought we were a thousand miles from nowhere,” Claire mouthed off silently.

“When?”

“As soon as I’m done painting.”

“You’re never going to be done painting, I’ve known you since you were born, you always put things off. When?”

“I don’t know, next week?”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Grandmother commented, unconvinced, and left to tend to her chores.

Claire returned to her painting, vaguely irritated that the color on her paintbrush looked slightly off and wondering what was the point of making plans for next week in light of her recent mirror enabled flight into the month before.