[62] The myths that comfort me

Johnny doesn’t need a big world yet. In the studio, I fold two painted blankets in the circus trunk and wrap his fist around a piece of chalk to colour his face, and Mister Frog is bobbing where he can watch, and it’s enough for the little man. Truth, he only visits me this week when I’m working on his likeness. That’s difficult, because he has no past and no one can know what his dreams are like. People can’t dream when there’s nothing for a mind to jumble. (You must have to be saturated with your past to dream as much as Emma does.) I have to wait for him to sleep – it’s the only time he shows something I can draw. So I’ve placed his box under the windowlight, just there, and work on some background or something till he stops snickering and drooling and nods off.

All right – this drawing reminds me of Gus’s ceiling frescos, like the one the theatre powers refused to install a few years ago. That’s my problem with it – Paul’s gone back too far, to things that Gus was doing years ago. It’s too early for him to paint Johnny’s portrait, but with so much new life in our own life, he must need to try one baby this winter. But there isn’t enough inside Johnny yet, so the content, no matter what Paul can do, has to be about what’s going on around him. In other words, it’s an allegory. Most of Paul’s people just hover, but this time you can see what Johnny’s floating down through – everyone else’s dreams. The dreams Paul would tell me about if he ever remembered one. (He does dream, never mind what he says – I watch him sleep at night sometimes, so I know. I see how his eyes dart back and forth under his lids. Then he forgets them instantly, lucky guy.) I stare at the colours, the energy, the violence of the world around him, until I’ve figured it out, I think – Johnny’s sleeping in the centre of a distant star. That’s the new theory these days, that we were all born in the centre of the same exploding star. And that perfect circle just behind him is the universe he knows, and what’s outside the circle, that’s what he is not but what he’s travelling towards without knowing it, expanding as he goes. He still has time to live in his own nature, but you can see the world he’ll find, the one we’ll all find, when the star bursts and the circle breaks.