Everything We Experience is a Figment of Our Imagination

Joe Halstead on dreaming dimensions, artistic anxiety, and what we see when we look at a blue horse.

Some time after I moved to Lexington, the Doctor sent me an email. I want you to write an essay, it read. An essay about a local artist whose work I respected. Lexington is a good-sized city of mostly young people, so I figured I could connect with one of them and write something. It would be a way of intellectualizing getting shitfaced at Al’s Bar. I started writing about bands that played in Lexington, but I had no idea how to write about musicians or artists or art, so I had complete writer’s block. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t feel anything or even understand it. To write successfully about something is to toe the line between bullshit and Buddha. It requires a certain degree of comfort with one’s own foolishness. So I wrote an essay that was derivative, trying to find figurative equivalents for the experience of listening to this music, piling on these literal descriptors — so much of what art criticism tends to be — “revolutionary,” “invigorating,” “cutting.” It was terribly confusing to read, and not very good. Anyway, I kept putting the Doctor off, telling him I was working on this essay, until finally I told him I couldn’t do it. I told him I didn’t know how to do it and, worse than that, I didn’t know what I was doing. The Doctor told me I was at my best when I wrote about the experience of having an experience. So, that’s what this is. It came about quite accidentally. Walking to the Starbucks downtown, watching the sun set behind the Big Blue Building, I always see this giant painting of a fuzzy blue horse standing by the sea. I stand there in a half-dream, staring at this blue horse, and think about how I may never create or see another vibrant, life-affirming work of art.

I’ve done many different things — selling appliances, working in a meat shop, writing scripts for internet ads, many different things. This and that, to find my way, I guess. I’ve found my way, but I’m still doing many different things. Most recently is working in Lexington for a company that does consulting and customer service for a multinational tech company, which is where I was when I was trying to find out about the blue horse. I entered into Google “blue horse painting Lexington.” A message appeared on-screen: Access to the requested site has been restricted due to its contents.

The company’s firewall had blocked the search.

I turned to my co-worker, a known heroin addict, and said, “Hey, do you know who painted that blue horse that’s standing by the ocean?”

She pointed at a can of nuts on my desk, meaning Give me a handful. I gave her the can. Then I walked out to the atrium, where I turned on my iPhone to search the web for the mural. I looked up through the glass ceiling, fogged up and yielding only hazy swathes of white and blue. When I looked back down, there was Winona, looking through her purse for her keys. She had long red hair and bright gray eyes and was dressed like a Lithuanian gypsy. She was vespertine, with a voice that punctuated sentences with a purple heart. She looked at me, so I walked over to her, but then she looked down at the floor to hide the fact that she didn’t want to talk to me.

That night, I went home. Molly was making her lunch for the next day. Sixteen baby carrots and three stalks of celery, each snapped in two. Sixteen and three. Not fifteen and four. Not seventeen and two. Calories counted and recounted. Everything had to be perfect. I washed the French press so it would be ready for her in the morning, then I poured myself a glass of wine and went upstairs to search Google for the artist behind the blue horse. I sat on the couch and stared at the blue horse images. By then I knew the name of the horse: Lexington. It looked like this:

The name Eric Henn popped up in the results, so I emailed him. Dear Mr. Henn, I wrote. I’d love to know more about what you do and how you painted the blue horse.

I closed the lid of my MacBook and then watched the old French movies alone. I’d seen them many times. Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory. Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Talking and loving, talking about the future, the future gone. Now this is real art, I thought. I wished I could write an essay about the French movies because everything about them was real. Everything was in black and white. Everything was in black and white even when it was in color.

I closed my eyes, and before I went to sleep all I saw was Molly counting the carrots and portioning them into little cubes. I could feel my patience chipping away into little splintery bits with them. I told her it was all wearing me down and I held her in the night to keep her warm and I held her in the night to keep me warm. Her cheekbones were so pronounced they cast blue shadows around her mouth.

The next day at work, I saw Winona in the atrium again. She wasn’t saying anything, just busying herself looking for her keys in her purse. I walked over to her.

“Don’t worry,” I said, leaning over the railing, “I’m sure they’re in there.”

She laughed nervously. “Yeah, I’m sure they’re in the very bottom.”

Eventually, she found the keys. There was a giant blue My Little Pony bauble attached to the keyring. Winona laughed and tapped it on the railing.

“Oh yeah, look what I just got,” she said.

I touched the Little Pony. “Creamy,” I said. I looked at the nub on its forehead, at its purple mermaid tail. “I like the colors. Is this a mermaid My Little Pony?”

“Not that I know of! They definitely should make a show about mermicorns, though!”

Staring at the mermicorn, I said, “It has great eyelashes.”

That night, she added me on Facebook and sent two messages.

— The sky is really clear tonight! So many stars!

— Is it clear where you are too?

I looked at the message bubbles on my iPhone and thought about how ill fated all friendships are in one way or another and I thought about the mermicorn keychain for a long moment, during which I tried to rationalize everything. Some people, when they go to the beach, spend their entire vacation in the lifeguard zone. A voice told me, Go outside the lifeguard zone — go into the deep, and you might just see a mermicorn.

I typed, It is.

Once upon a time, a woman kissed an untitled work by the American artist Cy Twombly and then went to prison for the rest of her life. There are a lot of people who are skilled artists, but they don’t have anything to say. There are people who come with wonderful imaginations, but they have pitiful output. And then there are people who are real artists without ever knowing it, and life itself is their canvas. In the presence of such thriving art, we often act on impulse.

I talked to Winona all night, about things like Doctor Who, Aleister Crowley, and how doppelgängers are the scariest thing in the world. When I saw her next, she asked me if I dreamed. I told her about a convoluted dream I’d had, one in which a nun was repeatedly going behind a sheer curtain, retrieving Polaroids that had images of the future on them. The Polaroids were photographs of an older me fishing with a little boy.

Winona was nodding, and tears were spilling down my face.

Later that night, we both watched the same scary Syfy TV show, one about a haunted house and a meaningless world of illusion. On the show, a man’s doppelgänger burns his twin in a bonfire. I opened the Messenger app and sent Winona a message:

— His fucking doppelgänger. I’m telling you, they’re so bad.

She wrote:

— Are you ever afraid you’re the empty one?

I looked at the words for a long time before I started typing, and it was painful, hearing those little keyboard clicks that sounded like someone breaking a child’s fingers.

I typed, I — am — the — empty — one.

And she typed, Same.

For weeks after that, I waited for Eric Henn’s email and I imagined a hard, disappointing conversation with the Doctor when the deadline came. Because I was nervous about everything, I was usually laughing with a brimming, manic form of anxiety. I bit my nails. I could barely sleep. I watched more of the old French movies by myself because it always seemed like the French know something about love that we don’t, or at least they make movies like they do. Like they know love is somewhere between laughing and choking, or laughing so hard until you’re choking. For months, I dreamed nothing but black space, but that night I had a dream of things I could remember later. Winona was crying. We were both wrapped in gray blankets, and I started kissing her, her mouth, her neck, my hands reaching down below her waist. I felt that familiar feeling in my gut. The promises, the love, the desire, the glory, the joy. But then it was interrupted by an unbearable nightmare — Winona was crying, and it was snowing, and she was crawling on her hands and knees, trying to move a pile of rocks with her mouth.

One night, I was driving to Half-Price Books in Hamburg. It occurred to me that my heart had been weakened by the existential tension between resenting and loving someone. How much we can resent the ones we love, the ones who love us. How much more we can resent them for that. I didn’t know how much was shame and how much was confusion, so I kept driving. I heard my phone ring and fumbled in my pocket to answer it. The name on the screen in all caps. I let it go to voicemail but I listened. I was wanted home.

The phone rang again and I answered.

I don’t want to describe the desperation. I said I didn’t believe it. It was my future I feared for when I let myself be afraid. I said I didn’t think our future together was as bright as it once was. I looked in the rearview mirror and I tried to see myself as someone unfamiliar as I hung up the phone and drove on to Half-Price Books. When I got there, I went inside and walked around. I found a book of poetry, “used,” called 12 Poems by Federico García Lorca. The cover looked like this:

Jean Delville believed there were three levels of beauty. There was Natural Beauty, which described the natural symmetry of objects occurring throughout the universe. Next, there was Physical Beauty, or Human Beauty, the level at which you are to make the most physically beautiful object that you’re capable of as an artist. Finally, there was Divine Beauty, which was the highest aspiration of art. It was the visionary, mystical experience that you can create in your divine imagination. The point is, imagination is the source of art. Art is the source of experience. Everything that we experience is a figment of our imagination. Everything you know and see is just a room of poorly angled mirrors, and you are just a figment in the imagination of a dream that doesn’t believe you exist.

A few days after that, an email arrived in response to the one I’d sent to Eric Henn: Sorry, Joe, but this one is not mine. Though it looks like the work of Edward Troye (see attached). Many thanks.

Dear fucking God, I thought. I clicked on the attachment. There was a painting of a horse that looked like this:

It wasn’t even standing by the sea, just by a field of “blue grass.” I turned to Google and searched for “Edward Troye.” It was a name I couldn’t have made up for this essay if I tried, but there it all was on the VisitLex homepage:

Renowned equine painter Edward Troye lived in the Bluegrass and painted all of the famous Thoroughbreds of his time, as well as other stock animals. Active before the age of photography, his extraordinary equine portraits serve as a record of the country’s early leading sires and mares. Accuracy was very important to Troye’s clients, and his attention to detail is evident throughout his work. He painted the great Lexington at least a dozen times.

They had just taken this really old horse painting and digitally altered it to make it blue. I dropped my hands and turned away from the MacBook. I’ll never fucking finish this.

More than before, I lost myself in Winona. I kept talking to her at work and one night she even invited me over to her apartment to look at some Tarot cards. She went into her bedroom to change her clothes and I had a look at the blurry pictures of her husband, Ned, on the wall: one of him wearing a black tuxedo, looking down into a cup. Or maybe it wasn’t her husband. It was a blurry picture, so I couldn’t really tell. I started thinking that we were all just suspended in Ned’s dream, a whim in his mind. I looked at his picture again and imagined he was a blue horse, wanting some evidence to show for all of this. When Winona emerged from the bedroom, she was wearing pajama pants, a thin tank top, and nothing else.

She poured me a coffee mug half full of vodka and then started looking for the Tarot cards in this old bookshelf while I debated whether a coffee mug half full of vodka can still be considered a coffee mug, but all she found was a sketchbook made of construction paper.

“I wanted to show you this,” she said.

The sketchbook was numbered with sticky-note tags on the flaps, and inside each flap was a drawing. She opened the sketchbook to a colored pencil sketch of a rose castle of hoary stone. In the bottom right corner were the words Fais de Beaux Reves.

“Fais de Beaux Reves,” she said, “means ‘sweet dreams’ in French and has always been my favorite phrase. Chateau de Beaux Reves means ‘castle of sweet dreams.’ ”

I smiled thinking of it, a dream within a dream. “That’s good. What else do you draw?”

“Oh, they’re not very good, but let’s see.” She flipped through the drawings until she came to an old carousel horse, a cornflower and spirited mare. The eyes were quasihuman. “I’ve always wanted a really old pastel chipped carousel horse, so I drew this. I thought that if I pretended my life with the drawing was real, if I just focused my energies on it, then I would get one for real.”

“That’s really good,” I said. Winona was looking into my eyes again. I looked back down at the carousel horse.

Half a century ago Roland Barthes wrote La mort de l’auteur, an essay more or less about removing the author from what they authored, about reading a text without considering the life of the author or the circumstances surrounding the text. I wonder if in the fifty years since La mort de l’auteur was written, if anyone has written La vie de l’auteur or at least C’est la vie de l’auteur, or if they started writing either or both but never finished.

I don’t know if I would want to start something to not finish, or finish something just because I started it.

To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it, wrote French artist Édouard Levé in his novel Autoportrait. Ten days after submitting the manuscript for Suicide, he hanged himself in his apartment in Paris.

The entirety of Works consists of over 500 projects he thought about and did not make.

Nothing is real. Not in life. Not in art divined from life. Not even a painting of a blue horse.

Joe Halstead is the author of West Virginia.