Getting Better

Brian Westerlind

I am sorry for being sick. He tells me I should practice being sorry, and I do. Remorse, he says, is the very first step. Since I began practicing remorse, I think my cough has lessened some.

My room is small and comfortable. There is a bed and a window and a beautiful painting of bright red geraniums. There are other rooms, though I know nothing of their occupants or interiors. Sometimes I hear sounds through the walls, the gentle healing of others. I know, I have a very long path ahead.

He visits me each day dressed in a smock. He often wears goggles when he must perform The Work. He is gentle with the Transfer Apparatus, and for this I am grateful. He points at the wall and asks me to talk about the painting. Apparently someone very important painted it, but the version in my room is just a reproduction. I tell him that the flowers sway; they’ve been roused by the flap of a low-flying bird. He frowns, tells me this is an impossible thing to see. If I am getting better, there are certain things I should see and certain things I should not. He tells me to spend plenty of time looking out the window. He leaves the faucet on.

•

Phoebe Intuitive began a quiet revolution behind my room is small and comfortable. A docent at the National Museum, she’d practice sorrow before jumping from frame to frame (someone very important painted it). Phoebe, the passer-through-paintings same color almost entirely camouflaged behind an old method of meditation: a psychic circling turns somatic turns entrance. Her movements caught the eye of a curvature, a third plane, the great Phoebe flying or sprouting red flowers or assuming the depths of a crater-turned-lake. The oil, the gesso, the visitors dressed in smocks to revise a version of my room is just a reproduction on fire. Revisions of playgrounds, flower beds, gift boxes, automobiles and aquariums. Phoebe means sketch the same color a curvature, a third plane, a faithful copy of red carnation not-so-quiet.

•

Mutate. Mutates. Mutation, the process-impression of wings the opposite curve of a gossamer. So easy petals and flames and melt through craters, not quite curvature, the oil and gesso begin to buckle and warp. I am getting better at things I should not.

Phoenix the Passer Through. Phoenix carnation and smolder precise the ashes of a museum in Cleveland see repertoire of dirty smocks and frail devices scattered a smoking landscape of soot the evening.

Bright red geraniums. Low-flying bird. An old method. Faithful copy very important long path ahead evening. Ahead evening. Ahead evening.

So glide, Phoenix, too bright too fast for all that, and a near-miss proposition of null. Sub minus null. Null of coordinates not breach see every room of every citizen from above the scatter sprout crimson petals too bright too fast for all that.

Getting Better, prose

Interview by C. VanWinkle
February 17, 2024

Can you describe for me the prompt that you responded to?

It was a painting of what I thought were probably red carnations against a purple background. And it's a multimedia piece, so attached to it and coming out of it is this 3D image of a bird, a phoenix, an angel, or something. When you sent it to me, it was in the evening and I had used most of my brain power for the day, and I was looking at it on my phone, so I didn't actually see the bird part. I thought, “Oh that’s interesting, maybe they put some clay stuff in the background to emphasize some of the flowers” or whatever. It didn’t really click until the next morning when it was on the big screen. I was fixated, wondering what kind of flowers they were, and then all of a sudden it just hit me. “Oh my God, this is another image in here.” That was a really fun, exciting moment.

And then I could see perspective and recognize the wing coming off the canvas. I guess that’s also an interesting comment in terms of Bait/Switch. We're living in the digital world, so we're not seeing the actual thing. We don't have it in front of us.

That's a great observation! Experiencing this virtually is so different from how it would be in person. So what did you think of it? What did it mean to you?

The emotional part of it definitely came through this image. Is it a phoenix? Is it a bird? I saw it more as an image of a phoenix. There are some little flames… Another thing that interests me about it, and you can see it in my piece, are these different morphing or mutating elements. How can a red petal also be a flame also be a feather? These images can contort and move in and out of each other. I use the word ‘mutate’ with a very positive connotation. We might think of it as cancerous, as something that's going on the wrong path, right? I see the idea of mutation as something more hopeful and creating something new. This definitely gave me that classic story of being reborn from the flames and rising again.

There's something about the face of the bird that somehow strikes me as human. That’s what brought angels to mind. I guess those are the structural things that I got from it.

In terms of associations, my mind immediately went to two other pieces. One is the short story called “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The other is probably lesser-known; it's this French short story by Marcel Aymé called “The Passer-Through-Walls.” It’s about this guy who finds out that he suddenly has the ability to walk through walls. He uses it to do some sneaky things and it catches up with him. He gets some medicine from his doctor to stop it, and when he takes it accidentally, he gets stuck midway through a wall. There’s actually a statue in Paris in Montmartre of this guy coming out of one of the walls, which is cool. So those are some of the different associations I got from it. I think the tone of my story definitely went more toward “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

I hadn’t thought of that on my own, but now that you mention it, I see it!

Yeah, it's a kind of mutating, strange image that’s coming out. And maybe also my experience of not seeing it and then seeing it.

So how did you actually get started writing your own piece?

I knew I wanted to do a fairly short, experimental piece that was composed of vignettes, and I really just started writing down little stories. One is the story that made it in as the first part, with this “patient,” if you will. And there was another story with Phoebe. There was more to that story (that didn’t make it to the final piece) about the world that she was living in, and why she's hopping through paintings and creating a sort of revolution by it. I wrote a lot before I decided how to piece it all together.

In the first section, the narrative is pretty clear and straight. Then we mutate into something different in the second section; there’s sort of a story there, but it's a little more diffuse. And then I wanted the third part to be more organic, thematic, and sprawling, if you will. I wanted to pull in elements from the other two sections as well as some new material.

It’s really cool. I don't know how to write in different voices like that. Is that something that you often do with your work?

I do lean toward this sort of abstract morphing of different unique elements to create something new. I'm really inspired by William S. Burroughs. He's technically part of the Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac and so on, but I don't think he would call himself that. He was very interested in language and experiments, and he started doing these things that he called “cut-ups.” This was in the early ‘60s, so there were no computers. He would take maybe his text and someone else's text, and literally cut them up with scissors and re-piece them into something else. Later, he streamlined this with the folding method, where he would take two pages, fold them in two, and then put them together and read it as if it was one page. The idea is that it creates something new, and that’s sort of like your first draft, and you edit from there.

That’s wild!

I did some cut-ups as part of this project. Most of that material ended up, as you can probably tell, in the second and third sections. That’s how a lot of those different voices or different elements come together.

I see! That’s fascinating.

I find repetition pretty powerful, so I repeat certain things throughout the piece, but then shift those in certain ways as we move through.

I didn't really pick that up on my first read-through, but then I read it again and connections started clicking. I like things that reward me for looking closer.

Like the painting I responded to, right? There was that aha moment.

You are also a visual artist, aren’t you?

Yeah, but I would definitely say writing is my main thing. With visual art, my big thing is collage, which is also taking disparate elements and making them into something new. I’m doing it less now, only every so often. Actually I did look at some collage stuff as an inspiration for this. I cut up some magazines and put some images together. For me, collaging is a retreat from writing. Obviously, as a writer you can get very self-critical and judgmental about what sounds good or doesn't sound good. But doing collage uses a different part of my brain, intuitively putting things together. It’s fun. I actually put together an Instagram for it a few years back. I feel like, especially in the digital art world, visual art is generally more accessible opposed to the written word today.

We do find a lot of contributors via Instagram, which of course means we lean heavily toward visual art. I feel like it’s lucky when I find a writer, particularly one like you who gets so into it. You really rose to this challenge.

I’m definitely aligned with the spirit of what you’re doing. It’s a cool thing.

Yeah, if you like collage and these Dadaesque ways of putting things together, that's very in tune with what we do. How did you feel about working from a prompt? Is that something you do much?

No. Actually, I usually get annoyed when I have to do practice exercises like that in a group or a class. “Let's all work on this prompt!” However, in terms of writing more experimental stuff, I do think it's nice to have some sort of grounding element, so you don't get completely lost in the thing. You know what I mean? It was nice to have an element to ground me.

When I think of prompts, I usually think of getting a written prompt. You know, like “Write something that has this kind of character, and they're smoking cigarettes in a museum” or whatever. I don't think I've ever used a visual prompt, so pulling out that language element directly was kind of cool.

Nice. That interdisciplinary element is something that we really value in this project. Now that you are on this side of this process, what is your advice to a newbie getting their prompt today?

I’d say to start as quickly as you can. Investigate every idea that you have, don't immediately commit to something. Just play and get your ideas out there first. Depending on what your medium is, maybe use your first week just to do that. Don’t put pressure on yourself to already know what you’re going to do. Eventually, after you get flowing, you’ll see the direction where you want to take it, and that’s where you’ll go.

Call Number: C112VA | G114PP.weGe

Brian Westerlind lives and creates in Western Massachusetts. In addition to writing, he also practices collage and perfumery. Reach him on Instagram @sosproutwings.