pablo vision – multimedia art anarchist

pablo vision enjoys the freedom that only anonymity allows: to tell the truth -- or lie -- with brutal honesty.

pablo vision requires the liberation from commitment and obligation that only anonymity permits: to be able to ‘disappear’ any time he feels the desire.

pablo vision prefers that his work is viewed as a separate entity – removed from any perceptions of ‘the artist’, ‘the person’, or ‘art’ produced in previous incarnations.

Information about current projects, and links to his work – including audio, film, and reviews - can be found here and his virtual office space at Epic Rites Press can be located here.

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pablo vision - unself portrait

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Breaking the Boy

I remember my grandma shouting at me for playing football in the back yard. She said I was going to end up smashing one of the windows of her greenhouse. She said it was the only place she could go and have some peace. I called her an old witch because I had heard my granddad call her that so many times before. She called me a bastard. I had never heard my grandma swear. I told her I would tell my granddad that she had swore at me. My granddad always stuck up for me, and we hated my grandma. She said bastard wasn’t swearing: it was what I was. When my granddad came home I told him what she had called me. He got his axe and smashed every single bit of glass, and every bit of wood, and threw all of her delicate flowers onto the ground and slowly crushed each one under his big dirty work boots. He dragged her outside to show her what he had done, and told her to never open her old clacking jaws again. I watched her cry, and, as he dragged her back inside, she looked at me, and I smiled.

Years later, I remember that smile, and I remember how she looked: completely defeated and broken, like whatever small bit that was still alive inside of her had died; that the one bit of her that my granddad had not beaten out of her had simply given up the will to live. I remember that smile, and each time I cry, and each time I feel her first, and most tragic death. I would like to say I was too young, I would like to say that years of my granddad’s influence, or my innocence were to blame, or some kind of mitigation of any sort. But I clearly remember how I felt at that moment: a feeling of triumph, a feeling of utter revenge; a feeling of don’t you ever fuck with me, don’t anyone ever fuck with me; and even if those words would not have been part of my vocabulary then, the meaning, and the intent, most certainly were.

Another memory of my grandma haunts me. It is the last time I saw her alive, the time before her second death: the death that committed her to the care of worms, and to lonely decay. She is on her bed, and there is something wrong and spastic with the angle of her body, and she can’t make her mouth move to say what her frightened eyes desperately try to plead. Her nightdress is twisted around her stomach and there is a disgusting mess of hair between her thighs. Her legs are covered in hideous raised patterns of forked lightening, and her toes are twisted like tree roots below her swollen, bulbous ankles. I stand paralysed in repulsion and fear; she is like some disgusting and frightened animal: something subhuman. I shout to my granddad that there is something wrong with grandma, and he says that there is always something wrong with the old witch, and starts off on his rant about how he never should have married below his class, that she grew up in the gutter, and she should have stayed in the gutter, and that the old hag can go rot in hell; the same stuff I’d heard him say over and over again. When he finally comes into her bedroom, his angry diatribe abruptly stops, and I see him take her hand, and I see him break down in tears. Looking back now, I guess there must have been love at some point in their lives, but at the time, it felt like my entire world had turned upside down. He shouts at me to stop standing there like a fucking imbecile cunt, and to go and get help. I am eight years old, and I learn three new words, and watch the solidity of the only world I know evaporate into something alien, and into something profoundly terrifying.

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Previously published in Heroin Love Songs

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Cover art and design for Rob Plath’s A Bellyful of Anarchy (Epic Rites Press)

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There Are Always Reasons

There are scars in the kitchen; blood soaked into the bare floorboards; cupboard doors with fissures so deep that they threaten their very being; tiles cracked and pitted by other ceramic once thrown in their direction. There are dark rectangles on the wall where pictures used to hang, but do not anymore. There was once a row of elegant glass jars containing pasta and coffee – a wedding present from your aunt – but now, if they exist, it is in fragments only: broken glass and remnants of pasta underneath the cooker, coffee powder between the cracks in the floorboards; and your aunt too, if she still exists, then she is just bone and disintegrating flesh in the cold earth - or a memory only. Whatever laughter there was, is no longer: frozen in time perhaps, or hanging like a ghost - something buried alive or bricked up behind the walls – a ghost then, certainly.

It was not love that changed, but what that love meant and represented. What once was easy, innocent and carefree, now stifling, restrictive and painful. You were not to blame, but neither was I. Whatever we shared so effortlessly and naturally, like two bodies fitting together as one, became forgotten, or - more so - imperceptible, like how one has to concentrate to hear the tick of the clock, or the beating of the heart, so that even though we may have been in the forest we still could not hear the falling of the tree. But how can there be here and now, if we were not there to witness them? Do we seem as familiar, yet strange, to each other as we do to ourselves?

It was my grandfather’s father who burnt the stillborn baby on the fire, and scattered the ashes in his garden – families were large, and they drowned kittens in sacks then. Some kind of love must have created the child, but some things were never meant to have permanence. And it was my grandfather who I can still see hitting my grandmother with an iron poker; bringing it down, time and time again, on the hands she used to cover her face with. And they too must have had love once. I knew I would never be those men, and I knew I could never be that cruel. But if a tree does fall and does make a sound, even if there is no one to hear it, can those roots, back through our fathers, exist invisible to the eye, but present and real, nonetheless?

They say that if one were to wear lenses that inverted the images on our retinas, that after a short time, the brain would invert them back again. And we can look at ink lines drawn into simple, but outlandish, caricatures – even upside down, or at an angle, and, faster than conscious thought itself, recognise with ease they which these images represent.

We see more than we realise, and less than we should.

You were on the floor, lying in the broken glass. And you were crying and screaming, and smashing your fists into the wood and the glass, and there was blood too. And you had done no wrong, except ask for the love I could no longer give. I could not deal with your pain, nor my own, I could not translate the confusion of intense feelings inside me to anything other than anger, and I could not impose the man I wished to be over the fathers inside me. I hit you hard, only once, but hit you I did. And although I grimace at the memory of that - and the sickening acceptance of who I really am - it was the words shouted as I towered over you that penetrate deeper.

There are scars in the kitchen, and there is silence there too. There is coffee powder in-between the cracks of the floorboards, like the ashes of a long dead child. There are absences and voids where things used to be. And there are ghosts, falling like silent trees, over and over again.

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Previously published in The Poetry Warrior

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Art for Paraphilia Magazine

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