ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shane Ryan is an art student from Boston, Massachusetts with a love for both visual and verbal languages. He spends his time either writing or pursuing realism with a ballpoint pen. The nurse inspecting her arms, becoming her audience of one, figured centrally in an image that captured the climax, her art finally gazed upon by someone other than her father, by an outsider whose cold calculation could be compared to that of the art critic whose sophistication has removed them from direct experience, by someone who didn’t follow her, who knew nothing of her online presence, who lacked the bias of the admirer, and by someone other than Yusef, whom her scars had worked upon, rousing him, her artwork presented at the summit of her selfhood, as though she were about to dive off a bridge and a group of her friends and acquaintances, day-drunk, were cheering her on – yes couldn’t that have been it, the peak? – perhaps, but the doctor’s eyes googling her at her quickest, marking her decisively as the razor, her hands turning over her wrist with a delicacy that made her head rush, and her mouth questioning her as a grand oratorio, perhaps one of Bach’s Passions, swelled, joining the Klonopin as it lulled her and then the Ambien as it put her to sleep and following her to McLean Hospital, where the Easter eggs and double meanings of her breakthrough, her first episode, had dwindled, where profundities, such as the inspection of her cuts, became banalities, these came together to decide at which point she was to peak and at which point, the same point, she was to fall, and if that indeed were the climax, that moment of recognition or misrecognition, then perhaps on second thought she was satisfied, and so for the better her climb had been cut short; she hadn’t crested the mountainous potential of a manic episode, that snow-capped insanity in whose grips she had once roamed Pitchuate observing its denizens and believing despite the serenity of that peopled morning, afternoon and night that a dancing plague was about to break out, that the summer had led to a medieval boredom that inside the cloisters of yore had led nuns to meow at each other, that everyone, not just her, was going mad, and in whose grips she had tagged the common room’s whiteboard and grown fearful believing she had signed a deceptive document, consenting to her perpetual commitment to the asylum, her name below the ghost of marker, the fine print she had overlooked, blinded by the promise of that glossy surface, by the joy of leaving her mark, of displaying herself, which has motivated grafittists to climb trusswork and hang over freeways and Paleolithic artists to venture into hypoxic depths, and for the better she wore grippy socks in a state of irony that the modesty of her madness allowed, and for the better she would lose motivation to carry on her hunger strike, and for the better she would be discharged after a month and permitted a glance back at a brief respite from her depression, or rather her stagnation, as hers had been and was now a mixed state, a chiasmus, whose mania is its depression and its depression its mania, one that in the manner of a camera obscura inverted the cross as well its terms, a belief in God having been her third delusion and a reverence for Satan, a stylized atheism, marking her return to reality, appearing on her body a year later among a host of other designs for which she felt her hospitalization had been a small sacrifice, becoming her fixed point as she stood adjacent to the mirror, shirtless, head turned, looking at her shoulder, deciding that the cross was her favorite design, representing as it did her greatest conviction, that there was no God, a truth whose proofs she believed worked on a higher plane than did the propositions of philosophy, which she now felt represented a tinkering of language carried out only as an end in itself, and her nihilism regarding this matter proved only an effect of her depression, one she would feel most strongly when she came home to those books she had left strewn about her room, a homecoming to which she would feel as indifferent as the depressive touring the pyramids of Giza, and while she would feel she could breathe again that radical change of place would have no effect on her mood, as each hour would terrorize her with its endlessness, and she would experience the claustrophobia of the present tense, or more specifically of the wait, of that limbo with which she was all too familiar.
"Excerpt from An Upcoming Novel" by Shane Ryan
"Excerpt from An Upcoming Novel" by Shane…
"Excerpt from An Upcoming Novel" by Shane Ryan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shane Ryan is an art student from Boston, Massachusetts with a love for both visual and verbal languages. He spends his time either writing or pursuing realism with a ballpoint pen. The nurse inspecting her arms, becoming her audience of one, figured centrally in an image that captured the climax, her art finally gazed upon by someone other than her father, by an outsider whose cold calculation could be compared to that of the art critic whose sophistication has removed them from direct experience, by someone who didn’t follow her, who knew nothing of her online presence, who lacked the bias of the admirer, and by someone other than Yusef, whom her scars had worked upon, rousing him, her artwork presented at the summit of her selfhood, as though she were about to dive off a bridge and a group of her friends and acquaintances, day-drunk, were cheering her on – yes couldn’t that have been it, the peak? – perhaps, but the doctor’s eyes googling her at her quickest, marking her decisively as the razor, her hands turning over her wrist with a delicacy that made her head rush, and her mouth questioning her as a grand oratorio, perhaps one of Bach’s Passions, swelled, joining the Klonopin as it lulled her and then the Ambien as it put her to sleep and following her to McLean Hospital, where the Easter eggs and double meanings of her breakthrough, her first episode, had dwindled, where profundities, such as the inspection of her cuts, became banalities, these came together to decide at which point she was to peak and at which point, the same point, she was to fall, and if that indeed were the climax, that moment of recognition or misrecognition, then perhaps on second thought she was satisfied, and so for the better her climb had been cut short; she hadn’t crested the mountainous potential of a manic episode, that snow-capped insanity in whose grips she had once roamed Pitchuate observing its denizens and believing despite the serenity of that peopled morning, afternoon and night that a dancing plague was about to break out, that the summer had led to a medieval boredom that inside the cloisters of yore had led nuns to meow at each other, that everyone, not just her, was going mad, and in whose grips she had tagged the common room’s whiteboard and grown fearful believing she had signed a deceptive document, consenting to her perpetual commitment to the asylum, her name below the ghost of marker, the fine print she had overlooked, blinded by the promise of that glossy surface, by the joy of leaving her mark, of displaying herself, which has motivated grafittists to climb trusswork and hang over freeways and Paleolithic artists to venture into hypoxic depths, and for the better she wore grippy socks in a state of irony that the modesty of her madness allowed, and for the better she would lose motivation to carry on her hunger strike, and for the better she would be discharged after a month and permitted a glance back at a brief respite from her depression, or rather her stagnation, as hers had been and was now a mixed state, a chiasmus, whose mania is its depression and its depression its mania, one that in the manner of a camera obscura inverted the cross as well its terms, a belief in God having been her third delusion and a reverence for Satan, a stylized atheism, marking her return to reality, appearing on her body a year later among a host of other designs for which she felt her hospitalization had been a small sacrifice, becoming her fixed point as she stood adjacent to the mirror, shirtless, head turned, looking at her shoulder, deciding that the cross was her favorite design, representing as it did her greatest conviction, that there was no God, a truth whose proofs she believed worked on a higher plane than did the propositions of philosophy, which she now felt represented a tinkering of language carried out only as an end in itself, and her nihilism regarding this matter proved only an effect of her depression, one she would feel most strongly when she came home to those books she had left strewn about her room, a homecoming to which she would feel as indifferent as the depressive touring the pyramids of Giza, and while she would feel she could breathe again that radical change of place would have no effect on her mood, as each hour would terrorize her with its endlessness, and she would experience the claustrophobia of the present tense, or more specifically of the wait, of that limbo with which she was all too familiar.