Of These Fortuitous Grotesques

During an aimless peramublation through the new officespace to the tune of T Bone Burnett’s latest, THE INVISIBLE LIGHT: ACOUSTIC SPACE (love it), I grabbed THE COMPLETE ESSAYS of Michel de Montaigne and opened to a random page. This is what he had to say:  

“I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with grotesques, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these Essays if not monstrosities and *grotesques* botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?” 

Michel de Montaigne, “On Affectionate Relationships

Without a doubt the finest description of these inconsequential daily exorcisms of thought, these shapeless and disordered monstrosities “botched together” by my own uncoordinated whim to fill up the empty space around The Work – executed to (whatever passes for) the best of my ability – at hand, an essential counterpoint to my indulgence of wanton perfectionism.

Reading: SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward.