Inspiration comes from both strange and ordinary places. When I worked as an orderly at the St. Ives Mental Hospital a number of years ago, inspiration was common. Everything those crazy folk did was interesting, even if only vaguely so. You might say they paid me in ideas, considering how little they paid me in cash. The fact is, without the patients, and especially without one man in particular, I would never have been able to quit and begin to write for a living. They called this man The Painter.

            My routine at work involved feeding and checking up on the patients. There were doctors in charge of medicine, guards in charge of conduct, and therapists for other serious problems – orderlies only had to keep the patients alive and clean. I would walk down the long pale-green hallways at Ives, as we used to call it, pushing my food cart and whistling a bit. I only learned to whistle in my twenties, but once I did, I simply couldn’t stop, though I can’t see how that’s important. It was when I pushed my food cart that I was truly happy. I don’t think I can remember a happier time in my life. Everybody loves to push carts – as a kid, I always begged to push the shopping cart – but I guess I expected that love to subside when it became my job. Not so; nothing changed. Stopping the cart and dealing with the patients was interesting, but ultimately repetitive. The cart had a healing effect – to that I do attest.

            Looking back on that last bit, I can understand when people imply that mental asylum workers are as crazy as their charges. Everyone’s a little crazy, I always say, but who am I to defend my former profession? All I know is that I owe everything to The Painter. He came to the place ten years before me – and he’s still there now, or else he’s dead, I suppose.

            The Painter had the corner room on the top floor. Like any large institution, seniority hath its privileges and in that regard a person’s sanity doesn’t change anything. So why did they call him The Painter? That’s obvious, I bet. The man was a talented artist. In the way that the fluorescent lights spaced evenly throughout Ives were the most efficient at what they did, regardless of elegance, The Painter was a fantastic and fantastically efficient, well, painter. Now, I know, that last sentence is crazy in and of itself. Where do the lights come in? Explanation: The Painter liked to talk, too. He talked constantly. The fluorescent light metaphor is his, not mine. Am I crazy for using it? That’s not up to me to decide.

            The Painter was insane, of that there is no doubt. No, incessant painting is not a reason for hospitalization, and neither is incessant talking, and unless one is feeling nitpicky, neither is both combined, but The Painter was insane. The problem was that incessant doesn’t begin to describe his activities in any useful way. The modern understanding of the word takes into account all of our penchant for exaggeration, whereas I mean it literally: without stopping. The man did not stop painting, so when he didn’t have paint, he used food. When he didn’t have food, he used excrement. When he didn’t have that, he used blood. If you remember, he never stopped talking during this whole process either.

            The above isn’t meant to imply that one couldn’t hold a conversation with The Painter. In my daily rounds, which lasted all day (because by the time I got through all of my assigned sections for the breakfast round, it was lunchtime), I always saw the Painter – I never missed. Besides the food cart, he was my highlight. His paintings were always fun to examine, despite what I mentioned, if you recall – namely that they were always devoid of emotion, and always subconsciously annoying. I remember one conversation we had out of many especially well, although the fact that my comments had to be squeezed in between his long and effusive chatter made it less of a conversation than a lecture. The Painter told me about artistry.

            “My good man” – He would always address me this way – “have you considered what it is to be an artist?” One must not fail to imagine, here, in order to appreciate fully the ‘conversation,’ the British accent, the lack of gaps between sentences, and the frenetic painting going on at the same time.

            “Everyone is an artist,” he said. “I have arrived at this conclusion after a careful thought experiment. First, I asked myself, ‘what is art?’ and I concluded, ‘art is anything inspired, regardless of beauty or function.’ Current thinking will tell you that art is any object that can be appreciated for something beyond its practical function. You might appreciate my canvas here for more than the skin it’s surely made of, but this is only a limited description.” Remember that he was an achieved circular-breather too…

            “Art,” he rushed on, “is anything that comes from anything else. Your wanderings with your cart are Art. What art Art? Are Art art, or are art only fart?” Obviously, not everything that spewed from his mouth was completely lucid, but I often brought a tape recorder with me, in case I wanted to parse anything later. Continuing:

            “Everybody is art. Every thing is art. Art cannot be too strictly defined. It must flow free, flow and swirl and spin, swing and slip… Who are we to tell them what it is? Who are they to tell you what I do?” He pranced merrily around his work. He was facing me that morning (he positioned himself and his canvas differently every day, seemingly at random), so I couldn’t see what he was painting.

            I always stayed a few minutes extra in his room, as one can imagine. I could sense, now, that he was reaching some sort of conclusion, though I knew he would lecture me indefinitely, if I only let him.

            “If I paint nothing here before me, is it art? If I am supremely inspired, perhaps by the terrible sounds I hear from the adjacent rooms at night, but my brush entirely misses the canvas, is it art? I have been attempting to answer this question, but all I get is painting after painting, and I HATE THEM ALL!” This last part uncharacteristically and surprisingly yelled. I moved to calm him, then, because he had begun stabbing himself in the chest with his paintbrush, and he was quickly covering himself in blue paint. As I gently took his shoulders he twisted me off, and my foot knocked against the easel, dislodging the painting and sending the whole thing to the floor. The easel knocked over a lamp on a nearby table, and the entire affair made quite a noise, not to mention a mess of broken wood and glass.

            He started muttering under his breath and twitching slightly, which is what he did when he was too confused to speak aloud. Between us lay his painting, face up. It was a painting of me, without a doubt, pushing my cart through the halls of St. Ives, though it was quite surreal. My limbs were arrayed at strange angles and ended in fur and claws, and from my head extended multiple stalks, like antennae, with long-toothed and screaming mouths on the ends. Overall, it was a dark and completely terrifying painting.

            It was also completely incandescent, if I may return to that earlier metaphor. When The Painter caught sight of his work, he briefly stopped muttering. In fact, he stopped talking altogether, which surprised me, to be sure. Our eyes locked, then, and I saw an intelligence there – and a deep pain – that I had never seen before. After six or seven seconds (though it could have been two, and it could have been twenty), he looked away and resumed his standard drone. I helped him clean up, collecting the wood and glass on the floor. Unfortunately, I had to bring the debris outside to the garbage chute, and by the time I came back, the painting was out of sight, as if it had never existed.

            “My good man,” he said, and here, did I perhaps see a twinkle in his eye, or a slight wink? “My good man, I’ve kept you much too long, and I’m sure you have carts to push, people to feed. Do not fear! We can continue this fascinating discussion at lunch,” so away I went.