Junk Shop Doll

The mind spins.  Thoughts wander.  Yesterday, last week last month.  Forward thinking is hopeless. Too many ideas thwarted by the whispering feeling time is running out. The sand in the hour glass of a lifetime has nearly filled the lower reservoir. Do not waiver now, do not capitulate.  All tasks must be finished before a new one is undertaken.  Why did I write that word? Is the subconscious mind reminding me of the undertaker’s hearse?

Even writing this blog brings me full of foreboding.  The picture I have chosen, the lonely doll, who would want her?  She’s too big to be carried around and surely it will be difficult to find new clothes to fit her? She’ll be in the cabinet until the car boot sale, the graveyard for no sale toys.  The owner he doesn’t care, a fiver is all he want’s.  And yet, I learn from the plastic figure.  Patience, silence, theres always a chance.

I discover she’d found a new home ‘Who bought her Ken?’ ‘An art student Ian, he’s going to spray her in differing colours, body blue, limbs four other’s and the head will be untouched’.  Why did I ask? The doll’s become a surgical experiment.  My mind goes back to concentration camp horrors taught by history teachers. If the doll had a memory who would it think of as the student placed her on the experiment table?  Would her eyes see the dismembered limbs and torso being sprayed blue? Horror of horror when will her troubled life end, or was her life difficult?

Once loved and surrounded by other dolls and toys and the little girl grew up and found real people to play with.  Or was she just to big a doll in the first place? Unwanted, ostracised for her beauty and grotesque size.  The other toys being of a smaller scale, she didn’t fit in the small community she could never become part of?  And why did she loose her clothes? The indignity the flesh toned plastic portrays makes me feel ill at ease.

You think, Ian your crazy, a doll effects your mind to these thoughts.  I answer why does a diamond ring represent love and mean so much?  Why does a sunset or sunrise evoke such feelings of wonder? I wish I’d paid the fiver and saved the Junk Shop Doll as a representation of the sharp knives of experiences which scar ones life.  And what would I have done with her once I’d possessed her?  Initially found some clothes, returned her dignity, spoken to her when no one knew?  The tragedy is I would have tired of her, the vacant stare, the whimsical oversized eyes and the unkempt hair.  I’d have wished her to be with the artist, because I would come to hate her.  The smug ‘knowing’ half smile, the silent answers to my questions and the revealing of my inner thoughts.  One day the artist may hate her too. For he may find her to be adulterer! Each time someone buys one of my prints of this image, she is mine and betrays her lover.  Yes, she may only be a model, but I know artists and they see life in a different way, he has taken her, made her into a representation of his inner creativity and if he discovers she’d already been abused, what then?  I’ve answered the question already…