A person memory of hidden realities in time and space

A personal memory of hidden realities in time and space

By Jon Rappoport

There is investigation from which hidden realities and elite figures will emerge—just as discovering what powers a home can lead to finding the far-flung generators of power for a whole metropolis.

But then there are investigations of another kind, which turn up strange connections among events—as if time and space make sudden detours.

These latter oddities are uncovered by personal reflection.

In the summer of 1962, young and crazy, with very few funds, at (very) loose ends, I gave up my apartment and traveled to Cape Cod. I spent a few weeks there and met a painter who was living in a small studio. He generously gave me a place to sleep on his floor.

I had a friend who was working as a waiter in a restaurant. Every night, just before sunset, I would go to the back door of the place, and he would come out and hand me a plate piled high with fresh lobster and salad. I would take it down the dock, sit, and eat my meal for the day.

I had already decided I wanted to paint, so the artist and I had long conversations in his studio late at night. These talks oxygenated my blood and set my brain on fire. I was as certain as certain could be that I was (somehow) going to paint.

THE DAY I returned to New York, still very short on money, and without a place to live (young and very crazy), my first stop was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had been there for long afternoons of looking and pondering over the past year.

NEVER had I been to the Museum restaurant—but this day, I decided to go in and have a cup of coffee. As I sat down, I noticed a man coming over to my table. He was a painter who worked in a small gallery downtown. We’d spoken a number of times there.

He sat down. Within a minute or so, he told me his problem. THAT DAY, in few hours, he was going on vacation, to the Cape, with his girlfriend, to the town I’d just come back from. He had a studio off 5th Avenue. He’d been trying to lease it for the rest of the summer, but he’d failed. Did I knew anyone who was looking for a temporary place to live?

Well, I said—my mind ignited by a blow torch—I was looking—but I had very little cash.

How much could you pay, he asked.

I named a ridiculous figure.

He shrugged and said he was mainly looking for someone who would live in the studio and take care of it until September. I could write there and—I told him I was starting to paint and he said he had “materials” I could use.

I reached in my pocket and gave him the first month’s rent, and he grinned and handed me the keys.

An hour later, I walked into his second-floor studio on 19th Street, a few doors down from 5th Avenue (three blocks away from where I had lived for the first five years of my life). The studio was about 60 feet long and 20 feet wide. There was a small bed on a platform, a kitchenette, and a bathroom.

There was a writing desk. There were two easels, perhaps 20 blank canvases, a few hundred sheets of water color paper, a hundred or so tubes of acrylic paint, and a few dozen brushes.

Christmas on Earth, good will to all.

Two days later, a friend showed up in Washington Square Park and paid me back a loan I’d given him a year earlier.

In retrospect, trying to calculate the odds of those events smoothly transpiring…there were no odds. What occurred was, to me, impossible but true.

And after a summer of painting (sometimes all day and into the night), my life was never the same again. Painting was inventing reality. Life was inventing reality.

I had seen my mountain and gone to the top of it.

It was as if reality had whispered in my ear, “YOUR DESIRE IS OVERFLOWING. GOOD. You want to bend me, you want to change me. Good. I’m bored with being what I am. I’ll cut you a slice of good fortune. Don’t be cautious. Go all out…”

Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/