Pandemonium
Before he can begin his brushstrokes of genius, Phillipe needed silence and solitude.
He got neither.
Today’s noise blared through the shoddy studio apartment above Rue Montorgueil. The streets of Paris became animated by the maddening crowd. Traffic roared its way back and forth the cityscape. Civilians bustled across the roads. Sirens blared. Horns honked. Construction sites rang with the grating noise of hammers and drills.
Phillipe stood pensively in the far corner of the open space. He ruminated endlessly on how to proceed with his latest creation: the canvas perched atop the wooden frame of the easel, its former blank space now an emboldened luscious backdrop of colour.
The painter had tried to encapsulate the unbridled nature of a herd of horses galloping across the Great Steppes.
However, he had yet to refine his work. It required an embellishment of detail. Otherwise he could not stand to be associated with such a bland painting.
Agitation coursed through him. His concentration lapsed from the endless torrent of noise outside. It was already a late start to the day. The deadline for this commissioned art was due tonight.
Yet, Phillipe remained unsatisfied by the piece. It needed more. It yearned for more.
As its creator, he was determined to perfect it.
While the client had been incredibly pleased with the result, Philippe was impassive about her gracious praise.
It’s not telling the story that I want, he reflected to himself.
‘You’ll never be satisfied with it mi amor, just deliver it to the client,’ Miguel interjected across the room. His partner was on his lunch break, eating a meal on the sofa while watching TV.
‘It’s not ready. Not yet.’
Phillipe heard the heavy sigh travel across the few feet of space between them.
The commotion of the laugh track in the sitcom reverberated across the walls.
His feet tapped impatiently on the floorboards.
‘When are you returning to work?,’ Philippe groaned to his partner.
‘Oh, I didn’t… I’ll leave soon then.’ Miguel replied nonchalantly, yet Philippe could sense the dejected manner suppressed within his partner’s body. A few minutes passed and Miguel bid him farewell. The door slammed behind him.
Phillipe was finally alone.
But the noise hadn’t subsided in his partner’s absence.
Amidst the shrieking streets of Paris, the washing machine drum bellowed ferociously, causing a tremor to run rampant through the studio apartment.
Phillipe’s neck and shoulders grew tense.
The paints on his palette were beginning to dry out. He wet the tips of his paintbrush in the water pot and dabbed it in the green paint. As he reached out to the canvas to pepper the fields with blades of grass–
– *buzz*
Another interruption.
The doorbell rang.
A curse exclaimed from his jowls.
After he answered the door and accepted the parcel with a grunt, the delivery driver dismissed herself quietly. Phillipe strode across to his work.
But his momentum was short-lived.
Ten minutes had passed before another dilemma interrupted his focus.
*Bzzt*
His phone rumbled on the coffee table.
He turned to look at it. Don’t you dare, he thought to himself.
He hastily turned the phone on to Focus Mode. At least silence from the device was (almost) guaranteed.
Elsewhere in the apartment block, a cacophony of door slams, din of neighbours’ conversations, and echoing footsteps tormented his last nerve.
Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get back into the flow again.
A groggy afternoon haze settled upon him. Phillipe’s palate yearned for a fresh pot of coffee. His concentration became clouded with judgement. His body moaned as the noose of stress tightened itself further: lethargy spread into his leaden limbs, coils of tension suffused into every muscle fibre.
He became a sponge of anguish, where even the slightest sounds were now absorbed as nagging concerns.
Everything became a distraction.
A pesky house fly buzzed in the corridor. The rain pelleted against the windows. The floorboards creaked under his feet.
It was as if the entire world decided to compress all its noise to aggravate Phillipe. Was this a conspiracy against him? Did the rest of humanity want him to leave his work unfinished?
He drew the blinds and confined himself to the dim darkness.
*Bzzt*
His phone rumbled on the coffee table.
But… How?, he thought.
Phillipe reared his head towards the phone. A call had bypassed the Focus Mode. It was the client calling about the piece. Panic surged through him. His hands trembled. Phillipe ignored it, but he felt the buzz rattle inside his head – an unrelenting reminder of the deadline – deterring his attention from re-commencing work.
Phillipe yelled aloud to his apartment. He covered his ears, shaking his head, gritting his teeth.
‘I can’t work like this!!’, he exclaimed to no one.
His phone rumbled again on the coffee table.
Phillipe let the call die out. Then he picked it up. Focus Mode was swiped away with a cursor of his finger.
The burdens of stress had worn his will down.
He yielded to the temptation.
At his fingertips, he had the finest throes that procrastination has to offer.
Much to his woe, Phillipe found himself digressing on the sofa amongst the hum-drum of social media: on his phone he succumbed to scrolling through the latest gossip and trends on Facebook and Instagram. Then an endless stream of stories on YouTube. Finally, he was lost in the labyrinth of Tik-Tok.
An orange glow glistened through the slits in the blinds. It was nearly dusk.
Disbelief dawned on him. He wasn’t going to finish in time. He hurled his phone across the room. It smacked against the wall and crashed onto the floor.
Another day derailed by his train of thoughts.
Vexation consumed Philippe.
He strode again towards the unfinished canvas. He wetted the tip of his paintbrush and he began using delicate light strokes. Time passed into night as he toiled away.
In spite of the surmounting strain on his faculties, he was determined to see it through.
But as he progressed, he only saw the afflictions he had placed upon this beautiful painting. With every additional stroke, he only saw grotesque, disfigured blotches where a herd of horses once galloped through the Great Steppe. The colour scheme made no sense to him anymore. The painting he spent months on now looked revolting in his eyes.
It was less than perfect.
Suddenly, during a momentary lapse in focus, he accidentally blemished a spot with the wrong shade of colour. Dread widened in his eyes. His hands trembled at the ghastly sight.
Hysteria seized him.
The pent-up frustration of the day moulded into wrath. Philippe relinquished his grip on sanity. He allowed the wrath to devour him.
Before he knew what he was doing, he had tossed the palette of paints onto his work, gripped his paintbrush like a knife and began stabbing relentlessly at the canvas.
‘Go to hell! Go to hell! Damn you all, go to hell!’ he roared as he ferociously ripped apart the canvas off the easel where it lay.
By the time he had regained his senses, Philippe stood aghast at the ungodly sight. Splotches of paint and morsels of canvas were strewn across the studio.
The painting was gone.
Philippe fell to his knees.
When Miguel returned from work, he found his partner heaving with heavy cries amidst the tapestry of pandemonium painted across their home.
A piece about perfectionism and waiting for the “perfect” moment to begin work.
Day 4 - This piece was posted as part of the 31 Days of Content Challenge that I undertook in March 2022.