This is just a couple of pages of random thoughts jotted down, I imagine (because I don’t recall) one morning after waking up. I remember the thoughts, I remember being intrigued at how we find ourselves again after having forgotten ourselves in dream. I still think that’s intriguing, how we can completely forget who we are in a subconscious state, but somehow, with consciousness, find our way back. It’s amazing how the brain works and a bit – more than a bit – frightening, how it sometimes doesn’t. But those thoughts – even if they build on these written in the image above, are for another time.

This idea of finding our way back to ourselves after being lost in the forgetfulness of dream, somehow run parallel to other thoughts, I’ve sometimes pondered about how amazing it is that there exists a geographical location we call home, that we find our way back to most evenings – and when we do, there it is, reserved for us and waiting.

The reference, at the end of this scribbled note, to the midnight stumbles to the bathroom alludes to the thoughts that led to the Pissers and the Fear of Death paintings five or six years earlier than when this was written down. Old thoughts now, and not new even then, but apparently still fresh in my mind at the time.

This would have been written at my apartment on Altair Place, in Venice. I can remember doing a lot of drawings while relaxing on the bed in that apartment. I’d draw or write either in the morning or late at night or in the middle of the day, if I was home. I did a lot of drawing in this sketchbook – and writing apparently – on that bed. It wasn’t exactly a bed – it was a futon, but a futon’s a bed, right? It was a nice room that I had there and these thoughts just have to do with dreaming and waking, and who we are, why we are us. I suppose I was doing a lot of questioning back then – maybe still am. The drawings and notes in this sketchbook ended up leading to the 14 Questions for Eve paintings – questions of course that were never really asked – let alone answered.