june 25th, 2022

a person has a severe nervous breakdown, locks themselves in their room, blocks out the windows, & draws several large
artworks on the walls that are expressions of their anguish. what they don't realize, due to sufficient self-censorship of
their own self-awareness, is that they are modeling this event after Francisco Goya's creation of his Black Paintings, &
this modeling stems from a buried desire to see themselves artistically expressing their anguish in a manner as private &
sincere as Goya himself, who didn't have himself to read about & model himself on, & indeed never spoke of the paintings.
try as this person might, though, they cannot unread what they've read about Goya. they're inevitably executing a pre-written
"story" &, in a repressed way, do hope & expect for it to find an audience eventually in the same way the Black Paintings
did. so the "unhinged" aspect of their breakdown is not so much the dramatic seclusion & creation of the art as
much as it is the desperate succumbing to that act of modeling, out of a desire to see their grief
externalized in a way that they understand & would like to see


naturally, the preceding characterizations of Goya apply only insofar as they are not
historical mischaracterizations or mere apocrypha, & only insofar as Goya was "truly
original." this, however, may have no relevance to the mindset of the protagonist


one may also imagine a variant of this scenario, where Goya's part is substituted with
an intermediary influence, who has already discovered Goya & lived something akin
to the scenario, before becoming known to the protagonist, who in this variant has
never heard of Goya & proceeds to enact the "story" of this intermediary