Note: “Fluid Ink” is Taboo Jive’s ‘Facebook Fan page of the Week’ kicking off 2012. Please read Rainer’s story of how it all got started and follow her work by finding the link to her fan page at the end of her story below…enjoy! – TJ

By Rainer Galea

This story begins as all stories do, with a thought, which cannot be contained within a singular word. Its force, so strong, that it needs to exhale, expand its energy and breathe itself into a story. This story. And this is where my story begins…

Besides the usual drawing antics that a child engages in during this period, I would not say I wished to be a cartoonist at that stage. I was mesmerised by creative writing and the ability to create worlds and characters. This was my reality and I was a God. Sentences would be passed and characters would live or die by my word. Where my fellow students would have trouble thinking of stories, I would be spinning freely along a trajectory of my own making. Imagination was my play friend, and we would huddle together and swap comedies and tragedies with the ease of breathing. From my earliest memories, I was able to see scripts unfold in coloured brilliance in my mind. I was a walking cinema. I wanted to be a photo journalist, an author, a director, a playwright. I just wanted to be.

However, it was not until the first year of University, when I was studying my undergraduate course, that the full force of what I consider to be one of my capital-c Callings in life introduced itself to me in a small library in an even smaller suburb. By this time, the fascination of the human mind was courting me. Highschool had closed its chapter and I was reading biographies of anyone and everyone that I could place my hands on. The stories of those that went out into the world to answer their own Callings enamoured me. These adventurers of the external and internal world had become my mentors and the main lesson they imparted was to live a life in alignment to ones’ psychological and spiritual belief systems. To turn away from a Calling would be the equivalent to desaturating ones’ life of colour and vibrance. As one of my cartoons state: “Although our souls are marbled rainbow, we choose to live in a world of monotone”. I choose to be painted multi-coloured.

And so it was with this philosophy in mind, that a most unexpected event was to gently unfold itself to me in the library on a hot, summers day in march.

I was three hours into reading text on psychology. It was if the library had thrown up. My notes and books were sprawled out in front of me in a haphazard mess. My eyes were strained from reading print the size of an ant. I was tired. My concentration was spread membrane thin. My mind decided to tear a hole in its lining and wander to a pencil, enticing it to began lazily scribble on my note pad. I was not focused on what I was doodling, which, I am certain, gave my subconscious mind an invitation to inhabit the space before me. All of a sudden, a small, naked man tumbled from my pencil and stood there on my once pristine page. He did not move, uncomfortable in the lines that contained his form.

He looked at me.
I looked at him.

At the age of 20, Destiny introduced to me The Love Of My Life. And, I, endowed with all the insight of a 20 year old, replied in sage like wisdom: “Huh?”

Change, I have decided, rarely comes with the sound of explosions and high pitch screams of joy. Instead, it comes as kindred spirits do, ever so gently and subtlely slipping their hand into yours, gradually giving voice to an internal life that beckons us to follow.

For the next three hours my graphite evolved into a friend and I conversed. It was as if an inner gateway had opened and a juggernaut of creative energy exploded outward. I was benignly possessed. I could not stop drawing. My character’s steps were uncertain: he stumbled, he fell, he splattered. I had no skills in technical execution but as I drew, my confidence was drawn. I had come ‘home’ without ever realising I had left. Soon, a woman birthed herself onto the page. She dressed herself in possibility and tentatively walked across the paper.

First man. First Woman. —————–>

Empty vessels into which I could pour all the light and dark of Humanity. Our courage. Our cowardice. Our innocence. Our guilt. Our humanness. Our savagery. The multifaceted self, enclosed and exposed in simple lines and ink. Without even knowing it, in these childlike, simplistic cartoons, I was given a powerful catalyst to explore the widely uncharted mindscape of the human psych. Through cartooning I was given “permission” to walk into darkness with questions that were untamed by Logic and eternal in nature. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Is there a universal force at work greater than our own? Of course, no concrete answer to these questions exist and each individual will cloak themselves in the answers that best serve and protect them. Some will turn away from the questions all together, but cartooning, as all the creative mediums must be, are in service to exploration and peeling back the layers of what society tells us it expects. To search for what an individuals’ psychology or soul needs.

I feel very fortunate to be a cartoonist. We are the jesters of the art world. Such a perception allows us tremendous freedom in what subjects we choose to load our pencils with. Everything from dismembering the reputation of political leaders to pondering the nature of God is ours to play with. If I choose to make a cow the symbol for “perpetual wisdom”, by the ‘laws’ of the cartooning universe such a declaration is perfectly acceptable. Logic and the laws of physics hold no power in my realm. I have become a deity and all events are possible.

A decade had come to pass since the Call to cartooning took place. The world had turned and I embraced the learning of my craft with enthusiasm and ease. By 2004 the chapter of my formal education had come to a close. The last line that declared me a Masters in Animation and Multimedia was written. With power and possibility pulsating through my hands I was ready to go into the world and start marketing the plethora of characters that had birthed themselves on my page over the last decade. There was assurance in my step and commitment in my blood. Nothing was going to stop me. My life stretched before me, rendered in graphite, paint and pixels.

Little did I know that twelve months later I would be begging for my mother to kill me.

Fibromyalgia. Such a silly sounding word. It fell upon me over a two week period. One day I was a healthy 30 year old, the next day my body was being torn apart by pain so severe and barbaric that no words have the courage to encapsulate the true horror of it. The pain was uncompromising, merciless and relentless. It was primordial, raw and naked. Never had I felt this depth of physical pain before. It sliced through my neck, shoulders, back legs, arms. Everywhere. I could not walk for 4 months. I could not dress myself. I could not hold a book or even a pencil. My mother had to spoon feed me because it was too painful to hold eating utensils.

My central nervous system was so over active that the slightest touch would send electrical signals screaming throughout my body. I could only bare to have a shower once a week: each droplet of water was akin to a needle piercing my skin. There was no rest anywhere, at anytime. Due to the pain I could not sleep more than a couple of hours a night. Without sleep the body cannot dream and to compensate the brain will dream while one is awake. My brain was drenched in images that tried to make sense of a body that had become a torture chamber. While awake I could see termites burrowing into my skin and eating my muscles. I knew I was hallucinating, but it did not stop me from surrounding my bed with crackers and frozen chops in the hope that the “termites” would eat these offering instead of me.

For two years this severe pain went on, but by the end of the first year, all I could think about was escaping the pain. I lost my career, my relationship and the majority of my friends abandoned me: even my beloved dog had to be put down because of cancer. No one in my family could stand being in the room with me for long periods because they felt too impotent to do anything. Time evaporated not into weeks, or days, or hours, or minutes. I was existing from one eternal moment to the next. My body felt as if it was being mutilated by an invisible madman and all I could do was lie in bed trying not to move for fear that my body would be jolted with burning, electric shocks. Nerve pain was rampaging through every fibre of self as my muscles tightened in an ever increasing vice like grip. No one in the medical profession knew what was wrong with me and no one could stop what was happening.

And the worst was talking to those who believed that this was my life from now on. As one specialist put it, “You are in an area that doctors know little about, so you will be placed in the too hard basket, and passed around from one doctor to another.” I came to intimately know there are worse things than death. I was being hollowed out by the non- relenting pain, physically, mentally and spiritually. When all Hope is abandoned, the mind will start to cannibalize itself and I was screaming for it to end. Suicidal thoughts began to whisper to me. I did not want to die. I just wanted out of the pain. I recall at one stage (somewhat comically now) permission from my mum to kill myself. Half expecting an authorization slip with her signature scrawled on it. Within hand reach, a pharmaceutical of drugs. It would be just so easy to swallow a box or two.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ztg6jEJ64
My mother would not give up on me, refused to concede ground to my black thoughts. She slept by my bed, constantly checked up on me, bathed me, dressed me, fed me, while stubbornly stating, “This too will pass. This too will pass. Do not give up. Do not give up.”

Fuck you, fibro. I am not going to have my mum bury me. Have your way with me, but I am not going to give you my mother. And there it was. That one thought that would not yield. A small pin prick of Light in a darkness that engulfed me.

My mum would not give up on me and I would not give up on my mum.

Love called out to itself and Love answered back.

This is the place where some inspiring music plays and there are shots of me gathering my inner strength and researching studies on how to treat myself. Endless hours of physio, stretching, ringing specialists, medical testing and playing tag with x amount of medications to take control over a primordial pain that wanted my life as its own. In this section, I like to think I look like Kate Beckensale. But the truth is, the road to recovery has been, and is, difficult, tedious, frustrating, depressing and at times, one step forward, two steps back. An endless dance where I seek to push myself continually forward, even if by only millimeters. I still have daily pain and limitations to what I can do, which causes never ending frustration for someone who lived their life to rush and accomplish goals, but my pain is not to the horrific and all soul consuming extent as was my reality during those two years. I can breathe now and then, to assess, to plan. I can walk now, dress myself, eat without assistance and have regained physical strength in the lower half of my body. Alas, I do not look like Kate Beckensale.

To those who are reading this, being chewed by chronic pain, there are no adequate words to embrace my wish that your body heals. Just know, I wish it to be so. Physical and emotional pain will be the burdens of every single human to varying lengths and degrees at some point in life. It may come in the form of an illness, or a death of loved one, relationship disintegrations or the struggle to understand one’s sexuality in a world that dictates the belief system of the majority is a standard that we should all conform to. There is no question that pain will come. The questions we all want answered is “why me and what for?” The answers will be framed in the perception of your reality.

And this is mine. Each of you are a part of something infinitely bigger than your individual self. You may see this in the form of a spiritual belief system, or, a societal belief system, in which the cooperation and the intellectual expansion of a community is important for the evolution of the individual self and the collective whole. Whenever an individual shows differences in the collective (the majority), it not only gives the individual, but society, a chance to assess, and expand upon its moral/ethical beliefs and evolve. This evolution is beyond anything materialistic. It is to do with spirit/social psychological maturing (how you label it is unimportant).

Differences within the majority, whether it be in the form of illness or sexuality, will cause spiritual/psychological growth in two streams.

One: the individual, at some stage, must turn inwards to find strength to overcome physical or psychological fear. This comes from an inner dialogue with self, a conversation that brings reflection and, consequently, revelations, which in turn brings insight and an altered perception of the world that expands acceptance of self and therefore others.

Two: those who are witness to the struggle of the individual have a choice to step forward to help (physically, emotionally, or putting up a website like WHOF) . This in turn expands the perimeters of their compassion, understanding, empathy and sense of self. Those who struggle -physically-emotionally- intellectually and spiritually grow. They are the bearers, the catalysts that provide opportunities for the same intellectual/spiritual growth in another. For example, in helping me through my illness, my mother has expanded her circle of compassion by understanding the effects of chronic pain in others that are not her blood kin. Because her experience is intimate with an illness, her genuine empathy for others has grown, as well as her intellectual understanding of how illness imposes itself upon the body. Individuals make up society and expansion of One cannot help but send ripple of compassion across society as a whole.

The One (individual) makes up the Collective (society) and the Collective is made up of the One. Or, as I would put it: Love called out to itself and Love answered back.

Differences define us. Individual experiences define us. Such differences and experiences add variation to our sense of self and society as a whole. And though many of us will struggle and rage against it, know that behind the pain, opportunities for great growth are there, waiting  for you to have an inner dialogue with the authentic YOU. Such ongoing conversations will provide answers to many of your questions. Not only that, but your struggles and answers will give to all those around you.

Delight in who you are and the differences you bring. Humans are not static in nature. We, as everything else in the universe, are in a constant state of flux and change. We are fluid. Fluid as ink.

Fluid Ink was created for two reasons. Being chronically ill tends to negate, or lessen to a great degree, social interaction amongst my peers. Even though the impulse to create is undeniably strong, there needs to be objective assessment as to whether or not the art is any good. I place the cartoons up to see if the ideas are connecting with people who are not connected to me in any social or kinship way. If the cartoon is one paneled, then it will likely be drawn for a laugh. Not only does fluid ink provide feedback, it also provided a much needed affirmation that my ideas did not suck. The philosophical cartoons I draw for an audience of one, namely myself. The drawings are a visual diary of my inner mindscape. I send the characters to explore what I am thinking about. Being true to that internal connection will elicit a reaction with a larger audience, as the ideas I explore are universal in nature. The second reason is that I wanted to connect with human right organisations and people who are stepping forward and making a difference for positive change in the world. Each of us have a unique ability that we have crafted over the years. I am of the personal view that my art is nothing, and comes to nothing, unless rendered in service to other people. I have opened my cartoons for human and animal right organizations to use the drawings to promote and raise funds for their work. It is only natural to assume that as I spin my pencil to draw for different perspectives and causes that my craft will improve as well. Positive output will elicit positive input.

Follow and become a fan of Rainer’s fan page here —–> Fluid Ink