Clarkes Scribbles

[Clarke Griffin]

She Draws In Prisons

Art is a coping mechanism. Art breaks out of boundaries. What a person could imagine, could come to life through simple methods of a piece of charcoal on a surface. And even those things that could not be imagined by the human might could exist on those surfaces, coming to life through a train of thought, unrelated, yet powerful enough to create a beautiful vision. Luckily a persons imagination rarely found a limit. And even the greatest chaos could create art.
Clarke Griffin created art in moments of greatest chaos.

She is in prison for the first time for simply knowing what her father knew, an all too innocent thing for a daughter to know her fathers thoughts and secret. In this case it was a secret dangerous to an entire society and yet vital. Clarke would have never used it, but it appeared nobody was to take chances with her having this knowledge. And so she was facing death for something no other daughter would face this for. 

And so she escaped. She escaped onto the ground, in her mind. She began to draw, taking her mind away, to cope. During this first imprisonment an idealistic girl drew pictures of earth, a hope for a better future for generations to come. She drew pictures of what she hoped to see when death took her. Maybe paradise would look like they said in Vera Kanes ceremonies. 

In peace, may you leave this shore.

In love, may you find the next. 

Safe passage on your travels, until our final journey to the ground. 

May we meet again.

Her final journey began with those drawings. As she imagined life on the ground, an idealistic few, as she dreamed of what was to come, she didn’t know that this time she would break free of her prison. And so her final journey to the ground began by imagining heaven, by imagining life. 

The second time she is in prison, it’s a subtle prison. At the end of it there is no death, not yet. Death, was out of reach, because on the ground death was imminent. Nobody took prisoners, saved them from death, just to kill them later on. And yet she felt suffocated in Mount Weather, stale air like in her first prison sending her back to the drawing board. This time she doesn’t draw what she craved for, dreams of afterlife and the ground, this time art freed her mind in another way: She made strategies, a skill slowly picked up from another person, dancing in her hand with her skills as an artist, creating logical points of entry and exist into a concrete and stone prison, that allowed her to interact with her jailers. Art created her exit and later on it created the downfall of her prison and her jailers.

The third prison is a prison of the mind. Clarke sits in a cave. She no longer moves around her are shadows, She had been in a frenzy, woken from haunting dream after dream where burned bodies reached for her. Clarke sat on the ground for hours after that. Practice strokes of charcoal turned a grayish surface black. The figures she created lacked finesse, lacked detail, but they did not need any detail. They held power in the way they were. Countless shadowy figures, some blurred into one, suggesting there were more behind them, had appeared on the walls the floor. They stopped where Clarke sat, knees drawn up to her chest. She stared at them, stared at the faces around her, the shadowy figures, each of them a life she took, a future she eliminated because she had to, because she saw no other way for her own survival. Their shadows weighed on her mind, her heart and soul and her future. In a frenzy Clarke had drawn all of them, hundred or more, giving what she felt a visual outlet. Her prison was invisible and her art made it visible. She had taken the prison of her mind out of her soul and laid it down in front of her, enabling to face those demons for the first time. This time she had drawn her jailers, her prison as nobody else could see it, giving it an almost physical component that she had power over, power to destroy. 

Her art had the power to escape prison, to recreate her prison and bring it to life. She drew in prison, because once she drew, prison lost power over her and she gained the power that prison tried to take from her back. She drew in prison, because she refused to let prison bring her down. She drew in prison, to bring take the illusions from prison and bring it down. She drew in prison to bring it down, to tear it apart, like a piece of paper, because:

Prison held no power over her art.

Sooo inspiration bit me and this one had to be written. It's just a tiny little something, but sometimes those come to me, so made this thread, in case I get bitten by inspiration of the sort again. Enjoy.