The following quotations are from “Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)” by Jim Dine. Where he uses “draw” or “drawing” substitute “write” or “writing” and I find a remarkable similarity with my own experience making things…I find his work and thought quite inspiring to my own and wanted to share with you many writers/artists/thinkers…
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“I’ve always had a wish to put down marks”
“My mind was going and so was my hand”
“I love building up, erasing, losing it, bringing it back, taking it away. I trust my method of not trusting”
“He’s always so frightened of failure and of finishing, and that moves me” (of Giacometti)
“But what is really the optimal situation for me is to get my brain around what I’m trying to do. That’s all.”
“I have a total connection between my hand and my eye – it’s just that I can’t see sometimes”
“Drawing is not an exercise. Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere. Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey. For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere. The quest is to keep the thing alive – “
“I’m interested in making a vehicle within which it is possible to feel certain things…And these emotions don’t have words. They really don’t”
“I want to get my drawing out of my heart the way photography accesses my marginal thoughts and images”
“The state of wanting to draw something, for me, is a way to capture it and that’s a primary emotion for me.”
“I want to possess them and what better way of possessing them than to draw them. The reason I wanted to possess them is they reminded me of other things that are wordless”
“Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life”
“This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief opportunities”
-Michel Serres-
What I really want to ask, is where I am? Implying already the question of an “I” to locate, whether or not there’s a who that could be. I really DO wake into questions.
Pop over to my “currently reading” page/list. It hasn’t changed a lot, perhaps gained a few pounds. I set in this tribal circle, stacks of books like temple pillars, and feel like I’m made of shavings and fragments. Some strange conglomeration of paper-thin shreds, filled with phrases and songs, floating in air. Like using dust as a puzzle.
What sits in that center, bathed in blaring desk-light, really?
“a slapdash piece of [sometimes very hard] work, subject to the vagaries of time [its growth and its wear] and the [sometimes brilliant] blunders of brief opportunities”
That feels pretty accurate. My parents, my sister, my Kansas. My musical training. Education, educators, friends. Marriages and children, travel and work. These words, this blogsite. How “I” originates and am formed. And thousands upon thousands of books, hours and hours of movies and song.
Then the dust and the shavings keep collecting: mountain climbs and ocean views, orchestras and art museums, foreign countries and people. Slapdash, subject to vagaries, blunders of opportunities.
I’ve an urge to look closer (a terminal “illness” of mine). For “slapdash” I find ‘things done hastily, carelessly,’ but I’ve often taken great pains over much time with fervent investment – yet, yes, the results have definitely been ‘roughcast’ and ‘haphazard.’
And “vagaries” – ‘erratic, extravagant, or outlandish’ occurrences, ‘unexpected and inexplicable change.’ Admitted, time works this way, as (the dictionary suggests) the ‘variations of weather’ – a ‘wandering’ ‘fluctuation.’ I accept.
And what of ‘blunders,’ of blundering? ‘Mistakes, usually serious, caused by ignorance and confusion.’ ‘Clumsily or blindly’ mannering forth. However else could I proceed with this limited mind and body, space and shape, this miniscule duration (recalling ‘hastily’ – how much time, relatively, do we really have in a larger scheme?). Yes, I am always walking into an unknown next, ‘blindly’ as it were, piecing together a ‘haphazard’ and ‘erratic’ assemblage of imagined/remembered experiences, ‘clumsily’ hauling them forward breath-by-breath. Fair enough, ‘extravagant’ or ‘serious mistakes,’ I blunder.
Remains the “opportunities” to set it all aright. These are described as ‘favorable or advantageous circumstances, or combinations of circumstances.’ ‘Suitable chances for progress or advancement.’ Possibles. And this scattered smattered hollow or vortex, opens out again.
So – I’m here, and this – a clumsy blind wanderer stumbling through unexpected and inexplicable changes to haphazard and outlandish results; a con-fused combination of circumstances ever entering favorable and advantageous, suitable chances to progress and keep going…into the ever-possibles…
“It is already late when you wake up inside a question” -Anne Carson-
It takes some prodding. Prodding and probing. You must have set out, been triggered or poked or otherwise disturbed. In the first place: to ask.
So something, anything, disturbs you. Annoys, feels good, causes you to move out of a way, or adjust. Friction. Something like pain or a sharp thrill, label it fear, designate desire. In any case – unrest, discomfort, necessity.
There’s the rub. A displacement of sorts, like an involuntary glance, or tripping on sidewalks. Awareness. I have legs. Eyes. An elbow. Breath. A need for a restroom, that kind of thing. Self/other; here/there; now/now. Force, motion, mass enter the vicinity. You become aware.
To right yourself, “get your bearings,” “take stock” and what-not usually begins in some knee-jerk instinctual mannered-reaction, as it were. Pierce-poke – wince and recoil. Delight – magnetism and submission. You are not awake, only slightly coming-to. Displaced, disturbed, floundering for shore.
An experience is occurring and senses churn, mind starts mapping, here and now are tired of hiding – regardless of the fun of the game. You startle and seek, calling things names deep in your head, listening for echoes that mate. Radar of accounting and imagination, disjunctively it gradually becomes “all systems go.”
Go where?
And how do these systems “go”?
Who is it that’s waking?
The entire propensity expanding the proverbial “What the – ?!”
Whether infant or sage, and all of us, after all, somewhere in between.
“People really understand very little of one another”
-Anne Carson-
You might say we studied one another through a thick fog. Or learned one another in the dark, guessing, reaching, feeling our way.
For many years.
We were determined.
Recording nuances, memorizing beats, mimicking rises and falls. Taking fingerprints with our bodies, collecting snapshots for official documents. We created and invented artifacts together in order not to know – who was who and which was which. We merged as often as we could, and more than often asked.
We still remember general shapes and movements – tones, colors, outlines. Each a sort of negative of the other – surfaces accepting imprints, continuous translations.
You could say we were scholars and specialists. At times we counted hairs, many times while splitting them. From observation it is hard to tell bodies tangled in fighting from those wrestling in love. Unfettered laughter from convulsive wails. We learned to do so by watching them changing one to another and back again. Momentary gradients. We were able to dance on thin lines.
In earnest we catalogued vocabularies by rote, genetics, neuroses, causes and effects, our marriage a lab of research and experiment. Encycopedic and replete.
Through interference of weather and evolution’s inexplicable leaps we adapted apparati for morphing data, constructing theses. Compared and bickered notes and conclusions, matters and intention. Interpretations varied.
More astrology than –onomy, more alchemy than chemistry, we carried forth our quest. Meteorology, geology, archaeology we sought of one another, growing compendiums of analyses and flow, catalysts and katharses.
Our distance became cosmically microscopic, mythological and rite. You might say we were studying one another in a great fog. We kept on receiving each other in the dark.
From most points of view, life is a system. Enormous and elaborate interlacing activities keep it going on. Biology, physics, religion, mathematics and logic; semiotics, psychology, aesthetics and history; chemistry and health, poetry and politics, philosophy and fame – all intricate reverberant systems of night (and possibly?!) infinite interconnections – visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious.
I feel it all the time. I’m “affected.”
Hubbub over sports, havoc of war, hullabaloo of cosmology and genetics. Tentacles of memory, omens from the past, illnesses and love. My own aches and pains. Allergies, anxiety, pleasure and joy. Tastes, values. All of/in these indecipherably interlocking worlds of living things, views, theories, events and conundrums. Words, images, feelings. Wires, energy, matter. Signals, symbols.
I feel it. I’m “affected.” Always.
All ways.
An hypothetically infinite ganglia or swarm of influences and infections — a finite and mortal middle-aged male inhabiting a very small space made of receptors, pores, nerves, cells and liquids: constantly thrumming, sloshing, snap-crackling, emoting and perceiving a cosmos of effects/affects.
This is why I keep saying: I get it, I’m totally “a/effected.”
The situation is perhaps similar to a paramecium channeling a bolt of lightning. Most likely the little sucker survives in some fashion – but what the – ?
How do we manage?
No wonder we blitz out, dull, “veg,” “pass out,” sleep. Drugs, fantastical entertainments, thrills, spills and crack-ups…anything to direct/divert the universe-sized charges incessantly overwhelming us.
Something struck me today. In our growing history of surviving, perhaps even thriving, how have humans as a species often overcome overwhelming difficulties? Well sure, all of the ways mentioned above: escape, denial, “tuning out,” apathy, ignorance, fantasy, insanity or violence, danger and so on, but when we are perceived (perceive ourselves) to “advance” “progress” or “grow” – what is the method? (When we can interpret one apart from “accident” or “effect”?)
Have we not repeatedly immersed ourselves in our reality (“the way things are”) and used them to our benefit rather than detriment? Technology, science, arts and beliefs – the seeking of the facts, turning them to our interests or needs, finding fulfillment and challenge – furtherance – survival.
What snapped in me today (I’ve had years of “managing” my “e/affectedness” thorugh alcohol, isolation or the dependence of my children) is this: if our inquiries and theories by and large agree/propose that “life” is one phenomenal, inescapable and gargantuan set of layered and inter/intra-relational systems, then “relating/relationships,” their process(es) and effects are precisely where the work, the living, the surviving (perhaps thriving) emphases ought to be engaged.
That balancing, recharging, nourishing, coping, diversion and awareness might be best figured out right where it happens – in systems of relationships. That where we are “affected” and what “effected” by is precisely where our greatest opportunity to “effect” must be. Our process of relating, our relationships with/in the cosmos of possibilities, is our living. What we know or think seems to tell us – our attention, our “solutions,” our being belongs there: in relationship.
EnergyLinguistic diagram
Thank you Holly (my wife), Scott (my dearest friend), children (all of you, my charges) – and others – you truly regulate me in this world.
All my Words are Silent 