“This business of the repetitive, how does it come about?” He does not choose to be Himself but rather finds Himself in experience. Being this ‘Artist’ is a curious thing. It may be not that He MUST be the Artist, but that the ‘art’ channels His repetitive need. He MUST repeat. Repeating is a return. This mounting pile of bird work is a continuous loop whose ostensible subject-matter enables Him to acceptably satisfy the repetitive need. Allied to a degree of competence, it disguises and reveals something pathological. This drawing is not an image or a representation. Its making created something real. Lacan wrote that the real is ” ..that which always returns to the same place.” “Don’t try to be clever!”, ‘It’ snaps. I watch his reaction. Like the beachcomber He comes across things that look interesting, useful. Bits of Lacan, bits of Steiner, bits of string, bits of thinking, detached pieces of larger worlds that bob up uncontrollably, glinting, to the surface. Bits of things are interesting in their own right. He does what He can. Moments of ‘Yes, I understand.’, are just that, moments. And then He returns to a time before He understood, to repeat the process. That is where He lives, in that space. The mounting pile may one day amount to something that makes sense, if bits of this and that find that their shapes fit. The shaded boundary of the bird, merging with the background, the not quite formed feathers create through the repetitive actions of their making, something that cannot be completed, that is ‘almost’ and which colludes with need to create desire.
“Do you believe all that stuff?” ‘It’ slapped him awake. “Don’t you think it might all be rather silly, unreal?”
Thoughts cannot be resisted. Thoughts arise as He draws. The act of shading is a waiting game. Repetition, slow movement, gradual emergence, an avoidance technique, drawing as tangential life. He shades, something is released in passing, a consequence. He draws to escape, leave something behind, to put something off. ‘It’ suggests that he is avoiding commitment, a notion that ‘I’ has previously suspected. The longer He waits the keener is His anticipation. Anal retentive? It fits with a general inability to like things. Describable condition? Satisfaction gained from the physical repetitiveness of shading is substantial, a confirmation of self. The act is what He is. To anticipate is to be alive. I want a degree of disassociation from His more crass thoughts. ‘I’ want ‘Him’ at arm’s length, to observe from a graspable distance. His thoughts as ‘It’ has pointed out can be pretty maudlin. “He should be past all this by now.”, It suggests. It’s right. Sometimes I feel for Him. He is a child on tiptoe at the window. I watch as ‘It’ bullies Him. He is omnipotent and powerless, no contradiction here, incompatible with Himself, a seesaw of extremes, dynamic imbalance of sorts. I remember Him so small at Christmas time looking up at the dining table where the grownups played cards. Is this why He feels Himself to be at the margins? He wrote of another artist, that she seemed to be saying, “Hey! Here I am!” The silence of a drawing can be profound. ‘It’ dares the child to shout. ‘He’ feels the silence as He works. Touch it gently. Build it slowly. I am satisfied for a while.
“Why does He always try to keep at a distance from me?” It asked. “He doesn’t like you,” I replied. “You’re all the things that He doesn’t want to be. You embarrass Him, following Him around.” “But that’s pathetic, if ‘It’ was not here, neither would ‘He’ be. He cannot invent a distance that is not there? Truth is, I tell Him things that He doesn’t want to hear. Admittedly, I’m inclined to a cruel edge, and He’s afraid of me. This art stuff is where He hides.” There seemed some truth in that. The problem was not that ‘It’ would not go away, but that ‘He’ had not challenged It. When It looked Him in the eye, He was beaten.There are times when It rests and He has a little space in which to do something. It is possible for the art to retaliate, beat It back. He enjoyed making these drawings. When It is resting, needy tensions subside, mistakes can be made at leisure. Strange idea, ‘making’ a drawing. Doing a drawing? That’s clumsy. A drawing grows. Can a drawing be grown? Drawing is more like breathing? You think you’ve discovered something and it turns out to be a cliché.The titling of the birds tickles still. Tracey’s Thrush was intended to be more linear, nervously dribbled onto the paper, but the breathing was too relaxed.
He has not worked for a while. He feels no urgency. He could let his art slip away, ride his bike, buy a cardigan and slippers. The problem of judgements occupies Him. He recalls the moment when he came across the notion of the ‘universal subjective validity’ of judgements of taste. How strange to be sitting in a library reading such stuff and to feel so delighted. It confirmed a suspicion that he had carried around but could not fully articulate. His enduring inability to be joyful in the company of ‘art’ and in the company of joyful others leads him to suspect the commission of a lifelong error. It’s somehow to do with the finding of a space, and the wrong space, in which to be. There is a strangeness of being that can be controlled if a place can be found for it, where He can ‘be’ with it. Differences of opinion emerge from differences of feeling? Or is it that we each ascribe meaning to similar events with differing terms? Points of view, opinions, are everywhere, and it can look as though we know what we are talking about, because we behave as though we know what we are talking about. Does this simply follow from confidence disguising ignorance? And there is scholarship. He has begun to recognise the truth that ‘It’ offers, that He has more opinions than understandings. It is no compensation to know that such is a common human condition. It is the foundation of his loss of urgency. His art may be a mistake.
He liked the whiteness. Reading yesterday the thought occurred that his reading is like his drawing. Much of the meaning in Steiner’s writing is beyond him, but not without also some felt connection. He feels his way through passages of fog to moments of light and back to fog. Returning to this drawing today, he saw immediately the incorrectly proportioned tail, something unnoticed yesterday. Reading Grammars of Creation prompted him to buy Dante’s Divine Comedy. Lovely, and like Steiner, full of references that He needs an education in order to understand. But there is enough to hang onto. The whiteness of the bird was the only intended outcome of this drawing, a kind of relaxation in drawing for Him. The way in which the edges of light and dark cling to and reject each other surprised Him. On one side is a white abyss bordered by dark. On the other, whiteness emerges as form. Steiner writes, ‘Being is axiomatically twinned with non-being. ; to be is ‘not not to be’.’ (Grammars of Creation p.104) Just drawing really, but magic. The bird shape is a reason for the external shading. He loves the repetitiveness of shading, like the rhythm of cycling. ‘It’ noted that it was not the art that he needed, but the repeated releases of doing.
