People I Have Known I - XV
Thursday, December 12, 2002
*
A couple of weeks ago Raymond and I were sitting and talking and I started drawing
in ink, or doodling, more like it, rectangles on the back of a piece of scratch
paper. Each rectangle had one or more squares or rectangles inside of it, and
each set of squares or rectangles was a variation on the previous set, kind of
a next step in shifting arrangements of squares or rectangles.
The arrangements showed a kind of progression, maybe a kind of animation.
Lloyd pointed out that it
could be read as “an abstract rendition of one of those slo-mo drops of water.”
That wasn’t my intention, but it works. I was looking at the shapes as flat
planes dividing and rejoining, moving across a larger plane. I thought of sheets
of color and colored glass, and I also thought of slow waving hand gestures
and something blowing in the air.
This little series could’ve continued indefinitely but I stopped at fifteen.
That seemed like something pushed far enough to be beyond meaningful, but not
so far beyond meaningful that it is meaningless. I think that last sentence
I just wrote, just before this one, about being beyond meaningful but not meaningless,
is something that interests me, but I’ve never said that before and now I’ll
be thinking about it.
I drew all the rectangles pretty quickly in HTML using Dreamweaver and stashed them, commented out,
on my weblog. I quickly decided on green and yellow but didn’t like the Oakland
A’s association, and so thought about changing the color. However, I’m always
changing colors or shapes to avoid associations, and so decided to stay with
the colors and see if I could find a way to get beyond the association, as if
by staying with the association it would be too obvious and that would push
beyond the association.
I thought that I’d move one drawing to the front page each day I flipped,
and that if nothing else was happening I’d at least have a simple drawing to
show everyday, which would allow me to coast, I thought, for two weeks. Other
than that it was all pretty simple, and no great shakes.
Except on the third day, realizing that I had two weeks of drawings, and knowing
that I can pretty easily use drawings as a writing prompt, I thought that if
I wrote a little something for each of the drawings, one everyday, that after
two weeks I’d have a nice little series of drawings and writings, a kind of
finished piece. This seems to be a method that is working for me pretty well
these days, resulting in quite a few small bodies
of work. Through weblogging I’ve become a firm believer in the practice
that if you write (or draw) a little everyday over time it adds up to a whole
lot of something that could be meaningful.
I don’t know why I started writing about people that I have known. I know
that on the third day, fairly late at night, someone from long ago popped into
my head and I wrote a short sentence about that person. So from there I thought
that all I had to do was think of someone I used to know and think of one thing
to say about them. What surprised me is some of the people I remembered and
what I had to say. It also surprised me how many memories I had from the 70’s,
which means, more or less, high school years, a period I don’t look back on
too fondly.
Why was I thinking about that period? I don’t know, but if I hadn’t gone through
this little exercise I wouldn’t know that this is something I actually give
some thought to. And there a number of people that I made myself remember late
at night when I wrote these pieces that I haven’t thought about much in a long
time, and I think that was a good ting for me to do. It was a kind of taking inventory, and acknowledging the memory, presence, and effect of people on me that prior to this experience appeared not to exist.
People
I Have Known I-XV is now compiled on a single page, combining the writing with each drawing.
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