I’m having a hard time pulling the last few weeks—or even last few days—together this week, so no big concepts today. Even though one of the joys of the past few weeks has been goal-undirected immersion in concepts. I’ve read more for my PhD research in the last 3 weeks than in at least the month before that (longer-term joys rather than shorter-term diving into classwork). I’ve been in the park a lot and noticed it’s more than deciduous green. It’s been a very wordsy, a very quiet, and a very visual time, only the first of which is normal for me.
I overthink everything and value, often too much, precision and completeness. To help with this, I’ve been taught (thank you!) not to play catch up on habits, writing, logging, old plans, all that junk when I’ve fallen out of the routine. Just pick up where you are. Now.
In that spirit, here are some glimpses from the New Year:
My 2021 Vision, Visually
I signed up for a 31-days-of-January “Sketchbook Revival” group. The last time I had a sketchbook was for an art class in high school—and I loved art history and digital art, but I couldn’t do portraits or painting at all—or so I told myself, then it was true. Truer, perhaps, to say that I had a painful narrative around visual art, felt like I could never reach competence in it, and thus didn’t take the emotional risk.
I decided to make “sketchbook” polysemous (okay, word nerding aside, I mean here “having many and broad meaning(s)”). To permission myself. In fact, my firm plan was to get into the habit of making a mind and/or concept map of something I was learning about every day… and the above is what resulted, starting with “Breath” as a seed word (in retrospect).
In an intentional push against shame I shared it with some trusted friends, and we connected better and started and shifted long conversations between us, to a person. I’m willing to say that I’m proud, not of the work or even the process, but of opening myself up to try this. Maybe it seems like a tiny thing, and maybe it is. But in the last 10 months I’ve learned the tiny things aren’t woo-woo at all.
Change Contexts, Change Your Mind
Here’s yesterday’s work. It’s based off of the neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawings of the brain (specifically the first two images here — I just did an image search, so I can’t recommend or not the associated article). I started wanting to imitate one image, ended up mixing the two…and then realizing afterwards that I made a brain out of an eye, which, hey, isn’t far wrong. I notice that my resistance was that this is scientific imagery: what if I draw something that doesn’t look like a real network of neurons? Aren’t dendrites not supposed to branch more than two ways, or form closed loops?! Oh no! These are touching!
Then my science training flickered on and I went back to the data…and busted that mental model, happily. The drawing got easier and more joyful. The emotions flowed easier and more widely. When I relaxed, the dendrites started looking more like “real” dendrites. When I played, started inserting little fine details of dancers and lovers and slugs on the branches, ones no-one else is going to find unless I show you, it got even more true to life (and for once I do mean natural verisimilitude, not “that’s the human condition!”).
Where this might lead…or not.
This Sturm of words, images and rewriting narratives has me feeling and thinking about craft, intimacy with our work, and the intimacy of connection through studying and appreciating others’ workmanship. Having played Boggle for the first time in more than 5 years on New Year’s Eve (I needed to make an auditory-sensory-friendly version first!) and finally watched the recordings of an October translation conference, I was marinating in words as craft beyond language. That’s all mixing with composing in and literarily translating ancient languages, and just maybe one part of my “orals exam”—the next big step in my PhD path—is starting to shape itself around ideas of the craft and process of language—beyond “classical rhetoric,” a way weaker version of what I mean, and towards representations of life and art—ekphrasis (descriptions of visuals and art in words, or word-painting or sculpting, as I think of it), the topology of words and the worlds we create and describe with them.
So concepts popped up after all—but I need to hear what I tell others and let them mix and flow and go bottom-to-top, not just top-to-bottom, in this mind-world-word dance.
Play around this week. Find some spaces in your head and let them jam together.
I’ll leave you with my table-composition exercise (I’ve become the official food photographer in the house during quarantine…??) and see you next week.
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