There is a collection of Margaret Atwood's short stories called 'Murder in the Dark' published in 1994 by Virago. One of her stories, entitled 'Autobiography', was I felt a wonderful evocation of what happens when you make a drawing. You begin with a line, in this case a blue one and this very quickly becomes the things that imagination breeds as the line moves on and the image gets more complex. But as Atwood's is a very short narrative, indeed a micro story; perhaps it's easier and much better to simply present it as I first read it.
Autobiography by Margaret Atwood
'The first thing I can remember is a blue line. This was on the left, where the lake disappeared into the sky. At that point there was a white sand cliff, although you couldn't see it from where I was standing. On the right the lake narrowed into a river and there was a dam and a covered bridge, some houses and a white church. In front there was a small rock island with a few trees on it. Along the shore there were large boulders and the sawed-off trunks of huge trees coming up through the water. Behind is a house, a path running back into the forest, the entrance to another path which cannot be seen from where I was standing but was there anyway. At one point this path was wider; oats fallen from the nosebags of logger's horses during some distant winter had sprouted and grown. Hawks nested there. Once, on the rock island, there was the half-eaten carcass of a deer, which smelled like iron, like rust rubbed into your hands so that it mixes with sweat. This smell is the point at which the landscape dissolves, ceases to be a landscape and becomes something else.'
In a few sentences Atwood shows how things grow out of the mind; in her case writing moves along and as it does it creates a world. Then at some point the imaginative unfolding will stop and as an artist you are once again reminded of the reality of what you are doing. As this happens the imaginative world disappears and you are confronted by marks on paper or a memory of the reality that lay behind the fantasy, in either case you step away from what you have created and see it as the fiction it is.
I have been making imaginative visualisations of the body's interior landscapes, often beginning by taking a felt-tip pen for a walk and just seeing what it will reveal to me. In the drawing above I was fascinated to see that what had emerged was an image that might have been designed as an illustration of the interior of an early mythic human. In his text 'the Symposium', Plato has Aristophanes narrate the history of what he terms the 'Soulmates', the first humans.
“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.” Symposium, Plato
“... the primeval human was round, back and sides forming a circle; with four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. Humans could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as they pleased, and they could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on their four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when they wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the human was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which humans offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained." The answer was of course for Zeus to split them into two separate parts, which is why we spend so much of our lives searching for that 'other half' in order to feel whole again.
I'm sure Plato's thoughts, just like Margaret Atwood's were arrived at, as Yates put it, 'out of a mouthful of air', the narrative shaping itself as it came into being. As usual I didn't know what I was going to write for this post, just as I never know what a drawing is going to become and that is what makes me keep going; every day I find something new emerging and as it does it can often be a thing of wonder.
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