PEN ON PULP
Order of Elements
Our eyes take in a lot of pride when drawing with pen on paper ... when articulating our dense lines, marks, patterns ... that end up more harmonious than we imagined during gazing at the blank sheet ... Consciousness over the empty page can't see what the hand already knows ... Imagining is lesser than ... And then the marks carefully grow during a composing process ...
Our eyes to heart to mind feed on what our steady hand creates ... There are loops: hand makes a mark, eyes take it in, the taking-in produces what the next mark will be ... Deep satisfaction is fuel drawn back through our eyes ... Not just a feeling we have but a thing we consume to stay alive ...
Harmony is our practice's nerve ... Propagating shapes ... lines ... textures ... Marks placed well keep the whole from collapsing and each mark answers the next ... producing evidence of a wonderful eye-opening sense of wholeness ... Overall quality of unbroken unity ...
Lack of variety can make a composition monotonous ... so ... we always try to balance harmony with contrasts ... The harmony itself can be its own surprise ... discovering that the unfolding drawing is willing to cohere ... Crowd forming as marks ... We look at the bright blank sheet and see chaos for a minute ... and then our faculties start to create The Order ... Flowing invisible underneath is Trust earned over time ...
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Except Here
The posture asks for the body ... folding inward ... The spine curling toward an embraced thing ... Timeless surveillance middle eye locked at one shallow distance ... Something in us was created to look up ... let our gaze travel to a far edge ... A phone screen pulls it back to a fixed surface or plane ... Our stiff and aching neck wants to breathe the stillness that isn't close to rest.
The phone screen seems to offer everything ... Artificial light that so far doesn't cause skin cancer ... Crescent moon clocking with the great room it's mounted in ... Performance we watch instead of staging we make ...
That steady and low exposure to lives over edited ... while we live with dull and aching parts that may never make it onto the screens ... Yet we measure that which is inside against that which is physically outside ... A screen is a way of being everywhere ... except right here ...
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Space Without Walls
The conscious hand drags ... the compos mentis wrist commits ... the awake and alert arm is involved ... There's friction when putting pen to paper ... abrasion is information ... The fiber surface of paper pushes back just enough ... a screen will never resist ... A surface answers our intentional hand with a little weight ... so that our body knows that it's putting some work into it ...
Pulp doesn't refresh or notify ... it's a thing that can't offer us several other places to be ... A legal size sheet of paper is one place ... A screen is like a door that keeps swinging open to everywhere ... A sheet of paper is a space without walls yet the door is always shut ... Some of this calm might be nothing more than mystical ...
There's also the essential gift of slowness ... We choose to not write as fast as our racing mind wants to think ... so ... the hand holding a pen causes the mind to wait ... and the lingering is where valuable insights settle ... The screen keeps pace ... the pen makes us more drawn-out alleviating a panic attack ...
Handwriting and drawing can hold dread as easily as calm ... A letter we can't send isn't virtuous ... it's just quiet ... Paper-good ... screen-bad ... falling-ugly ... Our hand desires to reach for something that is to its core always still ...