Journal notes remind me that it’s a year to the day since a health mishap. It was undetected in the moment but revealed hours later, a sentence at a time amidst mounting incredulity, as attempts to communicate stumbled.
Slow typing and speech impediments might seem enough of a shock to cause upset, but it was the assault on fine motor skills that was the source of greatest concern in those first few days. Making things being so bound to my self image.
A year on, after a session in class this afternoon trying to encourage students to draw with more exploratory ambition, I find myself remembering how it was my unrecognisable hand writing that truly did me in for a brief period last year. So here I am feeling extremely grateful that it was a brief symptom I recovered from within the first month.
Let us not forget the importance of the bond between thinking and action. Embodied knowledge sent from hand to paper along the pencil conduit.
I now began to see the white surface of the paper, on which I was going to draw, in a different way. From being a clean flat page it became an empty space. Its whiteness became an area of limitless, opaque light, possible to move through but not to see through. I knew that when I drew a line on it or through it I should have to control the line, not like the driver of a car, on one plane: but like a pilot in the air, movement in all three dimensions being possible.
Yet, when I made a mark, somewhere beneath the near ribs, the nature of the page changed again. The area of opaque light suddenly ceased to be limitless. The whole page was changed by what I had drawn just as the water in a glass tank is changed immediately you put a fish in it. It is then only the fish that you look at. The water merely becomes the condition of its life and the area in which it can swim.
Then, when I crossed the body to mark the outline of the far shoulder, yet another change occurred. It was not simply like putting another fish into the tank. The second line altered the nature of the first. Whereas before the first line had been aimless, now its meaning was fixed and made certain by the second line. Together they held down the edges of the area between them, and the area, straining under the force which had once given the whole page the potentiality of depth, heaved itself up into a suggestion of solid form. The drawing had begun.
Berger On Drawing – John Berger
But more importantly, beyond this self indulgent post, let us not forget that organisations like the Stroke Association need our donations.
Be well and look after each other.