No.15 The Atemporal Suchness of Things
In which blind contour drawings reveal a way to focus and a counterintuitive veracity
The title for No.15 comes from a line in A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde, which I’m currently reading. His thesis revolves around some long-established beliefs that there are many kinds of forgetting, some of which are beneficial and even necessary. He explores the themes of memory and forgetting as the revealing / hiding of truth in mythology and psychology, and different ways and contexts in which they are crucial to emotional well-being, to cognitive leaps, to creativity.
Indeed, imagination and poetry reside “at the seam of memory and oblivion”. Aletheia* is said to’ve given the poets the power to “‘decipher the invisible’; the atemporal suchness of things, their otherwise obscure being†.”
Last week I was reading through Learning by Heart, by by Corita Kent and Jan Steward, also a primer of sorts. In it, Corita gives an assignment for drawing everyday objects. She insists: you must forget everything you know about it, and draw it as if you’ve never seen it before; follow its contours with your eyes and allow only your observation to interpret what you see; leave your mind and memory out of the exercise altogether. It is the only way to see something as it truly is.
“Matisse said that to look at something as though you had never seen it takes great courage.” — Corita Kent
A wonderful exercise for keeping your memory and preconceptions out of a drawing is blind contour drawing, in which you look only at the subject— not at your page or what your hand is doing. This type of drawing often captures the gesture or essence of something more succinctly and powerfully than a traditional drawing, in which one is constantly editing oneself, erasing and redrawing one’s lines. That’s the interfering trickster, your fallible memory poking its nose in, saying ‘Oh, I know how this is meant to look, let me help you.’
Last evening I undertook to make a number of contour drawings of the same photograph. I did eight of them. I’ll be honest, I’m not in the habit of drawing the same observed subject over and over, but I may be in future— this exercise was not only fun, the repetition was illuminating. I began to see the ‘otherwise obscure being’ of these fancy tots emerge as I observed repeatedly, blindly tracing the shapes of what I saw.
‘Just stay still a few more minutes and we’ll take you for sweets after!’
In the first sketch (two children being photographed), I didn’t look at the page at all. In subsequent drawings I allowed myself to peek a few times in each, to keep my pen from traveling off the pages. What, at first glance, appears to two very posh and well-behaved young children begins to reveal more about them as individuals. They are fidgety, bored. The girl is nearing her demure limit, a defiant look on her face. She leans against the divan, wanting nothing so much as to be finished with this tiresome and interminable pose, to return to the nursery and normal clothes and be left alone to play. The girl isn’t looking at the camera, but to the right of the lens— at the photographer, perhaps, or her mother— imploring the girl to stand still and stop fussing with the dog— Please, just stay still a few more minutes and we’ll take you out for sweets after!
Having done the drawings and looked at the image closely, I can see much more than I had previously; a photographer also a poet, able to capture the invisible. But it took sustained looking with eyes-and-pen to reveal their boredom and listlessness, especially of the girl, more plainly than I’d previously ever noticed. The kids are clear and real to me now; I can decipher her atemporal suchness.
And I can relate to her listlessness! It’s difficult to be in the moment; I’m frequently given to distraction and ostensible multi-tasking (another form of distraction). It requires a conscious slowing-down for me to observe well, to think well. Drawing is a meditative practice in that way— like ‘getting lost’ in a book, it’s a way of undoing some of the damage of having one’s attention ruined by the woeful contemporary urge to be ‘efficient’ in all things; to be and do more more more.
I will 100% be repeating this exercise in future; will add it to the list of tricks I play on myself to focus attention— to tear it away from thoughts of the past, the future, and 37,562 other things vying for it. In some ways, we are all that mother, pleading with our attention to just stay still a few more minutes!
I’m always curious what sorts of tricks other people play on themselves to wrest some focused alone-time with their attention. Sometimes, I find the act of beginning is all it takes— show up, start doing the work, and suddenly hours have elapsed. But more often it requires some wheedling or sleight-of-mind. I’d love to hear how you herd the cats of your distracted mind— let me know in the comments, or reply to the email if that’s where you’re reading this.
Thanks so much for reading this, and a warm welcome to my new readers— it’s delightful to have you here! I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that cruel April, month of false Springs, is treating you kindly.
x Liz
*Aletheia is the personification of truth, taking the form of a goddess in Greek mythology. Her counterpart in Roman mythology is Veritas.
†Being, as in the verb to be in the present tense; a gerund. Being in the present moment requires us to forget the past, relinquish thoughts of the future; while being a human being (noun) does not.
Thank you for this thought provoking piece. Blind contour has long been a fav of mine but I never knew why. And now you’ve brought that clever quote to my attention and I’ll definitely repeat it every chance I get! For sure in an upcoming vlog and I’ll be sure to mention The Flat Files for it. I have forwarded your post to a friend who is a poet and writer but is very quiet and screen averse; she’s a book lover instead. I think she will appreciate it.