Here are some diary drawings I made while listening to episode one and episode two the new Draw Together podcast from my friend Wendy MacNaughton. In some ways, I find these audio experiments more soothing and more interesting than the show: there’s nothing to look at, so you focus on your own lines, and feel free to diverge… (These were done with my magic brush pen.)
Here are some diary pages I drew while listening to Alison Gopnik talk about her research and her books The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter on the podcast The Ezra Klein Show. Like Klein, I despise most parenting books, especially the “hey bro” tones of most of those aimed at dads, but Gopnik has not only helped me think differently about my kids, she’s helped me think differently about my own creative practice.
Gopnik was talking about childhood as evolution’s solution to explore-exploit tradeoffs and how children and adult are different kinds of creatures. The child mostly explores, the adult mostly exploits. (Children, she says are the R&D departments for the human race.) Then she brought up the octopus. The octopus has a split kind of brain. There’s a big brain in their heads, exploiting, basically, and then there are lots of little brains in their tentacles, exploring.
So, my thought is that we could imagine an alternate evolutionary path by which each of us was both a child and an adult. So imagine if your arms were like your two-year-old, right? So that you are always trying to get them to stop exploring because you had to get lunch. I suspect that may be what the consciousness of an octo is like.
After she said that, I thought, you’ve just described an artist.
The octopus has intelligence in its tentacles. When an artist (or a two-year-old) is drawing, there is intelligence in their fingers. The hand is moving beyond what the brain is telling it to do. The brain is being told as much by the fingers as the fingers are being told by the brain.
Later in the conversation, Gopnik says, “Going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake.” This was the very advice of the artist Corita Kent: “Borrow a kid.”
A podcast episode well worth your time.
One result of the pandemic is that I’m actually able to attend author events at the same frequency I did before I had children. Last week I watched Edward Carey discuss writing and drawing his re-telling of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale, The Swallowed Man (and one of my favorite reads of last spring), while highlighting treasures from the Ransom Center here in Austin, Texas. (You can watch the whole talk on YouTube.) Here are my notes:
It’s been one year since Jason Polan died. I am re-reading my diary entry from August 8, 2018, the last time I saw him. It is no coincidence that seeing him made me think about seeing — he was one of the great see-ers of our generation, always looking, always seeing.
I have been practicing a lot of Debussy on the piano, and read a letter he wrote to his friend, quoted in Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise:
I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun…. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen….”
Jason’s work smelled of the sun, and if it ever smelled like a lamp, it smelled like a lamp in Taco Bell: absolutely delicious.
If you don’t know his work, watch this video, narrated by his friend, Fritz Swanson, for the new site by UNIQLO, which features a letter from Jason’s mother. Jen Bekman also wrote a remembrance at 20×200.
Then pick up a Uniball Vision Elite Bold and a Strathmore 4×6 pad, take a walk, and draw what you see.
And be nice to people.
I was putting together a climbing dome for my kids out in the yard a few days ago (it’s December in Texas, you can still get a sunburn outside) and there were two kinds of nuts I had to distinguish between, and I thought, “How many damned kinds of nuts are there, anyways?” Many, it turns out, so I drew a bunch of them in my diary. Now I can name nuts like Harlan Pepper.
I copied those nuts from a diagram I found on the internet, much like I copied this timeline of composers a few years ago. It’s not enough, for me, to just print out a diagram and paste it in my diary. I need to copy it by hand, slowly, to really look at it and let the information sink in. Copying is how I learn, it’s a way to understand what’s really going on, and drawing is a way of slowing down long enough to really look at something. (It’s like I said in Keep Going: “Slow down and draw things out.”)
Here’s a drawing I made when I was trying to understand the moon phases. I thought I had it figured out, until I was playing with the Sundial app on my phone and realized that, duh, when the moon is full, it’s got the full sun shining on it from the other side of the earth, so lunar noon, when it’s at its peak, is at the opposite time of day from solar noon. (I think?) Again, drawing helped me understand:
If you draw something, no matter how mundane the subject, no matter how badly, you really look at the thing, and therefore, you remember it better.
If you want to remember something, try drawing it.
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