A diary collage made out of a guidebook from The Whitney
School and the seasons
Last night my wife and I re-watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The movie deals with time: how a prisoner does his time, how time brings back old wounds, and how we can use time to rewrite our stories. One device director Alfonso Caurón uses to show the passage of time is shots of the Whomping Willow in each season. (Stitched together in the image above.)
For me, the Harry Potter movies (I’ve only actually read book 7) have always been the story of going to school. The story starts when the summer is ending, and the story ends when summer begins again. Growing up, I was always like Harry: my life tied to the school year, I dreaded the summer and couldn’t wait for fall to come. The death of summer = the hope of new adventures. (Books, girls, etc.)
Before I went to bed last night, I came across this perfect passage in Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy:
I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game.
School is about to start here in Texas, but summer will continue to blaze for at least another two months. I wonder what time feels like to people who grew up here. I’ve lived in this seasonless place for over a decade — for 11 years I’ve lived in a constant state of seasonal disorientation. (And deprivation.) I want to feel that feeling again, of how “fall sharpens pencils.”
The seasons run the place
Coming home to spring
It’s often hard for me to return home from California, a place of such obvious beauty, still so foreign to me. This past trip, I was obsessed with the smell of eucalyptus driving down Highway 1 and the surprisingly lulling sound of the fog horns on the Golden Gate Bridge. They blew almost every night of our trip, like some great sleeping monster snoring out in the Bay.
But Texas has rolled out the red carpet weather for us — the snapdragons have bloomed in my wife’s garden, and the trees in the front yard are “coming into leaf… like something almost being said.”
The creative learning spiral
This is a diagram I copied out of Mitchel Resnick’s book, Lifelong Kindergarten. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how essential it is to stop thinking of our creative lives in terms of linear progress and think of them instead as cyclical, seasonal, and non-linear.
It’s an idea that’s been essential to my own practice, and one I’ve fiddled with in various visual representations. Here’s a page from Show Your Work!:
And here’s a blackout:
Here’s another doodle from my diary, where I’ve mapped some of the concepts from Resnick’s book onto the various parts of the spiral. (You’ll note my extra steal/share annotations.)
By now you might have noticed that the spiral is similar to the feedback loop of the Scientific Method or Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.” What’s essential is that the spiral doesn’t have an end — it is a lifelong spiral.
This morning I watched a livestream of Resnick presenting in Reggio Emilia, the Italian birthplace of the famous educational approach. Resnick talked about how it was a visit to Reggio 20 years ago + a (fantastic) book by Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, that brought him to the idea that the ways we learn in kindergarten should be “spread through a lifetime.” (I just got done reading The Art of Tinkering, a book from Resnick’s bibliography, which seems to me a catalog of artists who have retained a lifelong kindergarten-like sense of play.)
Thinking more and more about the spiral, I remembered a drawing I drew for someone who asked me a question about how I balanced creating and consuming:
Another endless learning spiral…