[Apologies in advance for any typos or other errors in this or the previous post. I mislaid my spectacles en route to Darkest East Southamptonshire and the world of words is very blurry.]
In Babel, human ingenuity, co-operation, bravado and curiosity are rewarded, by a fearful and vengeful Deity, with the damnation of incommunication, fragmenting their solidarity and driving the population to the corners of the world. It's a perplexing moral story, especially following soon after the Flood. Humankind seems incapable of learning to obey. Drown them and they want to build towers. Give them a thousand languages and they speak, write and read in them, leaving behind libraries of good and ill knowledge and ideas. Perpetually exercising that pesky free will, they seem always to invent new ways to affront those who command respect and obedience. May their memory be forever honoured.
This blog, an idea born in a whimsical conversation and pursued as a pragmatic solution, has actually proved to be a useful and sound tool and vehicle. (With a more resiliant cripple-spirit (h/t Carol) a lot more of my reading and thinking and ranting and research during the long hiatus between terms would have made it on to the blog, but I was more inclined to lie around feeling sorry for myself and being too doped to think in sentences.) Its fragmentary and dilettantish structure and entirely uneven tone and incoherent subject matter suit my mentality perfectly.
More seriously, the interwebs are the modern inheritor of the traditons of the broadside ballad and the samizdat, the place (at the time of writing) where an individual of modest means and no objective power can speak of any matter to a wide audience, can forge alliances and resistance movements, share.information and speak their own truths without the mediation of any form of authority. (No one may read, watch or listen, of course, but that's their right too.) As such. I may put my web-site building head on and actually re-locate to a fully realised site, something which would also resolve the issue of copyright which haunts this place. How electronic media would connect to what I still regard as the core activity of drawing has yet to be seen, but there is some relationship which might be developed which addresses both sides of my 'equation', of image and audience, art and function.
But this is, always and in the end, about the pencils and what they let me do. I never expected that, that it would be pencils. I thought I was probably a painter. Turns out, all I really want and need (and it does have a strong element of physical craving to it) to do is document that wild territory on the borders of Reason and Imagination with my box of pencils.
No comments:
Post a Comment