Mid-terms are done; writing has hit a roadblock. I’m sitting at my desk trying to screw up the courage to paint.
I’ve been rereading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This morning I read a passage that jolted my painter’s sensibilities awake:
“Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people—the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, ‘next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.’ Innocence is a better world.
“…What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.”
One of the few places I find that place of unself-consciousness is when painting. Occasionally, if I wait long enough and work diligently enough, the panel ceases to be a panel and the paint ceases to be paint. I forget the radio, the day, my butt numbing on the cold basement stool. I am completely in the moment and completely unaware of myself.
Maybe if I made that moment of self-forgetfulness the aim, if my objective shifted from a finished work to what Dillard calls “innocence”, I wouldn’t drag my feet to the drawing board.
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