When I was nineteen years old, I found myself feeling liberated by the process of drawing onto long banners; scribbled dirtied rolls of lining paper favoured by the local DIY store.
I was not happy, I was not good; I was twisted internally as the cheap rolls, dangling in the dirt and greying at the edges. That did not matter.
I was free.
Somewhat.
Stumble seems an apt word for that, as though I lost my footing on a staircase. Of moving, semi-consciously, to place my foot on the next step; yet somehow the trajectory was flicked awry; lapses. I missed my target. Whatever that was.
I had thrown myself forth and, sickeningly, plummeted. In the freefall of the unknown, I sank grappling hook into a reassuring surface; grasped FRANTICALLY at that which was near to me; flailed for something which I could recognize.
But it was a lifeline; a safety marker: my hook caught in a motif. It did not matter what I had grasped onto; all I knew was I had grasped for something; I was no longer in freefall. I latched; I applied force; my tendons contracted, and I drew with increased force. The hairline widened to a wire; darkened; grew thicker, stronger. It knitted about itself, back, forth, back, forth, expanding and contracting at the slightest flick of the wrist, flowing freely like the undulations of some great river. I caught the bug and it accelerated: voraciously, I drew body after body after body, sort-of-bodies, feminine-looking beings, ebbed and joined like linked newspaper cut-outs, an obsessive repetition; a compulsive return to something that fundamentally, I very much felt I knew; although how, I would struggle to articulate. A signifier with which I aligned myself.
The abyss was now irrelevant; all that mattered was my tightrope…
…yet, why? Which unknown was I leaping to cover? What would the alternative have been, and why was my preferred solution a body? The process of drawing is undoubtedly a bodily gesture; the presence of my gesture would still exist whatever I drew. Yet my compulsion to map myself speaks of a wider conditioning: one which had me perceive my existence through the eyes of another, and thus miss myself entirely.
Here you are. Here...I am not so sure. I may be safe, but I am unsatisfied. The line has assembled itself into a body: mine, allegedly; semi-human, fringed, hunched and peering; mimicking the sensation of the elbows grasping frantically for one another as though flailing for lifebuoys. The figure is legless, and (for some reason) emerging, quasi-gaseous, quasi-liquid, somewhere between a chrysalis and a poured substance. The body finishes in a conical point.
This is supposed to be me, and yet it evades me. It isn't me.
My intention swerved off course at that crucial moment; that test of faith; the leap into the unknown. My fear leapt FORTH, eye-to-paper, and it was almost pinpointed – and yet, not. Mid-jump, the gesture has lost its nerve.
.
My heart throbbed sour-sick;
beaded through in acidic wet spots on the forehead,
fastening my fringe. EYES!
yes, yes, eyes, too, the unbearable
laser-power of a group of beady glances
pooling me into wax. To take the first step
not to the moon
NOT like that
onto an elevated platform,
(or plastic chair)
seemed at first impossible, then
PLUNGE with the pen!!!!
First bit
the tentative marker-pen-scrawl, grasping at straws
a tremulous form emerges
slowly, slowly, forward.
My intention is baby-fresh. It creeps forth from a cave, gingerly as a badger nosing into the open. A hairline; a whisper; a fine, self-conscious thing, it trembles inwardly as it takes its first steps
