The gesture of line grants me three primary abilities.
[1] First and foremost, the ability to hide at will.
I want to return now to Jean-Luc Nancy’s statement that ‘one draws – one traces or extracts – in order to show’. (2013:xii). The methodology of line as I perceive it (of a poetic entanglement of abstracted drawing and writing) does indeed reach out to render something manifest.
I am loathe to avoid depicting the corporeal form altogether: there remains something undeniably bodily about my drawing – a tooth here, a tongue there, a writhing amoeba squirming in a bell jar. GAWK AT ME IN MY RELUCTANT BELL JAR, FINE! (Plath 1963/2005). I present a fragmented corporeality. Meanwhile, the gesture of mark-making (a bodily gesture in itself) grants me a level of remove; a degree of elusiveness within which I may conceal myself, as though hiding behind a curtain in a childhood game of hide-and-seek. If equips me to embrace, reclaim, maybe even weaponise the spectre of being that lacks. How to embrace nothingness; an unwillingness to appear apart from on one’s own terms?
Line is a process wrought with possibility. Line delineates, but it also has the power to evaporate and to remove, remove a part of itself or remove parts of that which it describes. Line is ever disappearing, and line keeps moving. Line abstracts and obfuscates. Line suggests, without always contouring, indeed, nor fully exposing the actualizing substance of what it represents. The line giveth and the line taketh away. The gesture of the line allows me some agency from the constraints of the corporeal body: for if the line itself; the very gesture of it, the potential of its becoming, marks my existence.
The line; the mark itself; that is my standpoint, where I look from nothingness and into beyond. It is the gesture of that line that enables me to embrace that nothing, for if I stand on my chair and leap, and embrace the all-encompassing terror…I burst. I am free.
[2] Secondly, line gives me the ability to play.
I present to you a manicured reptilian hand; a twist of phrase; a riddle; an otherworldly trill; a scar down a page that is ever expanding. I will give you a part of myself, a fragment, bit-by-bit, but not the whole, that is not yours. A coping mechanism; a glib fluctuation between survival and play; the ownership (and subsequent negotiation) of my own neurosis. Ownership. That word is crucial. The desire to play hide-and-seek; to conceal and reveal fragments and clues, is a form of agency. I am the one who runs this game. I am not a liar, I am unreliable.
I peer onto myself. I stick to myself. I eat myself.
[3] Lastly, and crucially, the line grants me the ability to speak.
I think in bursts: blood-filled, frantic, coloured in/in between nail-bit days of silence on a knife edge. Rituals are everything at times like this. That’s why the mark is so important to me, the direct communication of a drawn-out line that comprises letter and image as an inseparable mimetic language. It is immediate.
The peaks and troughs of my mental health invariably dictate the terms of these bursts of creative energy encompassing excitement, thrill, fear, despair. They are over as soon as they begin, and that has always been the first and foremost reason why drawing and writing became entrenched in how I perceive the world, process it, and respond with the creation of artwork.
When I first read Hélène Cixous’ ground-breaking text The Laugh of the Medusa, it was a thrilling relief to read her describe compulsive and unstoppable creative outpourings in manner of bursts. In her rallying cry for women to write, and thus write themselves into being, she wrote of a wondrous creative energy both intimidating and wrought with possibility – an energy she urged women not to suppress, for it had the power to frighten dominating patriarchal capitalist forces, and to enable women to establish themselves.
‘Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint half my world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts?' (Cixous 1976:876)
What is the meaning, indeed? I felt less alone with the notion, as… My obsessive bouts of passion, neurotically supercharged, aggrandised, painfully self-aware, could be viewed in a different light: as thrillingly, terrifyingly unstoppable.
Writing on laughter and comedy, Bergson (1900) wrote of the 'closed' circle that is invoked when a group share a private joke. 'However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.' This element of secrecy and complicity operates within line also as humour is evoked to dodge, play with and evade the gaze. I surface partially in a series of private jokes which I may or may not deign to let you in on.
