SECOND MONDAY
EXERCISE: draw ten leaves.
THOREAU: ‘An honest man [and woman] has hardly need to count more than his [her] ten fingers, or in extreme cases he[she] may add his [her] ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, let your affairs be as two and three… keep your accounts on your thumb nail.’ WALDEN
ROOTS – I shine a strawberry root, a leek with its roots onto the wall and draw them. Something grows into this barren underground place.
RADICAL – can these 10 days be a time for delving to the root and coming up different, stretched, expanded. Radical political, economic and social changes are taking place presently – I find them disturbing, distressing. They seem ungrounded. I see grounds for drastic turnabouts but in radically different directions.
I turn to Jeanette Winterson and I am calmed:
‘I like to live slowly. Modern life is too fast for me… One of the casualties of progress is peace and quiet.’
‘Art is large and it enlarges you and me. To a shrunk-up world its vistas are shocking. Art is the burning bush that both shelters and make visible our profounder longings. Through it we see ourselves in metaphor. Art is metaphor. Metaphor is transformation”.
