on feeling each gesture

every mark counts

crossposted from this thread

I. When I lived in sf I took a figure drawing class that turned out to be a philosophy/meditation on creativity class. For 3 months out of 6, all we did was make marks with our charcoal sticks. We were instructed not to draw objects, but to respond to the auditory & visual stimuli (we listened to music throughout class and had a model in the center of the studio) with our entire bodies and let the reaction unfold through our limbs onto the newsprint. The focus was to be fully resonant and through our resonance make a pure expression, seen as a charcoal mark. Halfway through class we'd break for cake and tea, and then tape our favorite marks up for critique. It amazed me how some marks clearly held more intention and emotion than others. The difference between scritch-scratching with your charcoal stick vs feeling deeply into the sensation & movement of charcoal across paper. Once you have mastered resonance in each mark, subsequent drawings became infinitely more beautiful.

II. When I took piano classes as a kid, my instructor kept returning to a very simple exercise— the motion of my fingers hitting the keys. Scales were a nice way to practice this, but the point was not to learn key signatures but to practice the fluidity of a turn of my wrist, the smoothness of a finger landing on each note. Each finger, my teacher said, should land with the softness of a cloud. This intention and technique is what differentiates a learned student from a novice when they both play a simple song.

III. All this to say that I have been thinking about this kind of lesson in various other areas of my life— the fluidity vs urgency/jerkiness of movement as I get water or put away groceries; the moment-to-moment presence, clarity, and connection as I hang out with my friends or family; the way my mouth forms words and the quality of vocabulary I choose; the way my fingers hits the keyboard as I type; each breath; the moral clarity vs ambient shittiness of saying something that doesn't feel connected to real emotion or is lightly trespassing a boundary or value I hold... It feels like there is a meta lesson here about existing in beauty; something about putting care into each increment before worrying about building a larger masterpiece.

I also talked about this on my vlog!