IN THE DETAILS
Lately I’ve tried to focus on slow movement. Not as in ‘the slow food movement’, but literally slowing down, stopping to look, smell the flowers, whatnot. This began as a exercise in strengthening my powers of observation, which have deteriorated over the years. I used to be quite good at catching the fine detail of a scene, visually or otherwise. In high school, my art teacher praised my ability to render subtle degrees of shading. She said it bordered on obsessive (it always took me three times as long to finish a piece than it did my classmates — if I ever finished it, that is) but otherwise was impressive. The compliment stuck with me, but the skill did not. I look over the drawings I’ve done recently, and I realize they are primarily line drawings, with no shading. I’ve stopped filling in the detail. Only the outline remains; the rest is empty space, devoid of story.
I saw the new Sherlock Holmes film the other night. Holmes is successful as a detective because he notices everything, and everyone else notices nothing. Chalk on a lapel, soot under a fingernail, scratches on a keyhole – strung together these details reveal a story, and they ultimately solve the case. What’s fun about reading a Holmes novel is trying to catch these details before he does, and patch together the story before his big reveal. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s predecessor was a writer named Wilkie Collins. His book The Moonstone set the standard for all future detective novels in that it posited a world in which true “mystery” does not exist: all problems can be solved through the application of logic and careful observation. Stitching together the pieces is the truly hard part, but once you do, the mystery evaporates: Mrs So-and-So killed her husband’s mistress with a pipe in the library. There are no loose ends. Case closed.
I believe in mystery. In fact, I rely on it. It makes the world much more interesting. Whitespace is just as important as detail, perhaps more so – any art professor will tell you that. Still, in order to utilize the full potential of whitespace you need to understand it. It can’t just be blank; it’s got to be purposeful. Which is not to say it has to lack mystery. I’m reading Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination right now, and on page 49 he quotes Hemingway: “if the writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.” You’ve got to know what you’re leaving out for it to count. Whatever I may think of Hemingway, I agree with his assessment. Knowing there is a mystery there, choosing to acknowledge it by leaving it unaddressed and unsolved, builds a significantly more fascinating story than one in which everything lines up in neat little rows.
So, coming back around the long way –
Though the little line drawings I do now contain mysterious blank space, that space isn’t interesting in the least, because I never bothered to notice what was inside there in the first place. Same with plain old day-to-day observation: if I hadn’t noticed the forty-odd birds perched on the wires outside my window an hour ago, I wouldn’t have noticed just now that they’re all gone. That transformation matters. The scene has changed, the story is different. Or rather, it finally exists. The absence of the birds has made the grey sky brighter, bigger, more lonely. I miss the little birds; they were good company.
So why a video of a churning oil derrick? I taped that when I was driving from Houston back to Austin the other day. At first I taped the rig from afar, it’s dipping beak and flexing joints all contained in the frame. Really peaceful to watch, actually. And you can hear the sound it makes as it does this, a constant iron hum. But then I got up close, stood right next to the counterweights and watched them roll over, and I heard something else: the sound of a sinking ship, a great groaning where the arm reaches the top of its turn, and comes down again. This sound absolutely captivated me. Standing in the mud next to this big machine off of Highway 71, I thought only of ships in the sea, drowning. Maybe that’s morbid, but that’s what I thought of. The video is noisy, but if you get the volume at the right level and listen very closely, you can make it out.
If I hadn’t pulled over when I saw that (and believe me it was tricky, because everyone is bolting down that highway at 80 miles an hour, and I had to make a few sketchy u-turns to get over to the rig) it would have been just another derrick dotting the Texas landscape. Now I’ve got all these photographs, and video too, and I’ve got the colors of it in my head, and that creepy creaking sound. And I’ve got a great new idea for a drawing, and a little story to tell here.
No Comments Yet