Corvids
This text takes the form of a letter, written to a close friend and collaborator named S-----. It focuses on two ideas: drawing and grief. Because it is written to a friend with a shared history of growing up and going to school in Ottawa, several (partially redacted) names are given without preamble.
When I mention T-- I am referring to our high school art teacher. When I mention C---, I am referring to S-----’s step-dad. When I mention N---,I am referring to S-----’s partner.
Dear S-----,
I have owed you a letter since September. I have also been writing you this letter since September. You asked me how school was going, and it’s been because of school that I’ve taken so long to get back to you.
To answer your question about what I’ve been working on, I can say that I’ve been drawing. The good ones take hours but they feel like they shape up quickly, at least in comparison to the animations we worked on for the last two years. I spend the first hour trying to establish if the drawing will have anything worthwhile to pursue, and then I spend the next few hours developing the drawing while struggling not to obliterate whatever made it interesting in the first place. I probably don’t have to tell you that I am often unsuccessful at this second bit. Most of my studio right now is a discard pile. I remember T-- telling me once that drawing stayed fresh – like if you looked at an old Master drawing it would look like the marks had just been laid into the page yesterday. I can tell when I’ve made a bad drawing when it goes stale.
I’ve been working entirely from observation but staying largely abstract. The practice of it has been diagnostic - I’m using these drawings to figure out what I want to do next with animation. There’s this famous Paul Klee quote about how drawing is ‘taking a line for a walk’[1]. I wonder if animating is making a line perform a magic trick. I suppose that a line already is a kind of magic trick once you learn that a line is always an abstraction. It took me two years of being instructed to ‘draw inside the figure’ to grasp that a body didn’t start with an outline, and to understand that a contour was only a graphic indication of shifts in colour and tone.
I remember a printout that T-- gave us (the one that he’d written out by hand and photocopied) that described drawing as a series of problems that are progressively built and corrected over the course of its making. As much as our high school life drawing classes were an epistemic training camp, it feels paradoxical to have learned that truthful visual information is constructed entirely through error. It's also funny to me that these lessons in drawing promised better seeing when my own physical ability to see gets creakier every year. I had an overdue eye-doctor appointment last week and I (predictably) need a stronger prescription. My shoulder is also protesting the recent uptick in its use - it’s been a rude reminder that every drawing is a statement of your skill, body, and attention in that moment. I wonder if the more my shoulder seizes up the less I’ll actually see.
I used to think that my drawings gave away the problems that I have with my eyesight. I have one moderately bad eye, and one cooperative one, and the discrepancy between my left and right eye causes me to have trouble with depth perception. Whether for this reason (or as coincidence) the imagery that I’ve always been attracted to is shallow, and the drawings that I’ve been making lately form a universe that’s maybe three inches deep. I remember coming across an article on Francis Bacon while I was in undergrad which argued that Bacon had a neurological disorder which caused gross image distortion[2]. This article described a patient with the disorder (called dysmorphopsia) who produced portraits that were uncannily like Bacon’s. This discovery temporarily deflated my interest in his work, but now it makes me think there must be a parallel universe where Francis Bacon sincerely meant to make an innocuous and traditional portrait of the Pope, and that his branding as an iconoclast was a complete accident.
My dad’s vision was notably worse than mine, although poor depth perception was something that I shared with him. His eyesight was poor in that one of his eyes fed little to no information to his brain. I don’t remember if his bad eye qualified as blind but I know its issues had something to do with a spinal nerve that got knocked the wrong way when he was born. When he died, the stuff of his that I got the most attached to was a series of his high school drawings that we found when we cleared out his storage lockers. The best ones were watercolours of birds - my dad never really got past a fixation on Robert Bateman or Audubon. His drawings were also distinctly flat. I don’t have the training or evidence to argue that this was because of his eyesight but I still do wonder if these drawings were the output from his own flat universe.
I should admit that I have been stuck in writing to you, even though I’ve been thinking of you since our informal convention of the dead-dads-club the last time I saw you before you left for Norwich. I realise now that this was also the first time I saw you since C---- died.
I have wrestled with this letter because all I can really offer is a story about myself and pass it on to you like a personal and rudimentary grief-map. All the map says is this is where I was, this is where I went, and this is where I am. You might go somewhere similar or you might go somewhere different. If you are where I think you are, then you are probably still feeling this loss in an immediate way and probably will for a while. The first months after a death for me have been a weird in-between where you can pretend to turn a corner and settle back into your life, but you do this while the absence is still taking up enormous mental real estate.
This time last year when I was in the first few months after my dad died, I was grappling with his death in three specific ways: the first, which I’ve already told you about, was in re-watching shows that I’d watched with him, the most notable and helpful one being Dead Like Me. The second was by going on a series of doomed Hinge dates where at some point I would compulsively mention that my dad had recently died. The third, which I may or may not have told you about, was that I seriously considered taking up church again.
I think this was something that my mom did when her dad died too. At least, her (and my) short lived attendance at an Anglican church in Kanata was in the year following my Granddad’s death. This attendance was in conflict with my dad’s dedicated and performed spiritual skepticism. I was well instructed by him on the theory of evolution and the Scopes Monkey trials. I have this vague memory of being in his car and listening to recordings of school board hearings from the US where debates on the inclusion of ‘intelligent design’ in school curricula were taking place. This was during a period when most of the books around his house were written by either Richard Dawkins or Douglas Adams. Once, a friend invited me to attend a summer camp with her that was run by the United Church, and when my dad dropped us off he mockingly yelled out “have fun singing about JEEEE-sus” just before leaving us there for the week.
Religion was also a point of contention at his funeral. When we surveyed his family for what they wanted us to read on their behalf, my grandmother sent a passage of scripture but self-consciously acknowledged that my dad would have hated the Christian undertones. In the eulogy I gave, I ducked the issue by reading a passage from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. The most disrespectful guests in attendance were crass evangelicals who gave improvised speeches about how he was ‘with God now’, but knowing their relationship to my dad, this was spoken less out of affection and more out of a grubby desire to have the last word in an ideological fight with a dead man.
Given all this, my impulse to join a flock was a contradictory one. My agnostic-white-woman’s grab bag of spirituality generally contains the following: failed attempts at meditation, a battered copy of Who Has Seen the Wind, and an amateur fascination with 20th century psychoanalysis that clashes with my immature and lifelong resistance to therapy. Problematically, one of the lasting effects of my dad dying was that I started to get recurring dreams in which he would appear and contradict that he was ever dead in the first place. It was all a horrible, hilarious mistake, he insists! Also, he wants his stuff back! These dreams typically end with him dying again, sometimes violently, but sometimes gently and within a pre-determined timeframe. Like, we’ll all somehow know that he’s going to die again in three days, but in the meantime we’ll get to have a proper chat. These dreams were (and are) darkly comic to me because I imagine my dad’s ghost in a purgatorial trap of his own making. If his spirit were ever to try to communicate with me, his living self would have foreclosed any ability I might have to take his visitations seriously. It would be a betrayal, even, to think of these messages as anything other than my unconscious mind cleaning house.
In the end I didn’t end up going to church. I settled for taking up long-distance running again and subscribing to an email newsletter for Quakers in Canada. I know that my delineation of science and belief is a false one, and some of the most affecting experiences I've had fence-sit the boundary of the explained and unexplainable. Do you remember that the neighbourhood around our old high school is supposedly known for its crow population? Crows are apparently very social and are known to grieve - I remember being told about this in grade 11 biology but by this point I had caught a few local crow funerals before I knew what they were. The ones I remember were silent but massive. I have this mental image of going outside after class and then abruptly noticing that a tree by the teachers’ parking lot was occupied by hundreds of crows sitting vigil. It’s almost too on the nose to have the most symbolically morbid animal also grieve so visibly, and I’m hard-pressed to reconcile the science of this phenomenon with its mysticism.
I’ve still been thinking about how you said the homesickness you’ve been feeling is different- that it’s not just a feeling of wanting to be home so much as it is wanting to be home in a different time. When you told me this a few weeks ago I said that this seemed connected to witnessing Ottawa’s continued and frustrating sprawl, but I underestimated the number of ways the city changes beyond its use of land and its glacial political machinations. I was in Ottawa this weekend and the city was in visible motion: there were fall migrations taking place and I caught a small murmuration of starlings over the highway. I think there is also something to be said for Ottawa being a city built on a river, and because of a river. Maybe a city built on a river is never the same city twice.
Send my best to N--- and let me know how your project is going whenever you get the chance. If you ever want to write about C----, know that I would be happy to learn more about him, but also know that you owe me no obligation.
-A
[1] Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 16.
[2] Safran et al, 581.
Sources:
Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook. New York ;: F.A. Praeger, 1960.
Safran, Avinoam B., et al. “A Neurological Disorder Presumably Underlies Painter Francis Bacon Distorted World Depiction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, 2014, pp. 581–581.