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| DOODLES
ARE DRAWINGS I’m on the phone, the conversation pulses along and my hand constantly moves – pen in hand I draw circles, connecting them to one another, a long chain of circles. Triangles jut out along their sides and the page erupts with thoughtless, thought-full, not thought about doodles. Why are they called doodles? It is drawing, fast, free and unfettered. “It happened on a Wednesday, I couldn’t stand the way he treated me.” A snippet of talk jabbing at my ear – I respond of course adding my thoughts to the back and forth conversation but half my brain is engrossed in the tangle of lines erupting, surfacing on the page – the patterns, the starts and stops of ideas. So different than my usual drawing. Words mingled in among the random marks, shapes and dots. I move the paper around , catch the other side and start the progression up the side – oblong shapes with pea like forms inside. I color a few in, “how will I move on,” she whispers into the phone. I hear her urgency, press a dark mark into the page and let the blackness of it grow. The doodle, the drawing is now dominating the page and I say gently but firmly back, it will come to you, you will know what to do.” My hand keeps moving, keeps pressing, works over the same mandala-like shape for a couple of minutes – a record player stuck in the same groove on a record. She talks on, I hear sighing and snippets of sentences and I’m taken by what’s growing in front of me. We say goodbye and I study this scrap of paper – the back of a Planned Parenthood envelope – and I remember the doodles in the margins of my notebooks in high school, in college. I took copious, neat, perfect outline notes but always in the margins were my doodles, my right brain pushing into the academy – the need to be part of the discourse – the conversation – the call and response. My left brain actively engaged in the “lecture” my right brain breaking out on the side – demanding attention or trying to make sense of the lecture material in a new way – another way – a creative sort of way. |
