Breaking with an Article of Faith (Untoward Growth)

Over the years, it has become an article of faith for me that when I sit down to draw at whatever time of day the urge becomes untenably intolerable and I've therefore no choice but to give in to it (which is as close as I can come to saying why I do anything) that I not bring to the blank sheet of Southworth acid free thesis paper (what I draw on) any intention whatsoever.

 

This moment is probably as close to what I understand to be the experience of meditation as the Buddhists envision it: that is, I've been doing this pretty much every day for so many years that it's not a struggle at all: it's not, that is, one of those awful DON'T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT! self-directed-admonitions which of course insure that's all you'll think of. I guess I'm saying I don't intend to not have an intention, I just don't - by now, in fact, for the other and greater reason I do anything: it's a fine-toothed, -tooled, -honed pleasure. However, as you no doubt suspect from the accompanying duo of images, I recently broke with this article of faith, which, as a measure of the seriousness of this sin, I hereby publicly confess in full daylight in the center of Facebook's town square. That fragile audacity of an aberration of a delicate sprig of neatly ordered baby green leaves you see bleeping out of the bark of that tree - well, that little bibbly-bop bred that most dread of all things: an idea. An Intention. Which I (taking a deep breath) confess to having followed.

 

An idea (the source of intention) like an ideology, is surely the most killing phenomenon known to human consciousness. As with the sun or God or anybody/-thing you deeply love or hate, it's best not looked at in the face: its tyrannical glare can take over your soul, effectively kill it. However I shall whisper this to you: if in the thankfully rare occasion you find, after having run out of any possible alternative, you must entertain "an idea," give it a fleet sideways glance: register only the barest impression. Like a whiff of gasoline fumes, it can very occasionally prick you into a moment of skewed if vaguely drugged attention in which you - well, may find that most terrible of all things, an "intention," emerge from it as something generative. That is, I hope, what this intention (sprig out of bark becomes 'untoward growth' drawing & poem) turned out to be. 

But I labor in detail herein to warn you that however benign and floating amid visions of  festive flowers and happy flounders it may seem at first inarguably to be, intention is invariably the thin edge of the killing army of ideas and ideologies and other illusions of certainty which comprise the active substances of hell. Regard it always, in any dose greater than a whiff, as the terrible toxin it has proven itself to be now and in history: at the poisonous heart of why human beings find what strikes them as inarguable reason to hate and kill and turn life into living death. 

But every-so-almost-never-here-&-there-otherwise, dare to have one anyway.

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