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Scrapbooks and Secret Blocks.

 

I am still trying to figure out why I keep buying and obsessing over journals and sketchbooks. If I understood the significance of a blank book this could nip the obsession in the bud. I have asked before going to sleep in the hope that my unconscious mind will convey something to me in a dream but to no avail. Instead, I have the following dream:

I am at my old workplace. I am hypomanic and drawing all over the place, on any surface I can find. My colleague says he is going to report me. I know I am going to loose my job but I just can’t stop myself.

In reality, I am literally drawing all over the place. As well as doing separate drawings I am drawing in the copy book and in two other sketchbooks. I decided that if I keep obsessively buying sketchbooks then I need to use them. I am now wondering what I was thinking. That is a lot of drawing in a lot of different places.

I then decide to use the journals and sketchbooks to create scrapbooks. I start a scrapbook on the theme of roots. I have been drawing a lot of roots and have taken loads of photographs of roots in the past. I thought a scrapbook may help me understand why I am drawing roots.





I feel like I am back studying, expected to evidence my sources. The whole process is making me feel chaotic. I also feel as though I am wrecking a nice journal. If scrapbooking isn’t the answer perhaps a Secret Block is. I have always loved the drawings that comprise Joseph Beuys’ Secret Block for a Secret person in Ireland. Beuys did these drawings and never looked at them again. They are done on many different types of paper including envelopes. I already have a tin of drawings, many torn out of sketchbooks, so a block of drawings makes perfect sense.

Beuy’s secret person in Ireland is presumed to be James Joyce. My not so secret person would probably be T.S. Elliot. Making the scrapbook on roots made me think of the lines from The Wasteland,

‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water…’

T. S. Elliot, Poems 1909 – 1925 (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 84.

 

I get the copy of T.S. Elliot’s Poems 1905-1925 that belonged to my grandfather off the shelf and read, ‘Here is no water only rock.’ I feel a bit disturbed and put the book back on the shelf. I then go to fill the kettle and there is no water. I decide to just go to bed and in the morning the water is back on.

I don’t know what to make of the water episode. A sign, coincidence, synchronicity or evocation but I feel reluctant to open that book again. I can’t decide whether the water episode was a sign to do a block of drawings or not to do one. This would be a lifetime project. I would need to find the right container for my, ‘…heap of broken images.’



 











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