A mostly hidden blog by Mechanical Grace.
When I was 8 or 9 I did a messy, free-form painting, the type that starts with beautiful colors but ends up a brownish tragedy. Still, small flashes of color remained. When I looked at the abstract mess after it had dried, I noticed a tiny shape that looked remarkably, precisely, like a small house, perched on a ledge. Suddenly the chaotic whorls became a cliff face, balancing this little house, and the grayish yellow strip across the top of the page, an odd-colored sky. Looking more carefully I found people, other little buildings, a horse. I marveled at having created such an objective reality, not because it was an accident-- on the contrary, I tried to forget that-- but rather because it seemed such an accomplishment to have achieved that impossible magic, verisimilitude. I kept the painting in the closet and would look at it in private, feeling unreasonably proud, and engrossed in the story I'd hidden in my own painting. I never expected anyone else to see the things I saw, and I still don't, but I work more intentionally now, so you never know...
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I once read that the general shape of any particular species of tree is called its habit. I love that concept (even if I also recall reading something later that made me question whether I’d got the info wrong) as it suggests the metaphorical possibility that our habits, which we think of as mere behaviors, may be not only somewhat pre-destined but also shared across relatives. And I like, even more, the sense of one’s habits as a shape, a three-dimensional structure that develops and grows, but all within a certain set of repeated patterns. A shape and a set of events, one and the same.
