Leaning in the Brain
Yesterday, a conclusion was quite powerfully confirmed for me: I have no visual memory of my childhood home. I mean to say that there is no image, no symbol of a house with a roof, a door and doorknob, with windows on either side, a pitched roof with Mom, Dad, Sis, li'l sis, and the dogs (Smokey, Sherlock, Duffy, Walley, Watson, Jackson, Brittanie, Matt, Annie, and Rosy) out front. There is no image of the bright and happy sun, confident crayon rays beaming, and a perfectly placed tree with cotton candy crown.
My psyche misses this vital cultural crutch for Americana. According to Betty Edwards of
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain , the vast majority of folks (American- Estadounidense, I'm guessing) worked through much typing paper as children reproducing this perfect scene of potent symbolism and 90% could now sit down and draw an almost exact replica of their childhood masterpiece at any time during their adult lives. As an exercise (perhaps to demonstrate the accuracy of her theory and method), Ms. Edwards includes this adult remembering in her book. And so, yesterday, I sat down to try and immediately realized that I would be part of the unhappy 10%. Immediately next, however, I remembered that there was a landscape scene that I repeated over and over as a child, a little seascape complete with giant setting sun dipping into the ocean ( a la South Pacific), silhouetted sailboat, dunes, and swaying palm trees -- with gulls floating in the distance. Needless to say, this was not a vista from my childhood window.
How odd. Why did I never draw the house and fam.? Why the little seascape? It then occurred to me that until very recently, after Hurricane Katrina, I had never in fact seen my childhood home as a structure independepent of its geographical/sylvan context. That is, as a log cabin, it was so nestled into the trees (overhanging it, growing next to it, thick branches and leaves), that there was actually never a vantage point to view more than a small part of the house at once. The trees were tall, the shade relatively dark. This may seem very difficult to believe, but I, honestly, as a child and even as a young adult could only piece the house together. I can never remember having the sensation of arriving "home," it was more arriving at the driveway and then entering the house. (The driveway was like a green tunnel, barely big enough for a car to squeeze through, and certainly enough to keep out the faint of heart.) Nor did we have any good pictures of the house. As a student abroad, I brought the best photo of the house I had to show my host family in Argentina. It merely confused them, through some trees was a brown structure of incomprehensible shape that kept sinking back into the trees.
We had no "front door," or we did, but it was never used to enter the house, except on rare occasions. A side door, under a porch roof was typically used.
Later yesterday, when I showed my mother the seascape, she recognized it immediately and told me that to her knowledge I never drew the typical family landscape. (And as an art teacher, she took a keen interest in my early drawing). And she said, "well, how could you draw the house? You couldn't see it." "Ah, ha! My intuition was right on," I said (an emphatic paraphrase), "I was thinking the same thing."
So what does it matter? Hmmm...that's a question that I don't have an answer to.
My psyche misses this vital cultural crutch for Americana. According to Betty Edwards of
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain , the vast majority of folks (American- Estadounidense, I'm guessing) worked through much typing paper as children reproducing this perfect scene of potent symbolism and 90% could now sit down and draw an almost exact replica of their childhood masterpiece at any time during their adult lives. As an exercise (perhaps to demonstrate the accuracy of her theory and method), Ms. Edwards includes this adult remembering in her book. And so, yesterday, I sat down to try and immediately realized that I would be part of the unhappy 10%. Immediately next, however, I remembered that there was a landscape scene that I repeated over and over as a child, a little seascape complete with giant setting sun dipping into the ocean ( a la South Pacific), silhouetted sailboat, dunes, and swaying palm trees -- with gulls floating in the distance. Needless to say, this was not a vista from my childhood window.
How odd. Why did I never draw the house and fam.? Why the little seascape? It then occurred to me that until very recently, after Hurricane Katrina, I had never in fact seen my childhood home as a structure independepent of its geographical/sylvan context. That is, as a log cabin, it was so nestled into the trees (overhanging it, growing next to it, thick branches and leaves), that there was actually never a vantage point to view more than a small part of the house at once. The trees were tall, the shade relatively dark. This may seem very difficult to believe, but I, honestly, as a child and even as a young adult could only piece the house together. I can never remember having the sensation of arriving "home," it was more arriving at the driveway and then entering the house. (The driveway was like a green tunnel, barely big enough for a car to squeeze through, and certainly enough to keep out the faint of heart.) Nor did we have any good pictures of the house. As a student abroad, I brought the best photo of the house I had to show my host family in Argentina. It merely confused them, through some trees was a brown structure of incomprehensible shape that kept sinking back into the trees.
We had no "front door," or we did, but it was never used to enter the house, except on rare occasions. A side door, under a porch roof was typically used.
Later yesterday, when I showed my mother the seascape, she recognized it immediately and told me that to her knowledge I never drew the typical family landscape. (And as an art teacher, she took a keen interest in my early drawing). And she said, "well, how could you draw the house? You couldn't see it." "Ah, ha! My intuition was right on," I said (an emphatic paraphrase), "I was thinking the same thing."
So what does it matter? Hmmm...that's a question that I don't have an answer to.
posted by Michael at
10:14 AM
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