Today’s Writing Prompt: Charcoal
The long thin sticks lay in a narrow, mustard yellow box in my mother’s paint box. The cardboard insides coated in black dust. Messy. I can feel the squeaky dryness and the surprising light weight of the black black stalks. Even a child can tell they are fragile, breakable, barely there. And yet they leave such a strong mark. On the canvas. On my hands. My clothes. Charcoal, however, does not stain but blows away, rinses free without a mark. Dark smoke.
The color black often reflects dark emotions, rejected norms, emptiness and nothingness. Charcoal black is a happy black for me. My drawings in charcoal were more a matter of smudges than lines. Shaded rather than sharp. Dry fingerpaints. Creativity happening, something becoming out of the flat white of the page.
I kept a canvas for many years of a Chinese vase my mother had planned to paint, with only the charcoal sketch on it. In its unfinished state, the picture was more alive than a finished work, as if she was there, about to mix the oils and take a brush to it.
For someone like me who is not tidy and has to struggle with lines, the looseness of charcoal, its willingness to move and blend, its fragile hold on the surface of things, often floating in the air, refusing to stay only there on the page, reflects a deep truth about reality. The shape of things, their separation one from the other, is a mysterious concept on the atomic level. The lines we use to describe shapes are the limitation of our sense of sight. There is no edge, no line, no absolute surface where one ends and another begins. Separation is a convention of our limited human knowing. Drawing with lines a practice in stopping ourselves from seeing too much. Carve the outlines over things and the world becomes more manageable. Drawing lines.
Mother’s vase also seemed to ask something of me. She never intended the drawing to be the final form. Its unfinished state hung as a reminder of all the threads in a life that are cut by Atropos that would ravel the fabric of family and community if we the living didn’t pick them up and continue the work. So one day I took my paints and “finished” the vase. I love it and hate it at the same time. Love that her aborted vision could reach some sort of completeness, a projection of my own anxiety I suppose for all the stories and projects I have in my mind and heart that will never live because life does end and they will end with it. But also hate it because of the soft beauty that was in the sketch has been erased by the intensity of carnelian and gold. Because over her work I have laid my own, my decisions about color, my edges defined, my rendering not hers.
The picture is clearer. More knowable in greater detail. Decided. Categorical thinking allows us to imagine the universe more precisely but to know our imagination itself less.
