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Life on a piece of paper

In the fading seasons where I live nowadays, I feel I should confess something for any epitaph that might be in its planning stages for me. It is something that, while I have given it the occasional try -like at the chess club in university- it was evident to anyone nearby that I lacked sufficient talent to be considered worthy of even a second attempt. Unlike rougher sports to which I never aspired or for which I was never chosen on weekend pick-up games on the field behind the school, or the more aesthetic endeavours like music that I was too embarrassed to practice within earshot of anybody who knew me, I have pretty well given up on pretending I ever lived a life on a pedestal; in fact, I have always resisted having any sort of artistic aspirations which might be publicly criticizable.

I refer, of course, to doodling -itself a strange word, reflecting the previous century’s ‘doo-terms’ for useless objects, and unbalanced states of mind including  words like ‘doodad’… ‘doohickey’… ‘doo-doo’… and ‘doofus’… – none of which, I hasten to add, have ever had a permanent place in my aging vocabulary.

I think I was right to ignore any abstruse pencilling on available paper, or flattenable surface as I matured and then aged, though -doodles or their ilk are rather too easily psychoanalyzed by zealous amateurs. Not that I haven’t accumulated any other worthy memorabilia that my children may be able to remember me by when my last leaf has fallen, or anything; it’s just that I don’t doodle, eh? Except, perhaps with words – and I’m not the first.

I’m reminded of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in which he not only uses numerous references to the ‘doodling dawdling’ antics of his dream novel’s cast. ‘He, the pixelated doodler,’ writes Joyce, ‘is on his last with illegible clergimanths boasting always of his ruddy complexious!’ Here, his choice of writing style is itself a semantic doodle. It is a difficult read, to be sure, and I must confess that apart from its resemblance to a literary doodle, I have only sampled it like a curious parent might a rival child’s drawings seen displayed on a seldom visited friend’s fridge door.

But although I like the literary allusion, I fear any personal usage would likely discourage further reading; I doubt it would even justify the expense of self-publishing. No, that form of literary doodling would have to be approached with care. There is a world of difference between slipping in a few imaginative metaphors or nonsense words, and trying to fill an entire essay with ‘doo-terms’ without an extensive footnoted glossary -especially without pre-warning the largely hidden Joycean crowd beforehand, and of course, the talent to get away with it…

I think one of the aspects of doodling that appeals to me, though, is the spontaneity of the process; it shouldn’t be forced, nor should there be rules as to why or where it is produced; it is unbidden, unsolicited, and certainly unrehearsed. In fact I suspect doodling is most akin to the jumble of thoughts pinballing around in one’s head before they organize themselves into ideas, into shapes, into words. They most likely represent the subconscious ruminations of what we sometimes refer to as our muse when it guides our pens, or directs our fingers on the keys of our laptops as they write a story, or describe an image without our conscious guidance.

Perhaps the idea of unguided production, or for that matter unintended production is troublesome for some of us, however. The very act of holding a pen, or suspending one’s fingers above a keyboard already implies intention, does it not? How then to escape forcing spontaneity; how to prove, even to yourself, that any resultant idiosyncrasies have not become the ends in themselves -not planned detours? Not ‘known unknowns’, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And let’s face it, a detour is usually intended to bypass an obstruction ahead somewhere, not avoid it forever. A semantic detour should be like an adjective describing the noun of the story: it adds both colour and heightens interest; a noun that is never disclosed, however, is likely as lost as the reason for continuing to read further.

Of course, pictorial doodles serve an aesthetic purpose, I suppose: trying to decipher their meaning is likely secondary to the fascination with their patterns, shapes, and guesses about why they were concocted in the first place. Was the drawer bored with what was happening around them; were they puzzled about what was being said, or angry that they were unable to have much input…?

With semantic doodles, though, I have to hope they would be sufficiently adjectival (or adverbial, if they found themselves attached to an otherwise inexplicable verb) to better explain the nouns of the story, colour the mood that the writer wants to attach to the purpose of the essay.

 For example, think of the way the late Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer in her story ‘The Umbilical Cord’ opens by describing the otherwise banal act of a child stealing some candies from a jar: ‘His small hand, like a little scoop, hung over into the cool, sticky triangles he could not see; the rim of the drawer lifted hard against his underarm. And on his fingers, tiny slivers and splinters of the sugar-stuff clung in facets of pink and green, like broken glass.’ Delightful description -or Doodle? Necessary information, or a helpful adverbial journey playing with the reader’s ability to visualize, and feel an otherwise banal act? An introductory overture, as it were…?

I suspect semantic doodles need not be as clever, or confusing as in James Joyce’s story -nor are pictorial doodles particularly helpful during, say, a telephone conversation, or a lecture in a large auditorium; they can merely act as unnecessary decorative patterns on a countertop, or the colours on a tie-dye shirt; they may serve a purpose perhaps, but are not absolutely required to understand the thrust of what is happening. They may only serve as a meaningless interregnum, a divertissement  -or a way to process what is happening: a subconscious teleology…

Just as verbal doodles act as colours; literary doodles can be bars of silent music whose rhythms add texture to the narrative; whose very presence can make the words come alive and dance on the page.

Or not… Have I just been doodling?

I wonder…

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