The Blank Page Had a Lot to Say

November fifteenth. I opened the sketchbook this morning with a specific intention. Gerald's vine has moved again, not dramatically, but enough that the shadow it makes on the shelf has shifted since October, and I thought: there is the sixth drawing. I got the pencil. I opened to the next blank page. I sat down.

Then I wrote three paragraphs instead. Not in the sketchbook, in the draft window, here, which is a different kind of page and a different kind of honesty. The paragraphs were about why I couldn't start. Which is not, I think, the same as not being able to start. I knew what I wanted to draw. I could picture exactly how the shadow falls now, shorter and at a different angle because the light has moved the way light moves in November. I had the pencil. The page was right there.

What I kept circling was the question of what the fifth drawing changed. Because it did change something. I drew the vine shadow in October and then published it here, and then Simone mentioned, not the drawing exactly, but the fact of it appearing, in one sentence at the end of a Tuesday session, the way she names things before I've decided to. And now the coworker question is still unanswered in the world, and the sketchbook is sitting on the kitchen table with a blank page, and I am apparently writing a blog post about the blank page rather than filling it.

the blank page and a pencil that hasn't moved

I think the question is: is the sketchbook a record of the apartment, the way it has been since the collapsed bowl in 2011? Or is it an attention practice, the drawing as the point, not the archive? Or is it something I haven't named yet, something that only becomes clear after a few more entries, or after a long enough absence that the absence itself becomes the entry? I don't know. The pencil is still on the table. The shadow is still on the shelf. The page is still blank. I'll probably know more by the time I can say I've figured it out.

looking at the shadow instead of drawing it