BLOOD AND GRISTLE

The physicality of drawing.  The physical connection that drawing provides has been made time and again by so many, that it is almost goes without saying.  We draw with our bodies.  We internalize knowledge with our bodies.

Yet what sort of bodily connection is it, really?  We talk about the physical connection that drawing provides all the time, yet where does the connection, the knowledge, reside?  In our brains?  In our muscles?

“The human animal is a creature of movement.  For each of us, the gift of consciousness resides in a cellular vehicle, made from bone and blood, skin and fat, and driven by muscles – a body, as Walt Whitman put it, ‘cunning in tendon and nerve'”.  p58

The passage above is taken from the article in The New Yorker footnoted below.  The article records the work of Schwartz, a scientist who works on biomechanics.  His goal is to understand how and where human movement is controlled and located.  A byproduct of this study is to understand where the locus of body memory is.

Turns out that consciousness resides in our blood and gristle.  The memory of the act of drawing resides in our entire body, not just our brains.  It is not just in our “mind,” or our “imagination.” What we internalize when we draw becomes a holistic integration with our entire physical being.

“Our bodies in motion are defined by a unified alchemy of speed and direction, as we trace parabolas, lemmiscates, trident curves, Poinsot’s spirals, and trajectories that have no mathematical name.”  p60.

How did he determine this?  The article explains how Schwartz quantified and catalogued neural firing as monkeys drew so as to trace circles and spirals.  A link to one of the papers that was published in 1999 can be found here.  Their quantification and analysis of this neural activity gave proof that this muscle memory is on a cellular level.

Think about it, any analogue drawing that you do is internalized across your entire body.  With data like this, who could possibly pick up a computer mouse to draw without moral equivocation?  Now that we have scientific proof confirming the blood and gristle integration of analogue drawing, can you still sit there making tiny, disjointed clicking movements with your fingers while watching TV?  You’ve got to get that blood and gristle shakin’. 

Scientific data like this mandates that we pick up that pencil, and proceed to make marks on a piece of paper: what could be a more holistic goal for the New Year?

1.  Khatchadourian, Raffi. “Degrees of Freedom.”  The New Yorker. November 26, 2018. Print