The other day sitting in the living room, I was struck by the complexity of the scene. Facing the couch that bordered the front hall, I saw an unsorted pile of clothes spread over random pillows, with the handles and seats of two bikes behind the couch, jutting up black against the lighted hall, the banisters and stairs at a steep incline in the background. For good or ill, it expressed my household. And so, still unaware, I drew a picture of it in a small moleskin sketch book I carry for that purpose.
We depend in psychology on finding words for our experience which helps to symbolize unprocessed emotional material such as dreams and personal encounters. But some of us organize through making pictures, acting, imitation, dance or music. For me, my eyes open as I draw as if I had been blind. I draw to see while within, what emotionally drew me, gathers itself to a meaning.
Rather than being trapped emotionally in a confined state, we find a way to stand outside and observe, to separate and contain. We do what our dog mostly fails to do—we symbolize. Then the non-verbal expression in its playfulness and density teaches us languages of thought our bodies learned many centuries before the current ancestors spoke their first word.
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