“All the lines erased weren’t mistakes and tap on our windows now, traces of the unruled world that call us back.”
Like so many of us given the chance, the effort to change our understanding of what we’ve tried to scrub, hide, dismiss, or attack as failed attempts at accuracy or competence, is an opportunity worthy of seizing. If you’ve had the opportunity to see the drawings of children when they are yet to be fully fledged in the concern that their language has arrived at a denotative power, an expected intelligibility, then you’ve seen what Wittgenstien said was impossible: a private language. But it is a private language only spacially.
That is to say, it is derived directly from the power and perceptions originating in one body, at one moment, in one place. It is a drawing created under two bent elbows resting on the floor, on the paper, eyes connecting to hands connected to a manifold bursting with ways of transcribing it that are unique, in the way the wind in one moment moves tall grass or in another a row of teeth bursts open. But if you direct your attention to the fellow storyteller next to our first, absorbed in their drawing/story , this same power of transcription, unconcerned about right proportion or agreed-upon methods of representation, is connecting to a sensation composed in joyful marks, unfiltered by any authority. She is a fellow traveler. She is the “Big Bang” of her new world.
It may be one of the last expressions of the undifferentiated body, not separated from the world but instead a world, full stop.
This is my website, describing my world, appreciating the amazing languages both in existence by community consent, and those head-butted into existence by the few who have never given up the belief that this very power is the gift of what being a human is.
Hugh McLaughlin, Nightmare, 1996
Gabe McLaughlin, 1993