a few specific images

i hadn’t been up the mountain in months, even though i know that it’s good for me to get out there periodically, that i go a bit weird if i don’t get out there. i let everything else in my life rush in, didn’t leave myself any time or energy to make the journey.

you can ignore the need, but that doesn’t make it go away. so in the morning, waking up feeling inarticulately unhappy, i threw off all my responsibilities and went out to revisit the mountain.

when i’m out there, i gravitate to its sunken places. erosion gullies. ponds. rivulets. fallen and hollowed out gumtrees and stringybarks. i spent a whole year drawing tree hollows, trying to reconstruct what they must look like inside. if they were jagged and scratchy, or if they were soft, if it was warmer to be in the hollow surrounded by the bleeding heartwood. what kinds of birds and reptiles might live in them.

i took the same route i’d taken to following earlier in the year, that from a frogpond follows up alongside a deep gully with an exposed rockface, then up and over the saddle between the taller and smaller summits. this time i followed a raised dirt trail that i’d seen, but not previously taken. it led around the northeast contour of the mountain, well above the road that marked its border but not so high up as the transmission lines. i could see metal arms and wires through the canopy.

i didn’t follow the trail to its end, because where it wound around another gully there was a grove of fallen trees. i got diverted. one of the trees, this one, the one i drew, had been halfway subsumed by the earth and vegetation. its surface was spongy. its exposed roots had been taken over by spiky moss. it looked like a floating continent. endless forest except for a couple raised plateaux, or where it hadn’t yet overtaken the fallen leaves and detritus.

for complicated reasons i try to not look at my drawings while i’m drawing them, instead try to look at what i’m looking at, for as long as i can. this turns the drawing into kind of a mess. i briefly lift the pencil, set it back down in what feels like the same place, but which turns out to be some distance away across the surface of the paper. breakages accumulate.

i have a hard time with attentiveness, with looking at what i’m looking at for hours. i’m incapable of starting at on one side and working across to the other. i have to rove through and over the same terrain, the same bit of wood jutting out of the moss, the same kidneyweed leaves growing in the cavity left by the root system, and because i’m not looking at the paper, that terrain winds up spreading out across the paper, intermingling with its own earlier traces.

i spent an hour drawing the dead tree and its mossworld. it’s not an accurate representation. it wouldn’t be an accurate representation if i’d spent the whole day in that grove. these drawings are inherently unfinished, which is why i like drawing them. they’re open. they’re porous.

i come back repeatedly to that idea of roving, crossing and recrossing, like a beetle moving across the surface or a wren flitting through the undergrowth. it can feel more like mapping than drawing. like exploring a world, a terrain, something that never resolves completely but continually unfolds new facets as the light and weather change, as creatures move through and across it, as your focus settles on parts you’d previously missed.

this is going to seem indefensible since the drawing is just an incomplete, unreadable scribble. i think of it and others like it, as worlds. spaces created by taking core samples or cross sections and letting them ramify out in their own confused ways. other creatures could live in these spaces. unknown molds could colonise their surfaces.

i couldn’t throw off all my responsibilities forever. i settled for what i could get. took my slice of this part of the mountain, on this day, followed the trail down to the road and caught the bus home.

when i get time though, i want to come back here and spend the entire day drawing. an entire day of this roving, distracted drawing won’t make it any more complete. my bet is it will wind up looking like a tangled smudge. something with stray, flailing tendrils. a denser impression of the day. i might like that.