Drawing the road ahead
The song T’ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It), by Fun Boy Three and Bananarama, had been playing in the car as we drove home from the country. Lulled by the words, I drew what I could see of the road before us.
Over the three days away, I’d been realising how much a recent stint of marking for a government literacy test had influenced my reading. Everything I read was filtered through the 12 rigid criteria that had been set for assessing a single task. After weeks of repetitive scanning of scripts, there seemed no other way of reading.
Now at last the grammarian was leaving me, and 147 drawings later, I had enough images to animate a journey from daylight through to night and back again (in a cycle). There was a rhythm to the drawings, influenced no doubt by the song, and thoughts followed thoughts. An oil tanker up ahead led me to thinking about oil, and how the bitumen roads are made of decomposed, ancient animal matter, and that bitumen is a byproduct of the petrol that propels us. Then the words dropped away for visual rhythms:
.
Working today as the casual teacher for a year 10 English class, I looked at some poems by Robert Frost. We talked about metaphors, and of repetition and rhythm through our journeys.
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
I like the way your poem curves
and how the rhythm plays.
It’s like a conversation
is a game of ball.
Not mine – Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’. You’ve picked up exactly what I was illustrating – the rhythm…what a sensibility you have!
What a lack
of knowing Frost!
I’m glad you think
me sensible.