When I was little, there was a toy craze. It was over those magic slates. You’d draw something to erase it by lifting the plastic surface sheet. Instantly! The childishly fascinating phenomenon of erasure brought up the, to my mind, equally interesting question: of what was the main point of these things? Was it to draw or was it to erase? Nothing that was drawn would stay. One drew to erase. Erasing was the beauty of it. Or the cause of tears. Set the thing down for a minute, distracted, but with a prize image fixed on its surface, insecure; turn and find that someone else had it and their image. The erased picture of a cat and bird and eggy sun. The drawing could be as crass as one liked, it didn’t matter; it was even, being crass, ideal in this condition, because it was to the purpose for it to go: to make the decision to indulge the mystery of that grey bland afterwards. That nothing thereafter. Nothing ugly. Nothing but battleship grey. Like the prow of one of those naval frigates cutting the blue of the Solent. However, it did after a while acquire a kind of palimpsest of squiggles. And there might be a single unignorable diagonal; a visible scratch that wouldn’t undo; the slate’s under reality injured; in a condition not able to be healed, this not being a living thing after all – unless one bought another slate.
June 13, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Reminds me of Syd Barrett as he grew older – making pictures to destroy them when they were complete. Or Tibetan monks making incredibly intricate mandalas out of coloured sand, then just blowing them away when they were done.