Gravity

My daughter the happy artist (欢艺) sent me this drawing for Father's Day. Blue giraffes I can accept--that is mere artistic license. What struck me was that when children represent the world, gravity doesn't matter. Or maybe giraffes have suction cups on their feet like squid. It doesn't matter whether it's real--what matters is whether you can imagine it. It's sad that we forget this as we grow into adultness, as if gravity flattens our imaginations over time.

I cleared a lot of stuff recently, including a pile of drawings that H drew a few years ago. She would have been about four. They were coloring books and sheets of paper that she had drawn on--doodles and primitive drawings; I kept the more humorous ones, but I felt something about the coloring books--they had to go of course--they contained nothing but scribbles, but leafing through them I got a vague sense of the innocent joy of filling shapes with color. This is probably universal to everyone when they are young, and eventually we forget about innocent joy. I suppose we convince ourselves over time that other things are more important--and they are--but as we become more and more busy fighting the gravity of life, joy is crowded out. The good news is, there's no reason we can't have it back at any time. We simply need to reach up and grab it--like a beach ball floating on the surface--though the water is murky and we rarely see it.

As it turned out, however, my speculations were incorrect. I put the drawing on the refrigerator next to Band-Aid Man (who most unfortunately fell asleep on a nest of Fire Ants, and had to but over a hundred band-aids all over his body). I called H and talked about the giraffes. She said that they were not actually walking on the ceiling, they were just drawn upside down. I've succumbed to the gravity of my situation and am utterly unable to understand the subtext of the drawing.