The Blue Blob

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. -- Theodore Roethke


"A Study of Boats," 1933, Winston Churchill

One reaches a point of just plain tiredness – as it hit me so profoundly not long ago when I was reading a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, written in his later years, in which he drones about the tiredness of pulling off one’s shoes and stockings at night and putting them on again in the morning . . . as I read those lines, they hit me just so – because, just then, I was profoundly tired of washing my face in the evening and putting on my bit of makeup in the morning – just tired of the routine, the things I could do in my sleep or in blindness – the fixing of toast and tea, the way a table is dusted, the way I walk through the house, the way the clean clothes are folded or made to hang, and even the way the hangers are always tangled and require a certain degree of tug to loosen them from each other – and how one always falls to the floor and must needs be picked up . . . an overwhelming familiarity . . . tired.

"The world is eaten up by boredom . . . It is like dust. You go about and never notice . . . But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go. And so people are always ‘on the go.’"  (The Diary of a Country Priest – Georges Bernanos)

But I’m tired of being forever ‘on the go.’  This is what the young do, and this is what I have always done.  A younger Everyman/Everywoman might seek novelty or new environs – or even new tables to dust and new clothes to fold – anything to enliven the tired mind.  But when we are tired of all that, maybe we seek new ways to see the familiar – or we stop seeing anything at all.

I recall a thin, out of print book I had picked up many years ago when I was content to be always ‘on the go.’  It is titled Painting as a Pastime, by Winston Churchill; it's a sort of memoir about a time between two world wars when he had been ousted from public life and was required to face his inner bleakness.

He suggests a person (public man, he says) acquire two or three hobbies that use other parts of the brain. “It is only when new cells are called into activity, when new stars become the lords of the ascendant, that relief, repose, refreshment are afforded.”  And so this public figure took up oil painting in his late forties.  A daunting and almost paralyzing task at first, he humorously describes placing a bean-sized blob of blue paint on a snowy white canvas with the intention of painting the sky in front of him – then sitting for a very good while – then rousing up a thing he calls Audacity to make the paint be smeared and stroked.  “The spell had been broken . . . I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.”

I suppose Churchill had come upon a new way of seeing things.  “I found myself instinctively as I walked noting the tint and character of a leaf, the dreamy, purple shades of mountains, the exquisite lacery of winter branches, the dim, pale silhouettes of far horizons . . . Now I often amuse myself when I am looking at a wall or a flat surface of any kind by trying to distinguish all the different colours and tints which can be discerned upon it . . . You would be astonished the first time you tried this to see how many and what beautiful colours there are even in the most commonplace objects, and the more carefully and frequently you look the more variations do you perceive.”

He didn’t forget or forego the statesman that he was meant to be; and he certainly could not have foreseen the part that he would play as Prime Minister during WWII.  He took a breather in life, exercised other parts of the brain, and perhaps saw parts of himself he didn’t know existed.  He came back with a vengeance at the beginning of WWII, even perceiving that the world had not “seen” the lessons of WWI and were so destined to repeat them.

Churchill wrote this little book at age 74, a time when he could look back and see with clarity the landscape of his own life – all the shades and hues, the darks and lights – and how they fit together and what they meant for the entire picture.



Churchill In Heaven

 “When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”