Circle

Thomas Merton sumi ink drawing. (One-snap blip, SOOC cropped.)

EMPTY is today's DDW challenge topic.

What is more empty than a circle ... or more full?
It is said that one must be emptied of self in order to be filled by God.
Writing and drawing are forms of self-emptying.

This drawing is from "Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton" by Roger Lipsey. Merton was a Trappist monk and hermit who was connected to the world through his writing and, in later years, his drawings. The text from Merton's writings that accompanies this drawing follows.

Not a shadow but a sign

The nineteenth century European and American realists were so realistic that their pictures were totally unlike what they were supposed to represent. And the first thing wrong with them was, of course, precisely that they were pictures. In any case, nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the imitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject: and that is something else again.

True artistic freedom can never be a matter of sheer willfulness, or arbitrary posturing. It is the outcome of authentic possibilities, understood and accepted in their own terms, not the refusal of the concrete in favor of the purely "interior." In the last analysis, the only valid witness to the artist's creative freedom is the work itself. The artist builds his own freedom and forms his own artistic conscience by the work of his hands. Only when the work is finished can he tell whether or not it was done "freely."

I pray for authentic creative freedom.

I pray that my work may be a sign bearing witness to a different reality.

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I have made my NaNoWriMo quota today, and I am empty.

I am thankful for the circle that holds me in blipworld.