The Anthropocene Reviewed(51)
Sarah called out to me. I turned around. She was so far away I couldn’t hear what she was saying at first, but she was waving me toward her, and so I walked back until I could hear: I was getting in the way of a drone shot they needed for the show; could I walk over to where she was? So I did. I stood next to her, and watched the drone flying over the salt flats. Our gazes entwined. I felt calmer. I was thinking about the people I used to be, and how they fought and scrapped and survived for moments like this one. Looking with Sarah, the salt flats seemed to change—they no longer had the menace of indifference about them.
I give the Bonneville Salt Flats three and a half stars.
HIROYUKI DOI’S CIRCLE DRAWINGS
ONE WEIRD THING ABOUT ME is that I have signed my name over five hundred thousand times. This effort began in earnest back in 2011, when I decided to sign the entire first printing of my fourth novel, The Fault in Our Stars. To do this, I signed sheets of paper that were then bound into copies of the book as they were printed. Over the course of a few months, I signed about 150,000 sheets. Sometimes I listened to podcasts or audiobooks, but often, I just sat there, alone in my basement, signing my name. I never really found it boring, because each time I was trying to realize some ideal form that I have in my head of what my signature looks like, and I can never quite achieve it.*
Paying attention to the very slight variations of repetitive behaviors engages me in a way I struggle to explain. There is a very specific itch within my brain that repetitive action scratches. I realize there may be some connection there to my having obsessive-compulsive disorder, but then again, lots of people enjoy doodling, which is what my signing boils down to. Doodling is good for brains—it relieves stress in ways similar to pacing or fidgeting, and it can help with attentiveness. A 2009 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that people given license to doodle recalled more information than non-doodlers, perhaps because doodling requires just enough brainpower to keep the mind from wandering.
I wouldn’t say I enjoy repetitive tasks, exactly, but I do benefit from them. Sometimes, when I feel burnt out and exhausted and I don’t know what to do with myself or whether my work matters or if I’m ever going to do anything of use to anyone, I ask my publisher to send me ten or twenty thousand sheets of paper, and I sign them just to have something specific and measurable to do for a week or so. I don’t even know whether those sheets end up in books. I hope they do, and I hope they make readers happy, but to be honest, I do it for myself, because it makes me . . . not happy, exactly, but engrossed. I think engrossed is what I really want to feel most of the time. It’s such an ugly word, “engrossed,” for such an absolutely beatific experience.
* * *
I first saw the ink drawings of Hiroyuki Doi in 2006, at the American Folk Art Museum’s show about obsessive drawing. Doi’s drawings are epic conglomerations of circles, thousands—or maybe tens of thousands—of tiny circles tightly packed together, combining to form vast, wildly intricate abstractions. Some people say they look like teeming masses of cells, or like galactic nebulae. The one that struck me most was an untitled 2003 drawing shaped vaguely like a human eye turned on its side, fifty-six inches high and twenty-seven inches wide. At times, the circles branching off from one another resemble blood vessels; at others, they seem to swirl around centers of gravity. As I looked longer at the circles, the drawing took on a third dimension, and I felt like I could step into it, like the circles were not just before me but also above and below and behind and within.
Doi did not set out to be an artist; he was a successful chef when, in 1980, his younger brother died of a brain tumor. Overwhelmed with sorrow, he began to draw circles, and found that he could not stop drawing them, because they helped him find “relief from the sadness and grief.”
What fascinates me about Doi’s drawings is partly their glaring obsessiveness. They look like circling, recursive thoughts made visible. You lose yourself inside a Doi drawing, which is maybe the point. But they also communicate that desire to find relief from the consuming pain of loss. In interviews, Doi uses that word regularly: relief. And that is what I’m also desperate for whenever I’ve been knocked over by grief. Loss can be so encompassing—it’s a job where the hours are all hours, every day. We talk of grief in stages—denial, bargaining, acceptance, and so on. But for me, at least, grief is a series of tightly packed circles that fade over many years, like ink exposed to light.
Why have I signed my name half a million times? Why has Hiroyuki Doi spent the last forty years drawing tiny circles? “I feel calm when I’m drawing,” Doi has said, and although I’m no artist, I know what he means. On the other side of monotony lies a flow state, a way of being that is just being, a present tense that actually feels present.
There’s also the human urge to make things, to paint cave walls and doodle in the margins of to-do lists. Doi once said, “I have to keep on working, otherwise nothing will be brought into existence.” But sometimes I feel like the paper is better before we get ahold of it, when it is still wood. Other times, I love the marks we leave. They feel like gifts and signs, like trail markers in the wilderness.
I know we’ve left scars everywhere, and that our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English. Even though we know that none of our marks will truly last, that time is coming not just for all of us but for all we make, we can’t stop scribbling, can’t stop seeking relief wherever we can find it. I’m grateful that Doi keeps on working, bringing things into existence. I am glad to be unalone in cramped circles of restless yearning.