Drawing Inward

Compared with music all communication by words is shameless

—Nietzsche

A quick note.

Drawing Inward, as a title, is an oblique riff on Nietzsche. It's a phrase that for me holds a Janus-like quality: it can relate to an attitude of reflection or self-reflection—which unless we count Homer, is a hallmark of pretty much all writing which today we consider "literary". Or, it can relate to an attitude or essence of a style of art—e.g., expressionism, symbolism, etc.

In fact, while I was googling the phrase to see if it had ever been used in the past, I discovered a 2012 retrospective for a forgotten surrealist artist named Richard Oelze. The exhibition featured "drawings and sketches of imaginary landscapes, fantastic objects, and figures that he drew in the years following World War II."

Today, artists stand at the edge of art history and call forth whatever style they please—a philosophical privilege that previous generations of artists did not have. (This, according to Arthur Danto in After the End of Art.) What this means, especially with regards to AI and digital technology more broadly, I don't know—but I think it's generally true.

It's also generally true that one of the things that the Digital Age has revealed to us is that human attention is like marmalade: it can be sweet, it can be bitter, and you can only spread it so far. And so a third association of "drawing inward" might be the word discipline: something I always need and want more of, especially as it relates to how I extend my own attention and energy.

I'm still navigating the various functions of the website, and my overall priority is to focus on things that might actually make me money, but I still have completed work that I want to publish on Drawing Inward, and I'll continue to post it intermittently (in addition to whatever deranged thoughts cross my mind and feel bloggy).