I dreamt that I was trying to draw hair with black India ink onto my No. 1 son’s hands. He was his current age, and his hands were huge, but we were playing as though he were a pre-teen boy still. He was trying to squirm away from my prickly pen, but he was not entirely opposed to my project. In fact, he played along and giggled delightedly all the while. I already had a strong vision of his hands covered with thick, black curls and large dots, but his skin appeared to be quite damp, and the ink quickly spread over it into big, uneven blotches. “Okay,” I let him go in the end, “go wash your hands!” When I woke up, I realized that I should try my little art project on my own hands, instead. But the first step is to get some India ink and a few pens on my next trip to Zagreb.

Addendum I (November 21, 2009)

I did get some India ink and a single pen with a plain penholder on my last trip to Zagreb. I put them in a glass, which I placed in the middle of the dining table in my livingroom. And they patiently waited for my return to drawing after some twenty years. I have been eying them for a week or so, but nothing has happened until this afternoon. Out of the blue, I grabbed my notebook, opened the ink jar, dipped the pen into it and started drawing without any idea of what would come out. To my surprise, I drew an awkward foot that extends half way up the shin. But it ends in a smokestack out of which black smoke billows toward the sky. The smokestack is an old theme of mine, but the foot is new. As the notebook paper is of rather poor quality, much of the smoke has penetrated all the way to the next page. It looks quite awful, too. But the first step is now behind me. I am drawing again. Hooray!

Addendum II (November 22, 2009)

Oddly, it took me an entire day to come up with an appropriate title for my last drawing—something like “Carbon Foot,” or perhaps even “Carbon Footprint.” It came to me only an hour or so before my friends suggested such a title, too. Which only goes to show that my drawing is much less, as it were, intellectual than my writing. More often than not, it comes straight from the gut. And it thus takes a while to put it into words. This is precisely how I like it, though. If at all possible, drawing should be kept out of the mind’s persistent meddling. Come to think of it, this may be the best reason to return to drawing in the first place.