Letter

I’ve been in Italy the last couple days. I’m here because my parents invited me to come spend a week with them at a place they like outside Florence. They’ve been here over a month and this is their third or fourth visit. The place they rent is in the hills and is surrounded by olive trees. The owners sell olive oil, in fact. This is called agritursimo here—kind of like AirBnB but out in the middle of a landscape that looks like the background of a Renaissance painting.

I don’t really know how to travel. The only touristy item I had on my agenda was visiting Giorgio Morandi’s house-museum in Bologna, which is about an hour and a half away from here. Half the route is through twisty little village roads. These were my initiation into driving in Italy. No one got killed and the car’s in one piece, so I count it a success.

Morandi’s place is on a nondescript side street called Via Fondazza. He lived there with his sisters for most of his seventy-four years, painting the same dusty bottles, saucers, cups, and seashells, and views of neighboring yellowish stucco houses with terra cotta shingles. The room he painted in is preserved now behind glass like a diorama display in an old-fashioned natural history museum. The only thing missing is a mannequin of the man himself, frozen in action. It has a monastic cell feel to it, this little room. What’s visible are the remnants of a life lived with blinders. The man only really did one thing for over fifty years. I don’t know if such a thing is possible these days—to shut out all the noise and devote yourself to a singular activity until you die. But the idea of it is very seductive. Perhaps, at least in part, because I know I couldn’t do it. 

Before I left Chicago, I painted another dog, reviewed a show of illustrations from the pioneering satirical magazine Puck, and added to my growing collection of capsule film reviews.

The sketchbook goes everywhere with me. Sometimes it’s a hiding place, a way to assuage social anxiety, other times just a way to pass hours I don’t know what to do with. Because I’ve never kept a diary, it’s the closest thing to a record of my days. Unlike many artists, I’ve never used a sketchbook to work up ideas for more finished work, or for any ideas at all for that matter. What I draw in there is what I see of where I’ve been. More often than not it’s faces of singers, readers, and sitters on public transportation which make me take the book out. I hardly ever know these people but drawing them establishes a tenuous connection (whether they know it or not). 

The last couple of sketches in the book I just finished were of the singer/songwriter Will Oldham and the electronic combo Bitchin’ Bajas. I don’t know any of them personally and likely never will, but for the 15 or 20 minutes when I was making marks as they played, I was engaged more actively with their music and for that, no matter what I end up with, these drawings matter.

I have a stack of about 15 finished sketchbook teetering on my studio book case. I don’t look at them that often but when I do there’s an occasional drawing which doesn’t seem so bad and, as a whole, each book does remind me of specific blocks of time. Remembering with pictures isn’t the same as remembering with words. It feels sturdier to me, less prone to sugarcoating or other revision after the fact. But that’s probably because drawing has been how I’ve talked with the world for over 30 years and I just trust it more. 

In the meantime, I started a new book. The first sketch is of a glass, wine bottle, and water carafe at Rootstock on Saturday night. Nothing profound here, but when I look at it later I’ll remember the porkbelly salad, mushroom tagliatelle, and two very different glasses of wine I had that night, the people I talked to and eavesdropped on, and it’ll happen without a single word jotted down anywhere.

I reviewed Svetlana Alexievich’s fascinating and galling oral history of the end of the Soviet Union this week and it got me thinking—not for the first time—about what a dangerous thing nostalgia is. In that book, dozens of people, from all strata of society, recall one of the bloodiest eras in human history fondly and long for its return. I miss people who aren’t around and occasionally think back to this or that thing which has happened in my life, but I never long to go back or return and replace the present. It’s unthinkable to me to live at any moment but now. Whether it used to be better or may be better some time in the future rarely figures into my thinking.

I spent a lot of last year writing about my childhood, but never in any of those many days and hours did that exercise of burrowing into my own past make me ache to be seven or thirteen or twenty-two. I hear people at the bar and elsewhere talking about what amounts to “the good old days” but in nearly forty-six years of drawing breath I have yet to be drawn to that sunny glow of yesterday. Election politics traffics in this sort of thing too. That’s what “Make America Great” is about. We should be careful what we wish for or we’ll be reliving Germany in the ’30s or Russia in much of the 20th century. My crystal ball is pretty cloudy but I truly hope we don’t voluntarily start going backwards.