It is seductive to think there is a way to avoid this struggle — instead of Plato’s never-completable dialectical process or another similar we might simply grok essences or transcend the world and its ten thousand things. We might leave aside understanding, focus on expressing our feelings. One of the reasons this is difficult, if not impossible, is that the moment we are not simply seeing or feeling, but seeing or feeling (or expressing) something, we find ourselves in the world of names and symbols, of descriptions and representations, of languages (spoken, written, pictorial), of human society which gives us language. It can be a lifetime’s work just to appreciate what a slippery slope this is. And as one might note in comparing the drawings of young children and adolescents, even a few glimmers of the dependence of the self on others and the larger world renders self-expression a much less straightforward process.

So there I was in my first drawing class, trying, with such thoughts playing in the back of my head and with little drawing experience, to meet the grand challenge of art: to see what I, and perhaps I alone, saw, and to express my vision in a language that others (a few, many, even just myself?) could understand (readily, or if they/I really wanted to?).

       The drawing instructor wanted me to use an eraser, both to correct “mistakes” and as a way of getting the brightest tones (here erasing is adding, a sort of invisible white paint). But my artist first wife and Jean Cocteau and above all my character had wed me to the progressive view — erasers are bad; there is no such thing as a mistake or wrong line in the first place, and to start thinking about erasing is to engage one’s internal censor/superego/analytical or conventional mind and thus lose contact with creativity, individuality, essences, genius. “The first time a thing appears it disconcerts everyone, the artist too,” Cocteau said. “But you have to leave it — not retouch it. Of course you must then canonize the ‘bad’. For the good is familiar. The new arrives only by mischance. As Picasso says it is a fault. And by sanctifying our faults we create.”

          “O my friend, pause and do not hazard your dearest interests in a game of chance,” Socrates says in The Protagoras. “For there is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink. These latter you can carry away from the shop or warehouse in a receptacle, and before you receive them into your body as food, you may deposit them at home and call in any experienced friend who knows what is good to be eaten or drunk, and what not, and how much, and when; so there is not much risk in the actual purchase. But knowledge cannot be taken away in a receptacle. When you have paid for it you must receive it into the soul; you go your way having learned it and are benefited or harmed accordingly.”

    As I was drawing I began ruminating on what it means to study, particularly at the outset, with a flawed instructor. If one’s foundation is faulty, how can a suitable structure be built? How might one attain the ideal? Middle-aged, I thought that these were faulty questions, insofar as flawed instructors and faulty foundations are inevitable, and Plato himself recognized that understanding is a matter of sparks. In a foggy night, I might add.

    Can there be a superior myopia, a right way to stumble? As with drawing, so with life, it would seem: One just keeps throwing oneself and being thrown at the problem, mark upon mark is made, sparks fly. Quite quickly awkward and occasionally evocative images begin to appear, offering further testimony — as if further testimony were needed — of the elusiveness of the ideal.