There’s hope in uncertainty, isn’t there?
Dearest Doodle Soupsters,
A few days ago, a fellow Doodle Soupster sent me a message to check in — she had been going through her emails and realized I hadn’t sent out one of these in a while. I have to admit it made me feel good. It’s so human, isn’t it? To feel good that your absence was noticed?
I’ve been reading a novel called Time Shelter by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov. The story circles about themes of memory, dementia, nostalgia, Eastern European history … how our memories at once part of who we are and how we know who we are. At one point, Gospodinov’s main character asks, if everyone who knew you is gone and if you can no longer remember yourself, do you still exist?
The time shelter is a place where people losing their memories can live in the time period that still feels real to them, the 1950s, the 1960s, 1970s, you name it. The past is made now by facility staff. However, later in the novel, time shelters spread to people without memory loss, people who know the present all too well, fear the future far too much, and would rather live in the past.
Above is “Through my kaleidoscope,” one of my favorite pieces I’ve made. Underneath is a painting I made of a girl, hair flowing around her, surrounded by swirling streams of pink, blue, red, orange, yellow, purple, green. Then I alternated between layers of tape, colored pencil, ink … there’s a real leaf I incorporated into the top right section.
The result is the blurred form of the girl’s face and flowing wavy hair, connected with swirling lines to the core of the leaf, with concentric ovals like the rings of a tree, all this within the largest oval shape with dark brown, gold at the rim, bleeding into the top left, bottom left, and bottom right corners. A steady stream of light overflows into the top right corner.
Someone told me once that we tend to draw/paint/visualize into the top right corner our most hopeful views, our lightest scenario …
I made this piece in 2020 — it’s part of my Love Letters to Mother Earth series. As I continue my Whispers Among the Trees book arts project, this work keeps feeling like a precursor of sorts. This artwork is like a window into a tree, girl or spirit inside the tree, the light that flows from the core of something (the tree? Nature? The spirit?) into something boundless, open wide?
There’s comfort in what’s closed, because there is discomfort in uncertainty? (Just like the time shelter … the past has already happened, case closed! As awful as a past may be, we know it. It is familiar. The present is connected to the all too uncertain future, one moment bleeds into the next, unconfined, uncontained, unrestrained?) We allude to this in various ways: “I think I just need closure,” how monotony can feel like a cage or the ultimate salvation. Isn’t paradise sort of static?
Yet, there’s hope in uncertainty, isn’t there? Excitement and fear, two sides of the same coin?
I’ve written about “Through my kaleidoscope” before, but I see something new in it now, something deeper.
From childhood through now, I’ve always had a need to work through existential questions. I ask the same questions over and over until something comes to me. And then, I inevitably dive further, inching toward the core (something like an instruction manual of existence!) I know I will never reach because the core is the unknowable. Each answer brings about more questions. And throughout this process (this ebb and flow of question, answer, more questions, always cycling like this Earth spinning, rotating in relationship to the sun), I make meaning of what I experience, what I observe, what it means to be me, what it means to be human, to exist, to be alive.
With each retreat into the darkness of tree bark, I allow myself to swing into the top-right corner of light and for a moment, all is clear. Not certain, not perfect, not complete — and nonetheless, clear. Peaceful, somehow. Acceptance washes over me, a wave crashing over my head as I stand firm without clenching, toes steady in the sand. The brisk invigorates. Uncertainty wakes us up. I see, and everything feels more real, in all its complexity, intricacy, absurdity.
In embrace of uncertainty, in embrace of now and what comes next,
Nicole Sylvia Javorsky
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