‘I Have A Thinking Feeling’ is my latest ‘Ciaotime’ menu board contribution.
I welcome the opportunity to write or draw something here, from time to time, that lasts as long the demands for renewal. My last contribution remained for several months. Chalk is designed to be wiped off, so it has been gratifying that the wiping urge has been held back by some agency in the drawings.
Its appearance here on the blog, or its digital manifestation, is relatively virtually comparatively permanent, such is the fastness the blog brings.
The blog presents as virtual hardware compared to the impermanence of chalk.
We are removed somewhat from the physical world as a consequence of our reliance on phones and screens, so that the act of wiping is part of a skill set less practised.
I remember chalk associated with schoolrooms and the dust hovering in the air from having been enthusiastically erased by the English teacher, or was he a Latin teacher? The dust would get caught in his academic gown before it had a chance to land on the floor of the classroom.
The chalk made for a theatricality which was persuasive and my knowledge of English grammar is well infused now as a result.
My other memory of this teacher was in the bathrooms where after rugby, he would come to check that we were well behaved. I went to an English grammar school in my first three years in London in the early sixties. We used to wash off the mud in great communal baths that could accommodate 20 boys and you could slide across the full width of the bath if you had sufficient soap on your body to work as lubrication.
We were always mystified by why he would come to exercise his authority when it was so far out of his subject range.
‘I have a thinking feeling’ needs no explanation other than it seems to convey the spirit, somewhat, of our age, where feelings can so often be always somehow on a downward sinking projectory.
Here, the thinking instead seems to possess some of the qualities that helium brings, of lifting a thing, to make it buoyant and jovial, lightheaded , happy.
To make such a proposition as this is not treasonous but does run against the general instruction lately, which is to be dire.