"Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'un occupation inutile."
Ravel inscribed these words by Henri de Régnier on the title page of his score for Valses Nobles et Sentimentales; an indication that, despite his fascination with the waltzes of Schubert, he was fully aware of the almost mindless gaiety of the Viennese ballroom and the self-satisfied pleasure that led to the catastrophic Great War.
The delicious and ever-fresh pleasure of a useless occupation.
The French were ensconced at the table with their families, the streets were empty and I was free to wander. When I had completed my first circuit of the city, gawping at the grandeur of the municipal architecture and the vast public spaces that are such anathema to English town-planning, I realised that I had more than enough time to do it all over again... and again. I had a date at 4pm and here I was at 11am, my belly already full of coffee, croissants and municipal architecture, with six hours to go and no desire for an early lunch. What was I to do?
In his excellent book, The Art Of Travel, Alain de Botton describes so well the kind of lethargy and incuriosity that can overwhelm us in foreign places and at such times. During a trip to Madrid, he chose to malinger under the bedsheets in his hotel room rather than endure the tourist slog around the town, imbibing historical and geographical tidbits from an almost reproachful guidebook. The hardest thing, he wrote, was to take pleasure in lying there, whilst knowing that just outside the room was an exotic, new world, just waiting to be explored.
We feel, so often, like disembodied observers when we visit other places and cultures. We blink at the world from the other side of our goldfish bowl without any true feeling of engagement or belonging, conscious always that like the holiday clothes in our suitcases, we will shortly be bundled up and carted back to a place of familiarity, where the boredom of routine can seem infinitely preferable to the disconcerting tedium of our present anomie.
Clearly, it was time for me to do that thing; to mitigate the unfamiliarity of my circumstances and my present ennui with an activity with which I have had the greatest propinquity for more than fifty years:
My own delicious and ever-fresh pleasure; the useless occupation of drawing.
At a life-class, a student with severe back problems once told me that drawing was a more effective analgesia than his TENS machine and at the Society of Disabled Artists meetings in Frome, where I taught for several years, many of our members found that drawing (and painting) made their chronic pain go away and for a time, made them forget that life for them was not 'normal.' This is no surprise as drawing is neurally demanding, engaging as it does, the hand and the eye as well as the brain in an extraordinary synchronicity of movements and measurements. And it is that rare thing; entirely autonomous, self-directed labour, the end result of which is yours and yours alone, to do with as you will. Added to that, drawing changes the act of observation from a passive to an active one and reinvigorates your curiosity in the world. With the rekindling of that curiosity, lethargy vanishes. The municipal building is no longer on the other side of the goldfish bowl but right there, under your hand, along with the rest of the city. You have internalised it in a very conscious way and you may find that even when the drawing is done, your rekindled curiosity continues to grow rather than diminish.
Now I am home again, regardless of any artistic merit they might have, I look with pleasure at the drawings in my sketchbook because I can remember the circumstances in which they were made with a kind of clarity that is absent from the rest of my trip. In The Art Of Travel, de Botton suggests that travel 'twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic.'
I'm inclined to think that drawing unravels it again.
