Doodle of a fish in water colours. One of my series of doodles some of which are representational and others abstract.In Sainbury's to day it occurs to me that I and my fellow shoppers are hunter gathers. We exercise our skills in spotting what we want among the varieties of goods on the shelves, in loading and navigating our trolleys though the aisles crowded with other hunters and some stackers who replenish the shelves, and in packing our kill on the conveyor at the check out. Nature was never so challenging. Oh for those good days on the plain and in the forest!
"You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of clichés in your writing". This aphorism from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's wonderful book of aphorisms called The Bed of Procustes is among my favourites.
4 comments:
A lovely watercolour, much more than a doodle.
Hunter-gatherers in the supermarket - great image!
Beautiful blue fish.
A probably more dead than alive cliché would have it that in general men are the hunters in the supermarket, making the quick forceful dash in and out and bearing off the desired prey, while women are the shopping gatherers, browsing and letting their eyes pass in leisurely but purposeful fashion over the retail greenery until they light upon (dead cliché) the choice and juicy berry of a bargain.
But it ain't necessarily so... (ellipses = another dead cliché).
You are the ever slayer of clichés sans pareil, thanks be.
Yes, I think the effort required to avoid a cliché is confirmation I'm still alive, still active in the only church in which I took ordination. I'm not a great Martin Amis enthusiast but I enjoyed his collection of essays, The War Against Cliché, and was drawn there by the title. But, alas, clichés are not limited to what is written: there can be clichés of attitude, of belief and of thought. There is also the cliché of age - clinging on to conclusions arrived at two decades ago, refusing to question them.
The fish is a veritable bijou (cliché? - one can't escape merely by translation). I would like to see it enlarged, Hockney-style, and hung against an acre of white wall.
A sense of hunter-gather is more apparent at Tesco (the brutish supermarket) than at Sainsbury.
I can see that fish in the water, flitting through shadows. It's beautiful.
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