In the Margins

You’re sitting in a classroom on a regular Wednesday afternoon. No matter how interesting the discussion is, your mind inevitably starts to wander – especially if you’re right by the window and it’s a beautiful day. Hey, it happens to the best of us when we try to cram in multiple classes into a couple of days, striving for that coveted three- or four-day week.

I’m the type of person who can’t sit without some kind of outlet – I’m always spinning my pen, shaking my leg, or as it were, doodling in the margins of my notebook. I thought I would go through some old notes and look at some of my little scribbles.

I was thinking about Ariana Grande when I drew this one. She has this signature high ponytail look paired with winged eyeliner every time I see pictures of her. I like how this girl seems to have a personality of her own. She looks sassy and astute, like she’s observing the text to her left with laser-sharp focus.

I am really fascinated with bones. It’s amazing how we have come to associate skeletons and skulls with death when we live everyday because of the support, protection, and movement they allow us. We also tend treat death with such weight because it is the one inevitable ending for us all. In John Donne‘s sonnets, he personifies and belittles Death:

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Donne sees Death as subject to the whims of the dying, sick, and war ravaged. As a believer in Christianity, he also believed in a vision of an eternal afterlife; from this perspective, Death was even less important as “one short sleep” from one life to another instead of a permanent state.

If you’ve never seen any of ViHart‘s videos on Youtube, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. I don’t even like math very much (except for geometry, because that focuses more on logic and shapes), but I’m convinced that her videos could get you interested in anything from infinite series to Fibonacci sequences. Look, don’t take my word for it. Check out the video below for the most entertaining math tangent of your life:

I know; it’s beautiful how her mind works. My doodles were inspired by ViHart’s whimsical, yet completely organized, scribbles. May doodling always contain hidden depths.

I was reading Petrarch’s famous Ascent of Mount Ventoux when I drew this one. Did you know that Petrarch is said to be the first every recorded recreational mountain climber? Before him, people usually climbed mountains out of necessity – which doesn’t surprise me at all, since it still seems unreasonable to risk the high altitudes and unfavorable conditions just to get to a higher place, especially if you’re risking death. For the doodle on the left, I played with crosshatching textures to give the piece more personality than a simple line drawing. I think it would make a cute logo for a pin.

This doodle sat next to my notes on Dante’s Purgatorio. It is one of my favorite works of literature now, although at the time I found it tedious to go back and forth between the text and the footnotes just to understand a few lines of poetry. At parts of the poem where Dante just goes on and on soliloquizing about the human condition, Virgil urges him to continue onward. The image of Virgil rolling his eyes in exasperation as Dante pours out his heart in fluent Italian still makes me laugh – so the top image has Virgil with his walking stick yelling out in irritation, “Hurry up Dante!” (Dante has a shadow because he’s still alive, whereas dead spirits like Virgil don’t.)

The bottom figure is Belacqua, a figure that Dante and Virgil find curled up in a ball in ante-Purgatory. He is stuck waiting there for the length of the time he waited before turning to God. What’s cool about him is his unbothered attitude to the whole situation. While a lot of people might be pissed about lounging about for so long, our guy Belacqua is just chilling. Dante based Belacqua on a real historical figure who made instruments – so in a way, Belacqua is just listening to the music and biding his time.

In religious imagery, the lion often symbolizes Jesus. For this reason, I remember trying to imbue this likeness with a sense of majesty. I kept thinking about Aslan, that lion from C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I grew up as a Buddhist ignorant to Bible. It took me a lot time to realize that Aslan was a Christ-like figure in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, what with his noble death at the hands of the White Witch and subsequent resurrection. Again: I was pretty ignorant about Christianity as a kid.

I grew up with what a lot of people consider the anti-Christian fantasy counterpart to the Chronicles: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which you might recognize better as The Golden Compass series. It’s not surprising that he got flak from Christian groups, considering Pullman himself has commented that his books are about “killing God.” Having read these books as a kid, I wasn’t interested in any anti-religion undertones. I was more interested in the idea of ripping the boundaries between different worlds and having supernatural adventures with spirit animals. Books like The Golden Compass trick kids into consuming complex subjects without them realizing it – for example, the entire series alludes strongly to Milton’s Paradise Lost, from the titles to the plot. It’s sneaky, but I love it because it takes the capacity of the child mind seriously. (It’s not like Pullman is the only one disguising classic pieces in his creations, either. The Lion King is just an zoomorphic retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, after all.)

Funnily enough, one of the deuteragonists of the Golden Compass is Lyra Belacqua – a reference to Dante, as I’ve mentioned before. I’m getting the eerie feeling that childhood me somehow knew I would grow up to read and enjoy Dante.

Your professor dismisses the class and you look down at the half-doodled, half-written patchwork that stretches out on the pages. Good enough! You throw your books into your bag and zip it closed. Find your next classroom and try to pay more attention this time. (If your hand twitches and your mind starts to wander, well, only your blog readers need to know.)

-Monica