cantata
Had a strange dream last night. I was taking part in some sort of Zen painting lesson, out in the street in a town somewhere. We had been told to paint an aubergine. I was a bit slow off the mark, and so by the time the pad of paper got around to me there was none left, so I improvised and started drawing my aubergine on the pavement in chalk.
I got the aubergine almost right, then I tried to add some highlighting, to give it a bit of shine and a bit of life, but it wasn't quite right when I finished, so I added more and more highlighting until the aubergine was almost completely bleached out white.
At this point I heard a crack of thunder and it started to rain. We all scrambled inside. All the other students brought their paintings in with them, but of course I couldn't move mine because it was drawn on the pavement. It rained for a while and I just stood there, watching my painting running and washing down the pavement. I felt quite sad.
After a while the rain stopped and it dried up almost immediately. I went back outside and looked at my painting. Only the stalk was left visible, as I'd drawn that in fairly heavily. The other students all gathered round to show our teacher their work. They all had sticks of broccoli, which they'd spray painted purple with orange highlights. They'd used the paper to stop the spray paint getting on the pavement, so that under each stick of broccoli there was a kind of inverse shadow of white paper with colours radiating away from it.
The teacher praised all the other pupils, but ignored me. It didn't matter though, as I had a strange feeling I'd learnt something important.
