While I was on one of my usual prowls trying to dig up a column, I stopped in at an acquaintance's Magnolia Village office.
He had assumed one of his usual postures, hunched over his desk with telephone seemingly permanently attached to his ear.
"Uh-huh," he mumbled into the phone, "we might be interested...." The person on the other end of the line then launched into what seemed like a five-minute explanation of some problem without giving my buddy any real chance to respond.
My friend picked up a pencil and wrote down a few words on a pad of paper in front of him, but for the most part the page was filled with aimless doodles. When the conversation finally ended and I asked who it was, he explained it was some salesman seeking a new placing for his product.
I looked at my buddy's doodles and thought of my own endless scribblings across innumerable notebooks. Back when I was in still in school, I had developed doodling into a fine art; the margins of my class notes were often more interesting than the notes themselves.
A doodle is defined as "a mark, design or figure made in aimless drawing." But what you probably haven't realized is that a doodle, according to Webster's Universal Dictionary, is also a "foolish person, a simpleton," just as the verb doodle can mean "to move about foolishly." (Bonus trivia note: "Doodles" Weaver was a popular featured performer in Spike Jones' comedy swing band.)
If that means you've got to be a fool to doodle, you should know you're in excellent company. Virtually all of us doodle, and some of the world's most brilliant artists, writers and scientists have been doodling fools.
It's rumored that Picasso doodled on restaurant napkins, which he then presented to waiters he particularly liked as a tip. (That would be some tip - those napkins might be worth thousands of dollars today!)
Doodles have been used to interpret behavior almost since the dawn of modern psychology. It was Freud who first declared that geometric shapes were sexually symbolic, and much of his dream work was based on the interpretation of symbols. Later, Jung discovered that a mandala, a circular form, and the shapes that he drew inside it had a centering effect.
New York Jungian analyst Gregg M. Furth, author of "The Secret World of Drawings," compares doodle analysis to dream analysis. "A doodle is information from the unconscious," he says. "As unique as each person on earth, that's how unique his doodle will be."
My elementary-school doodling didn't seem to be all that unique; it all revolved around jet fighters, like those of most of my chums. Then, as I moved on to high school, drawings of dragsters filled more and more of my notebook margins. When my family pulled me - kicking and screaming - from California on our move to Detroit, I changed my doodle subject to all the surfing waves I so sorely missed.
"Joy usually takes the form of light, upwardly curving lines," says Betty Edwards, author of the popular book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and professor emeritus of art at California State University-Long Beach. She might just as well have been describing the waves that I had drawn.
"The left brain is constantly analyzing, trying to put things into words, trying to make sense. But when the right side of the brain begins to draw, the left brain says, 'Hey, it's just doodling.' As soon as it lets down its guard, all sorts of surprising things pour forth."
According to a 1988 survey by the pen makers Faber/Castell (folks with a vested interest, to be sure), most of us doodle. "One very positive aspect of doodling," says Bernice Pescosolido, a professor of sociology at Indiana University who studies mental-health issues, "is when you're doodling, sometimes you get enough fresh air inside your head to be brilliant. It's a way of staying mentally limber."
Now that you know that, does everybody out there have pen and paper ready? Are we all ready to doodle? Myself, I've just got to add a few more pen strokes to the face of this awesome wave before I'm finished.
[[In-content Ad]]
