Brown Study

We are going to a murder mystery evening in Blackpool shortly, and as a consequence I didn't travel down to London today to watch the team playing at Leyton Orient, couldn't have got back for 7.30 pm - but missed a horror show by all accounts. So here I am in the jewel of the north, killing time before playing detective. To paraphrase from that well-known board game: it's the Saturday Blogger, in the Brown Study, with the Abstraction.

brown study (i)

By the way, that's not me in the image above (although it could be), and it's certainly not my brown study. It more resembles the room in which my ex-father-in-law used to write his lectures, or my own father used to compose his sermons, and even that is being hugely generous in comparison. I suspect it's really the library of some Edwardian gentleman, though I'm not sure about the feet up on the desk. 

But I should get to the point, which is, as you've realised, brown study, more specifically being in one, in a metaphorical rather than the literal sense with which I teased you above. The phrase, whose roots can be traced back at least as far as the 16th century, has rather gone out of fashion these days, ousted by the equally colourful notion of having the blues. 

However, although brown study did and does have connotations of a gloomy or melancholic state of mind, with Doctor Watson famously describing himself as "falling into a brown study" in 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box' (as who wouldn't?), and Conrad writing in 'Thrift and the Child' "He sat solemnly dejected, in a brown study", there is another sense to being in a brown study that goes over and beyond what having the blues means. 

That additional depth to the phrase carries an implication not so much of depression or sadness, but of the mind being in contemplative or reflective mode to such a degree of intensity that the person ceases to be aware of anything going on around them.

We sometimes fall into these states of abstraction quite by accident (or so it sems), when our senses momentarily disconnect themselves from the treadmill of life. Such moments can even be quite long, as in periods of day-dreaming (reverie), or when we're functioning on automatic pilot, and we generally don't know we've been in this type of brown study until something happens to make us snap out of it.

But we are also capable of inducing such a meditative state if we so wish, by practising techniques that empty the mind of conscious thought and allow us to enter a still and trance-like state.

brown study (ii)

I sometimes use a mandala like the one above to help me lose myself into abstraction. Maybe you've tried something similar yourself at some point? 

As for poems on theme, I did have a look. There are a couple of quite famous brown study ones, but somehow they didn't appeal, so I've used some of my time this afternoon to conjure up the following rather edgy composition. I nearly titled it 'Take Three Girls' (being beastly to each other). See what you think. It comes with the usual caveat, that I will probably look to refine it at a later date.

  

Abstraction

Because Sienna has the knack

of getting out of it 

without the aid of grass or tabs

or wine, the naughty girls

think her haughty,

both envy and despise her,

mostly the latter actually,

referring to her behind her back

as snake eyes.

It doesn't help matters that she's

building quite the cool rep 

with her abstract style. Her art

hangs on gallery walls,

merits exhibitions, sells well.

Ginger painted her in secret,

'portrait of the artist as a young bitch'

as if there might be voodoo

in gouache laid on thick

with menace.

And Rose steals 

both paints and brushes

from the studio they share

but Sienna

with her thousand yard stare

doesn't give a fuck.

After all, she has her secrets too -

knows that 'abstract # 18'

represents Ginger giving birth

to a piglet and 'abstract # 31'

is about Rose being mangled

by a truck.

 

Thanks for reading. Murder mystery beckons.  S ;-)