A seemingly intelligent and accomplished person spent hours creating a two-minute video clip that will be seen by few people and bring its creator meager financial rewards. Hours!

Why, Pedro, oh why?

Below is the clip in question.

My wife and I don’t have children. We also don’t have a cat or a dog—I mean, a live, flesh-and-blood pet. But we do have stuffed toys; many; a whole menagerie. Lion, tiger, duck, elephant, and assorted ambiguous entities. Some are palm-of-the-hand little, others are big enough to encompass most of your belly and chest when you and the toy are reciprocally recumbent (r&r). The toys have names, personalities, quirks. When we audition new candidates for the menagerie, we test them for squeezeability, cuteness, sad-making eyes, and fluff.

Stuffed toys are charged with possibilities, both sensorial and symbolic. Wow, the pleasure of handling them; the pleasure of looking at them; the pleasure of listening to them. Yes, they talk. In their own language, of course, but we understand them easily. Wow. Do you know how they talk, those stuffed toys? They go like this: “Wow wow wow wow wow.”

I do think that everyone, everyone! everyone should have a menagerie in their homes: all children, all adults, everyone. Besides the multiple, deep sensorial pleasures that they bring into our lives, stuffed toys carry tremendous symbolic power: the symbol of our own animal nature, the symbol of childhood, the symbol of tenderness and love, the embodiment of Storytelling and Healing. Wow!

As it happened, my wife was traveling when I made the video clip. (I may be crazy, but I’m not dumb.) (I may be dumb, but I’m not crazy!) I took photos of some of our animals. I became a portraitist, a biologist, a psychologist. While photographing them, I got thinking about my home in Paris, the passage of time, the countries and cities where I’ve lived, the languages that I speak. (Wow wow!) I got thinking about the child within. Your heart has four chambers. They correspond to the baby, the 3-year-old, the 5-year-old, and the 7-year-old who together “beat the drums of your heart.” No inner child, no heartbeat!

Editing and organizing the photos, I pondered what it was like to be alone (for instance, when your wife is traveling). I pondered the difference between alone and lonely. And I pondered the play of opposing forces: “me by myself” and “me in company,” two different qualities, two essential energies. It’s an art to be alone, it’s an art to be in company. And it’s an art to meditate on these arts.

Taking photographs, editing them, stringing them into a video clip, adding a soundtrack: you learn a lot in the process of structuring a narrative. You must survey the collection of photos, make choices and decisions, handle technology. It’s a whole education.

I used the video clip and its materials in my online Drawing Lab. My students and I watched the clip and had emotions, then we made drawings and had emotions. We developed eye-to-hand coordination, plus brain-to-eye and heart-to-brain-to-eye-to-hand-to-paper coordination. We played with contour, silhouette, line, gesture, shape, size, perspective, color, and wow wow.

The workout was so fruitful that I made a second video clip, featuring two ferocious beasts that didn’t appear in the original clip. If the tiger and the elephant beat the drums of your heart, I’ll know that the time I spent producing these clips was perfectly wow wow.

With thanks to Anselm, Blaine, Katharine, Katie, Margaret, Mary, Michele, Sarah, and Tomoko.