These are the Lascaux cave paintings.
Nobody knows exactly why they were made. That’s where this project starts.
Last night an old friend messaged me. We hadn’t spoken in a while — the last time felt more like an ambush. He insulted my work and told me all about his wife’s family wealth and how it was coming his way. It was more like a press release than a conversation. This time he messaged asking if I would show his son around Berlin. No “please”, no “if you have time”, just the demand. Sally, be good!
I wanted to tell him how that last conversation had felt, to give him the full account, to make him understand. I wanted to punish him for being so disappointing, and I was busy composing my elegant takedown in my head, aiming for maximum impact.
And then, there it was.
The message has to reach its destination
And then, there it was
Everything I was about to write was in service of a concept — someone who had been wronged — and sending it would have made that concept stronger. I would have felt more wronged, not less, and I’d have added embarrassment into the mix.
There would have been no catharsis or relief. Just the fantasy that performing the mistreatment loudly enough might finally make someone understand. It’s exhausting and it never works. You’re left more identified with the pain than before you started.
The message’s destination is the origin.
Because the picture I had in mind while planning my truth-telling, my revenge script was him, not me.
And it was me playing the role of a you.
The you who had been wronged.
And the you that needed to settle that score.
… self as subject — the one who is having this experience — rather than the self as object to be improved … or witnessed.
But what has any of this got to do with the paintings in the cave?
The looping into loops that land nowhere
This is the loop the Analogue Project exists to interrupt.
From my own experience and the people I work with I see this: What’s being looked for isn’t a better self. It’s contact with the self as subject — the one who is having this experience — rather than the self as object to be improved, defended, explained, or witnessed.
The act of objectifying, improving, and designing the new self brings short-term relief, while long-term it grinds us down and increases our dissatisfaction with the one that we’ve got. We know from Barrett’s work that acting on a feeling can strengthen it — rage-posting makes you angrier, not less. And the self-improvement loop has its own version of this: it brings us into contact with concepts that make us feel worse, and transformation stories that our intellect dismisses as bullshit but our neediness clings to anyway.
It’s looking at what’s here that matters
Drawing does something strange and useful here.
When you draw what you actually see — not what you expect to see, not the symbol for nose or chair or hand, but the actual light and edge and shadow your eyes are receiving right now — the managing, narrating self goes quiet. This is why the drawing itself doesn’t matter. Whether you can represent the fall of light on a nose is irrelevant; you’ve seen it, and that’s what we’re interested in. The will to represent accurately may well take on a life of its own, but it’s not necessary for what we do here. The shift happens not through effort but through attention directed somewhere specific.
Whether you can represent the fall of light on a nose is irrelevant; you’ve seen it, and that’s what we’re interested in.
A question of attention, subtle and essential
Wide attention, Marion Milner called it. The opposite of the focused, goal-directed attention that keeps us locked in the loop, where everything must justify itself. In that state something shifts. You stop being the object of your own story and become, briefly, the subject of your own experience.
I would bet everything I have that the people who drew in those caves were not trying to improve themselves or “be creative” because they had heard it would make them happy and live longer. I would speculate that they drew them just because they could.
The Analogue Project uses drawing — doodling, mind-mapping, scribbling, sketching — writing by hand, and other real-world practices to experiment with attention.
But the theory is scaffolding. The cave paintings are the point.
