The Sketchbook 3

Back from a break, in which I went to the toilets, I find my sketchbook abandoned carelessly on a shelf at the side of the room. I pick it up and leaf through it: It is full of his drawings, or rather the marks he has made. With a light pencil. I am not thrilled.
I count the pages he has used, with annoyance: 12 in all, 12 large A3 pieces of clean white cartridge paper. A substantial portion of the book ruined, or will have to be thrown away. My favourite sketchbook, that I was keeping so pristine, so pure and professional. Contaminated by his careless scrawl. He had drawn disconsolately, as though half-asleep, turning pages as soon as a new idea, nebulous and dim, formed in his mind, to be in turn abandoned. Like automatic drawing.
Spurious pencil drawings with a loose line meandering over pages, as though the drawer's hand drifted by itself from page to page, formlessly dancing, allowing the line to wander delicately as the leaves turned. Also, scribbles and doodles, like would be done on a pad by the phone, while the drawer was immersed in a daydream or dull phonecall, or on a beermat or betting slip. Confined to a corner of the paper, or skulking at its lower edge, like rude and futile gestures.
On one page I find he had drawn a series of boxes, like comic panels, suggesting a sequence to be read from  left to right. But depicted inside the little boxes are only what look like stylised depictions of clouds and mist, as might be shown in an old print, obscuring the edges and corners of ambiguous objects. Is this his dream, his vagueness, drawn lightly with a light pencil, did he in fact slumber as he drew? No, he draws like this because he is mysterious, because he is himself a figure from a dream. I find the vagueness contemptible, the cheap pencil, the loose, uncaring line, that commits to nothing. It disgusts me, as though he had marked the paper with dirt.