ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the wordless nature of absorbed experience which arises in the practice of drawing, but which might be said to exist in all practices. It attempts to throw light upon the particular nature of absorbed immersiveness that occurs, unwilled yet yearned for, right at the centre of practice. The practice not only leaves the physically externalized traces of a drawing itself, but discloses an internal source which the author describes as the 'ontological sketchbook'. The practice of anything involves transcendence of the body in which action or activity is aimed at some purpose or end. Motivations often lay hidden from view and we progress through a series of strategies drawn from unconscious experience, as rational preferences and emotional affects. Therefore, the ontological sketchbook is not made from paper pages but is the source of our being which is the accumulation of a lived experience immersed in cultural discourses.
