Day 281: According to

Pooped tonight. Bushed. Beat. Tuckered all the way out. Gonna crawl into bed with my book and get enough sleep to be refreshed for the open tomorrow.

I’m reading Underworld by Don DeLillo. I’ve been reading Underworld by Don DeLillo for about three years now. I started it what feels like an aeon ago, fell away from it, picked it back up last month, and am currently struggling through the verbiage, a sluggish paragraph at a time.

I sort of love it. But it sort of leaves me entirely cold. I can tell he’s an exemplary writer, and there’s so much nuance and exploration of subtle truths in there. But maybe I don’t think he’s a good writer at all - this is the second book of his that I’ve appreciated from afar, or maybe felt I should appreciate, without any of it connecting with me on an emotional level.

Not that his prose isn’t suffused with beauty:

“The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car.”

And his dialogue is taut, sizzling, low-key exhilarating. But I’m not really following what’s going on, or why it’s important. There’s someone who works for a waste-disposal agency, and a lot of musing about how waste, trash, excrement, points to something profound and corporeal and hidden in plain view about us all and our place in the world. There’s a baseball that was hit to win the World Series in 1951 that is followed through the novel, a kid grabbing it during the game, his father taking it off him, a collector searching for it in the 90s, something in the 70s - and lots of subtext about sports and achievement and collecting and owning and wanting and What it Means to Be American, which American writers are always trying to answer, which is far less interesting when you’re not yourself American and don’t see why they always have to bang on about themselves so much. There are about fifty more characters who I’ve been introduced to in vignettes so far unattached to anything else, and subsequently forgotten. And there’s someone cruising down freeways murdering people in his car.

That actually all sounds like the kind of novel I would adore. But something about it is so theoretical, so distanced. It’s long, and it requires effort to read - every passage begins in medias res, with characters you can’t remember, pursuing needs that aren’t at all obvious, and after a ponderous few pages you cut away again, unsure of what to make of what you’ve read.

I mean, it all makes sense on the page, and sounds meaningful and powerful and strong. But I’m struggling to transfer any of that from the book into my experience of real life. It’s like it’s encoded with wisdom, but wisdom for an alien lifeform that processes information differently to myself.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough. But I think I get most of it, that’s not the problem - I feel the depths that he’s mining. They’re just cerebral depths, always discrete and unrelated to the heart.

I’ll carry on reading, regardless. Many important works of art only fully connect with me once they’re done, once I’ve experienced them and taken in their whole and felt my own whole being shift to accommodate what they express.

I was just looking for, but couldn’t find, a quote about viewing art. Can’t remember who said it. The gist is that we don’t see art, we see according to art. It changes our viewpoint, changes us, in a very real sense, as we consume it. So far seeing according to Underworld is a lonely, removed way of seeing. But perhaps there will be immense worth in that, once I’m through.

Anyway, that’s enough of my evening spent tapping away. Now it’s time for bed and book.

...... 

Music: Barracuda, by John Cale.

Day 253: Swing and miss

An addendum to yesterday's post, in which I said that inspiration is like a deer in the woods. If you are quiet, and patient, and still, sometimes the deer wanders up, graces you with its presence. But sometimes it does not. And whatever you’re working on you have to just work anyway, regardless, and accept that it will be as it will be. Most times the work isn’t inspired, it’s dull and pedestrian and uninteresting, but you have to accept it anyway, and move on.

But this is difficult. It really is, and especially at first, when you lack experience. It’s tough to be someone who has the acumen to discern quality in a particular field - which you presumably do, if you’re enthusiastic enough to try your hand in that field, be it cupcake baking, dollhouse cabinet building, poetry writing - you presumably love cupcakes, let’s say, and know a good cupcake when you taste it - and it is tough, at first, to sense that the cupcakes you yourself are baking are objectively not good cupcakes.

Allow me to jump analogies, from deer to sports. Because you can lie there, in bed, after a hard day baking, covered in flour and frosting and sloshed egg white, and think about the tray of bland, unrisen muffins cooling on the side downstairs, and you can feel really bad about yourself. 

You can imagine yourself as a sportsperson, a batter, maybe, trying out for a team; these cupcakes you've been baking are your big opportunity to prove yourself, and you imagine the coach watching from the sidelines, clipboard in hand, and here you are on the field striking out.

Even if sometimes you swing and connect. Even if you’ve hit the occasional home run. Mostly you’re missing. Your hitting average must be depressingly low. No team would hire you. Maybe you just don’t have what it takes.

But this the wrong way to think about it.

You’re not at try-outs here. You’re not in the game winning final minute.

This is just one of many practice sessions on a dreary Tuesday afternoon in the rain. You have to do it, and a million more like it, before you’ll even know how good you are. Romanticised assumptions tell you that people with hidden beautiful gifts get noticed, and have to only display those innate gifts, and they win fame, attention, call-ups to world cup teams, positions on next year’s Bake Off.

But the truth is that it’s all a lot of work. For everyone, regardless of talent. And most of the work involves failing, and learning, and adjusting, and failing again, over and over and over. Batters spend all day every day swinging at balls. Not to prove their talent. Just to practise. To dedicate themselves. Have you got any idea how many footballs Beckham would bend in from outside the box in ceaseless training sessions, ingraining the muscle memory, honing the movements? How many of those do you think went in? Not all of them. Not nearly.

How many free kicks did Beckham score, in actual matches, out of the total number he took? Some of them.

And what’s more, art is not sport. The primary drive is not competition. There aren’t rigid rules within which precise skills may be tested. Art is more exploratory, imprecise, curative, playful. You are not aiming to best others, but to share with them. Whether you share through words, fabrics, musical scales, or cupcakes, you’re dedicating yourself to an act of communion.

So when you’re next lying in bed, sugar and dough beneath your fingernails, feeling the day has been for naught, remember that this is the job. Your cupcakes will sag. You’ll strike out. Why not give yourself a decade or two, and then see if that’s still the case. And if it is, but you still enjoy what you do, then who the hell cares?

We’re all only going to die.

So get down to the oven, to the pitch, to the page, and do your work, whether you hit or miss or fall. There is nothing more for it.

...... 

Music: This Is the Day, by the The. An upbeat new wave classic, imbued with optimism, but with a hint of melancholy twisting through the core. Gently profound. Lovely.

Day 252: Deer

Here's something about creativity that I should know, and yet am continuously learning: it cannot be forced. Creativity is a deer in the woods, picking gingerly through the thicket, and yelling at it will only scare it away. Telling it when to turn up is an exercise in futility. Anger and frustration only drive it deeper into the bush.

The best you can do is create a large and tranquil space within yourself, put out food, ensure there is running water, and then wait. Maybe the deer will be along. Maybe it won't.

If the deer does arrive then you can only be relaxed, let it do its thing, and accept that it is going to leave whenever it wants. Maybe you need it to stay for a full day, but it wanders off after half an hour, and does not return.

This is the nature of the deer.

You're not hunting it. You're not capturing it. You simply want it to come and sit with you. The energy and beauty that the deer bestows upon you only works when the deer is free. Creativity cannot be made to happen.

But of course this doesn't mean you have to wait to be productive. Oh no. The deer might well come and go as it pleases, an animal spirit beholden to no mortal laws, but you, if you are serious about creativity, have to make commitments.

Whether you're painting, writing, sewing baby jumpers, or baking meringues, you have to be able to work whether or not the deer of creativity, of inspiration, deigns to grace you with its presence.

How do you go about this?

There are many tricks. Bum on seat, that's always vital. Get to where you need to work, and put yourself in position. You have to be in that woodland glade, ready, or there's zero chance of meeting the deer.

Schedule your time. Turn off your phone, disable Wi-Fi on your laptop, create a block of time that is for this activity only. Don't leave until the time is over. If two hours feels impossible, do twenty minutes. Do ten minutes. Do sixty seconds. Building a routine of sixty-second blocks, a number of times a day, for a number of months - and sticking to it - you might be shocked by what happens. And you may well find after forcing yourself down to the glade that you've become lost in the sunlight and birdsong, you've met a few deer, and your alarm has long since sounded and fallen silent. Ingraining the habit of getting going is a powerful thing indeed.

Picture where you want to be in the future, say, winning the local meringue baking contest, and try to spend every day moving closer rather than further away from that goal. Go to bed closer than you were when you woke up. Even if only by an inch.

Go for a walk every day. Eat a satsuma. Get enough sleep. Try the Morning Pages. Three sides of free-writing every day, no excuses. They work.

There are many tricks. For me, though, the hardest one to learn has been this:

Get over yourself.

Just get the hell over yourself. Because the truth is that most of what you create, when you sit at your desk, stand at your easel, lean over your stove, will be rubbish. It will be not good. Most of the time the deer will not turn up, there will be drizzle falling, and you'll come home cold and damp.

This is the nature of the deer. This is the nature of the work. This is the nature of life.

Fight it all you want, but it won't change. So best get the hell over yourself, and get on with making things anyway.

You simply cannot put energy into getting that damned deer to do a damned thing. So forget about it, and put your energy into all the rest. There is much to do.

......

Music: Sister Cities, by Hop Along.

Day 212: Wonky art

Wotcha. I’m just home from work. I’ve not got much to say tonight, I did a load of writing this afternoon, but it was more the first delicately reaching fingers of a hand palpating a subject, feeling for the size, the shape, whether there’s anything there to necessitate further action. Maybe the words I wrote will coalesce into something later down the line. Maybe not.

But I can come here and just write this, and see what happens. I know eventually something will come out, because I’ve got my mojo back.

I had a confrontation with the negative voices in my head the other night, shined the light of awareness directly on them after a long time of them bubbling away in the dark, and they hissed and fled, and suddenly I was alone, myself, free to laugh and think and write again.

And, Christ, does it make a difference, believing in yourself! Who cares if this all is pathetic? It’s aflame for me right now. I’m where I want to be. Who cares if no one reads it? Write for the stars and the moon - and if the stars and the moon whisper that you’re a loser, give them the finger and write what you wanted anyway.

… Uhh, not that I’m bragging, by the way. About having my mojo back.

Why would that be bragging? Why would I be ashamed about having my mojo back? It isn’t shameful to feel good.

So why do I feel ashamed?

Because those negative voices haven’t truly fled. They’re just on the periphery of the light, looking for a way back in.

But not today, you pesky buggers.

I’ve got a lifetime of experience squishing myself up really tight, and trying really hard, and using stress and self-loathing and perfectionism to try to sort of trick people into thinking I have talent. Like if I obsess over a piece of writing for months then, provided it doesn’t implode under the weight, I can make it read pretty well.

But the secret to creating things is to just do them naturally, and badly, and not worry that they’re bad, but love that they’re natural, and encourage that natural element, the organic, artistic element - foster it, nourish it, and let it slowly develop and grow. And only when this instinctive joyful chaotic process inside you has parity with that squished-tight, try-hard process, that voice that criticises and frets - only when the two are equally powerful can you have a fruitful creative life.

The try-hard process hones and shapes. But it is the chaotic process that spews the clay initially that may then be honed and shaped. Be overly critical and the clay well will dry up (that’s a weird metaphor, but screw it!), and you’ll be left criticising an empty hole, and then, eventually, yourself.

So no more of that. No no. I’ve done that for so long. But I’ve also got 212 days practice just chucking out whatever clay I can find. The clay well got clogged (I’m not letting this metaphor drop) recently, but all it took was hauling out the clay blockage and slapping it into some sort of shape and saying, Hey, I made this wonky clay thing, and it might not be a Grecian urn, but it came from me, and that’s good enough - all it took was that, making a concerted effort to accept myself, and the clay was flowing once again, the beautifully flowing clay well… or maybe fountain... maybe this metaphor works better with the clay coming from a fountain, because wells don’t flow, do they? They just sit and wait for you to dip your bucket in them.

Do wells flow? Fountains flow. Or spray. Can wells be fountains? It’s too late at night and concepts have stopped making sense to me.

I don’t know. But I do know you should go away and make something, and love whatever it is you make, and when those negative voices come out to tell you that the thing you made is wonky and disgusting, well, tell them it does not matter.

Your wonky art is wonky because it’s true. And I believe Keats had a little something to say about what is true, whether Grecian urn or no.

So get to it.

Day 191: Verdant

Just a little one for tonight. Fran is lying in my bed, and the light and the typing keep her awake, so I don't want to be too long. It’s late anyway, and I’m full of fish and chips, and I’m tired like you wouldn’t believe.

We had a long relationship talk this evening. Being an adult is hard, and messy, and there are no obvious answers. But we're doing the best we can. I think that's all any of us can do.

Check this out though. It’s a picture I asked my friend Jackson to draw for the blog, and he’s knocked it right out of the park. I love his style so much, the detail, the curlicues, the flow and the verdant decomposing sense of life. I’m still not sure how I’m going to use the picture, my Blogger template doesn’t allow for header images, and my web design skills are paltry, and probably the whole blog needs an overhaul - but it’s finding the time, the energy, as with everything else.

But regardless, the artwork is fantastic. It's exactly what I was picturing when I gave him the vaguest, least helpful spec imaginable. Thankfully he somehow went and drew precisely what was in my head. Go check out his stuff on Instagram, it’s seriously the best.

Anyway, I’ve got a bed to jump in and a girlfriend to go snuggle down next to. See you for now.

Day 110: Things I like

Got the sadness tonight, the wailing blues, but determined not to be ruled by it, so instead here are some things that make me happy:

- When you open the coffee bag in the morning and the fresh, chocolatey aroma hits your nose and you feel like maybe you'll be able to make it through this day after all.
- Reading a novel and finding a line about a far off city twinkling in the sunlight, or a fabulous hidden garden, or a vast mountain range marching to the horizon, and getting a shock of realisation at the breadth of the world and how much magic and beauty there is waiting in every direction.
- That first spoonful of fudge brownie ice cream before it's become sickly when it's still gloriously rich and indulgent.
- Becoming aware of how your vision isn't passive, like light hitting plates behind your eyes, but something active and alert and living, a reaching out into your environment, an exploratory hand of sight sweeping the world, touching it, caressing it; a meeting of self and other, at the mystical liminal boundary where the two merge. And then catching someone's eye and sensing your alert gaze entwining with their alert gaze. Feeling all the mechanisms of defence and caution you both erect to protect those pathways through the eyes that lead back down into the depths inside you, but sensing the possibility that these mechanisms could, perhaps only for the briefest of moments, be dropped.
- The first days of autumn when the breeze comes hard and cold and the leaves begin to turn and the air is clear and the light is fading and it is all so beautiful, so delicate, so doomed.
- Miles Davis and red wine by candlight.
- That opening paragraph of The Pale King, starting, "Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust," and ending with the line, "We are all of us brothers."
- Pretty much any camera movement in a Scorcese film.
- The listening booth scene from Before Sunrise.
- The sensitive, stubborn humanity of Kurt Vonnegut.
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, how he writes courageous and complex female protagonists matter-of-factly, as if it would be ludicrous for other male writers not to all do the same, which of course it is. How he refuses to allow his antagonists to meet grizzly ends getting the comeuppances they deserve, because in real life there are no real villains, no monsters, only human beings each with their own vast internal universes whom we should treat with respect and courtesy and love.
- That video doing the rounds on social media about the importance of the 60s American show Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood, what Rogers did for race relations, having a black policeman move in as his neighbour, inviting him round in a scene when Rogers was bathing his feet in a paddling pool on a hot day, asking the black policeman if he wanted to take his shoes and socks off and join him, which the policeman did, and the two men sat there, white and black feet naked and almost touching, the scene quietly telling children across the US and the world that this was normal, a million times normal, that, to borrow from The Pale King, we are all of us brothers. And for me now to think about this in days that grow dark with portents, as demagogues seek to divide us, and to remember that art can change the world, that there is always a choice between love and hate, always only one choice that matters, and that we are free to make it in every moment in which we still exist.

Day 54: A quick question

Imagine this: your close friend comes to you and tells you that they've become interested in origami, that they've started creating origami models, but that recently someone has been messaging them saying horrible things, telling them their models are rubbish, that they (the friend) are a joke, that everything they make looks pathetic, that everyone is laughing at them, that it's all a waste of time and the friend should give up before they make an even bigger fool of themselves.

You'd give this friend a big hug, right? You'd give them a big hug and look directly into their eyes and tell them in complete honesty to ignore that prick. You'd say that that stuff all is nonsense. We're all only going to die, we're reaching no final goal apart from that, death, and if we can find something that gives us meaning in the doing of it, for a short while, then that is worth doing.

You'd say that you bet the origami models are not rubbish, that you bet they're really cool. And that even if you did personally think they were rubbish, that still would be only your opinion, that there is no one objective truth about art. That even if there was, and even if your friend somehow ended up making objectively the worst origami models the planet had ever seen, they should just get on with doing that, over and over, that they should love it all, should gather up handfuls of their terrible origami models and set the fuckers alight, torch them, and dance naked over the flames, dance and howl at the moon, spit at the stars -- then put their clothes back on and make a whole load more terrible origami models.

You'd say that we contain no permanent selves. That we are not fixed, there is nothing in us to be a failure, to be not good enough. That we are a flowing dream of a ghost passing through carbon atoms arising and falling on a rock hurtling through infinite space on its way back into the birthing pool of nothingness, and that with all that in mind if they, your friend, want to make origami models then they should bloody well go and make origami models, haters be damned.

Right?

That is what I would say. That is what I truly believe. It would be easy.

And yet when we ourselves are beset by self-doubts over our own endeavours, when that negative voice in our heads is telling us it's all worthless, everything we do is pathetic, that we should give up -- why then do we find it so hard to be similarly kind to ourselves?

If you wouldn't let a stranger say it to your friend, don't let your own head say it to you. Disagree, argue, talk it down. You are deserving of love.

I'm trying to keep this in mind tonight. It's so tough, but I'm trying.

A new plan, again: Day 12

Yes, yes, there was some depression this morning. Some self-loathing. I was half an hour late waking up and I sat in bed with the usual thoughts swimming by, about how I'm a shitty person and my life is empty and I'm desperate to receive some magical validation from everyone that in truth will never come and that this blog is worthless and I should slink back to my hole and go drink myself into unconsciousness because everything else is misery and pain.

But there's no reason why that has to matter! What a voice, eh? What a sad creature hunched in the darkness in my brain there. He can come out, if he needs to, dripping his slime everywhere, glum about everything, and I'll pat him on the head, tell him I love him, let him slouch about until he calms.

I'm enjoying this daily blogging. It's fab. It's a bit like that Zen technique of painting with water on rock. Wet the brush, draw out some quick picture, then as the sun beats down the water dries and the art disappears, and you go on your merry way.

Except I suppose instead of this disappearing it sticks around forever and ever, and I get to stumble across it in five years and wince at how clumsy and unguarded it all was. OK, it's not much like painting with water on rock.

But it is like that other Zen thing, which I guess it what I was really thinking about, where you take the brush and you swish and you flourish, and that's it, it's done. And the next day you do it again, and each time it is about mindfulness of form, of creation for creation's sake, and you don't stress and hone and edit, you just live in that now-realm of energy and an attempt to ride that energy, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You love the imperfection, love the letting go of attachments, love the part of you that can never wholly let go of attachments. And onwards you march.

And of course the negative thoughts are there, as always, but you don't keep grasping at them, feeding them -- you let them out and you watch, in the blinding sunlight of awareness, as they evaporate, majestically, like water on scorching rock.

Does that tie the piece together? Not quite, but I guess with some self-knowing line about how I know it doesn't quite tie the piece together, it might just about work.

Yeah?