history

a bare place

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In my artist summer seasons there is a pattern which seems to recur but is almost impossible to prepare for.

I arrive to it, exhausted and colonised by work.

I’m simultaneously ravenous for, afraid of, wrongly orientated for, unable to reach the freedom I have longed for for months.

The muscles of artist living and freedom enjoying have atrophied, replaced by obedience to structures I had no say in making.

I start playing the role of the version of myself that most recently inhabited the freedom, but without the inner substance all my attempts are flimsy and I feel vulnerable and frail and ashamed and disappointed that what I have longed for I am not enjoying, if even I can admit to feeling disappointed or ashamed, which usually I can’t because along with the obedience to structures I’ve lost the power to feel or speak my feelings.

I cast around for rescuers and they all disappoint me because I can only do the work myself, but this disappointment makes me feel despair.

I make indirect appeals for encouragement and validation but those too get ignored.

I feel pain.

With the wisdom of having experienced this pattern I have often pre-planned a container event that will preserve me through this turbulence. A visit to a museum, a favourite book.

This works well to prompt glimpses of the joy that will be there, but usually it’s so flimsy that one tricky conversation or unnecessary appeal for my time, responsibility or energy will distract me and the cunning plan will disintegrate.

Somewhere in here I might see an early sign of true substance.

This gives me the hope to persist.

The turbulence starts to become more manageable. The loops of disorientation repeat but their power starts to diminish. I am building the muscles of artistic practice again. I start to gain confidence. I start to remember who I am.

Eventually I will reach the mid point and all hell will break loose again.

digging

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The process by which one unearths oneself from one’s life is highly mysterious to me. Is one’s life not oneself, for example, what self is being unearthed and from what other self? Why does one self feel like digging up another self? Why is it hard to do it? What happens if that self is not dug up? Why is there this sense of an unheard appeal from a self that to all intents and purposes is the same person. Who’s to say that what is being dug up is any more authentic or meaningful than the one who is, apparently, persuaded into digging.

Mysterious, and for the most part, unanswerable. There is some kind of appeal and it is somehow appealing. The one who responds to the call to dig is also mysterious, then. Why does she dig?

This digging is what I am spending my days on, so it seems, mining myself for something that is not certain, really to exist. I am so used to it that it feels certain to me. But I never know quite what I am digging for and sometimes when I have dug it up, whatever it is, I also don’t recognise it until later.

But nonetheless, the digging is part of me and so is the apparent regularity of sensing an appeal, often after weeks of performing at a high level other tasks and jobs that I actually do enjoy – I really don’t think I’m faking it. So then how does this part get so buried?

I am unusual in that I keep a daily journal and one of the very interesting elements of this practice is that one can visit oneself in any previous era of one’s life. Sixteen? I’m there, with my sixth form self, questioning the universe and pondering boys with my best friend. Twenty four? I’m there in a corporate job being appraised and wondering if I can get a mortgage on a flat in an aspirational area of a capital city, despite my frail pecuniary beginnings.

This week I have been revisiting selves of seven, five, and and three years ago, a year ago. It’s like digging in various layers of substrata and somehow I feel like I am getting somewhere, but where? It’s like lining up my younger selves in a row and interviewing them as witnesses to an event, the event of me, that I am somehow not quite able to grasp, and I’m relying on them to shed light on things.

Of course I talk to other people too, but almost none of them keep a record. Their thoughts are memories of memories. Mine are of their time.

I don’t know why it felt important to capture this thought in writing, but there is something that I’ve come to recognise as relatively unusual in this process, and this is on my mind as I continue it.

self/ish

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Are you there, self?

Or have you given up,
understandably
as you have been
intolerably neglected.

I coax you with delicious morsels
(Look a fun moment with friends!
Look, the beauty of the garden!
Soon we will bike to the seaside!)
as to a mouse, in its hole
Am I a cat to you?
Is that why you hide,
timid?

I deliver monologues
explaining everything, patiently
as if to a small child whose mother
culpably, had to depart
for work, or an evening out.
Who cares? You left me.

You will not be reasoned back
You will not be controlled
You will not diminish
all those weary days.

But if I wait patiently and listen,
go about the necessary tasks,
forgiving myself at least and others, being
merciful,
perhaps suddenly you will be there
before I have really noticed
and then something new will begin.

childhood piano

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child
sitting there, legs dangling
enthralled, wondering
playing notes as
precisely, intentionally as a
Phd researcher,
though four years old

girl
sitting there, music room
stuffy, piano teacher
aside, seeing notes
black marks on black lines
pure

girl, still, though older
sitting there, wishing
her father was not so emphatic
my daughter could play that piano,
a contortion, playing
another person’s tune

teenager
sitting there,
aplomb, the one who can
accompany the orchestra
glory, approval,
satisfaction

young woman
sitting there, university
practice room, ‘perhaps you
can teach me?’ – she fails to recognise
an offer of intimacy,
and why should she?
she is absorbed

twenties
long absence, no room
in the small spaces, none
in time either

thirty-something
sitting there, new home
space, although it’s squeezed up to the sofa
new teacher,
horror at performing,
at persistent error,
inepitude,
shaking with it

forties
sitting there, new home
old piano abandoned to old existence
yet grace, magic
though borrowed, a queen’s instrument
peace, beauty, renovation, reunion
soul.

poetic history

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Every now and then you catch one of those moments, flitting about tiny as a dust mote, but golden and shivering off a tiny glimmer that you can ignore or chase.

I caught it.

There is a poet friend of mine and knowing him has helped me to realise that I might be a poet too.  Maybe one day.  He writes poetry and about poetry, introducing me both intentionally and not to poem-mirrors that make me wonder.  Perhaps I can do/am doing this?  These moments are a kind of equation, a logic that appeals to my maths-geek brain.  If fragment of poem (x)  = fragment of poem (y) and x is the work of a ‘real poet’, is perhaps y the work of a ‘real poet’.

Reading my friend’s new book (about poems, of course), I come across this thought.  When was my first poetry experience?  In fact, what is my poetic history?  These questions have literally never occurred to me before.

(What is more, these questions answer the matter I pondered in happy birthday extraplorer:  whether to write about creative living.  The answer, I think, is not to write about how to do it, but to discover more about my own creativity.)

So another avenue of extraploration opens up…

To answer the first question (and to hop over nursery rhymes, songs, my parents’ banter), my earliest poetic memory is not of reading a poem, but writing one. This makes me think that I must have read one, otherwise how would I have known what a poem was? But it seems that the poem at the heart of my own poetry has vanished.  What is left is a memory of creating tiny poetry books, maybe an inch and a half square, hand-illustrated and stapled, with rhymes like this:

My mummy is very kind
when you’re hurt she’ll bathe and bind
she wraps me up in bed
and kisses me on my head.
I love my mummy.

As far as I recall I was about six or seven years old. (I also wrote songs.)

While I must have read poetry at primary school (and maybe it will come back to me; I have a vague dusty feeling thinking about it, as if the poems I encountered must have said nothing to me), my first memory of a poem is from an English class age ten or eleven.  There is a line in it I still recall, although extensive googling does not retrieve the poem. It is my first memory of being stirred by poetic magic:

‘interminable flocks
hives of the archipelago’

The captivating five syllables of ‘interminable’ have never left me and I see flocks flying still as I breathe these lines, as far as the eye can see.