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reflections on blogging, one month review, part one, ‘scrapbook of fragments’

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Well, I’ve managed a more conventional timescale for my blogging review this time.  A month.

Unlike seventeen days, a month is enough to become aware of patterns in yourself, not knowings, hopes, delights, perplexities.  Over the last week, especially, I have become aware of ongoing questioning of some aspects of what I am doing, both in the critical-inquiry sense and also the curiosity sense.

However, it also turns out that a month is also long enough to create deeper reviewing thoughts than I expected.  So I am going to post this review in parts…  Here’s part one.

In my ‘about’ page, I talk about this being a ‘scrapbook of fragments’, and this is indeed exactly what extraplorer has turned out to be.  I have felt settled enough with everything to post it (the one thing I felt unsettled about I took down), but I am aware that it is all higgledy-piggledy everything together as if I’d tipped a box of myself out onto the floor.  This is definitely liberating for me in terms of what to write, but it also does make me feel slightly uneasy, like I should tidy it up.  I peek at other blogs and think, ‘hmmm drop-down boxes with categories might be nice’.  But then I also like the idea that a reader could have an exploratory experience because everything is not neatly labeled and put in filing cabinets.

The other aspect of the ‘scrapbook of fragments’ is that it does not have an overarching story.  I would quite like to make one of these, like, ‘this is who I am and poem a means this and thoughts b means that’, but I’m aware that my desire to impose this kind of order will set me up to conform to what will at some point turn out to be a limiting narrative arc.

In my original idea, I thought that my ‘scrapbook’ might hint at some kind of underlying unity, and I think I do have a sense of this.  One thing I love is the ‘cloud’ of tags, and I like to see it and think of the nice things that there are to write about in the world.  Admittedly I do err on the positive side with my tag words, so it is true that ‘darkness’, ‘death’, ‘sadness’ don’t feature in the tags although they do have a place in my writing.  But still, that is part of what I want to achieve with my work – to point towards beauty and truth and love, both despite and because of the hard things.  Besides, sad things get plenty of attention without me adding to it.

This leads me nicely on to part two, ‘discovering more beauty through writing’.

recovery

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So it’s getting near to the piano exam, and an important and underrated skill is coming to the fore:

Recovery.

It turns out that despite my own deep desire to avoid mistakes, this is not a realistic goal.  In fact, the more pressure that is put upon my performance to be exquisite, like the concert pianist I watched online, the more likely it is that my fingers will hesitate, trip over themselves and take a tumble.

So as well as practising getting the notes, pace, rhythm, tonality, expression right, I am also practising keeping going when it goes wrong.

I am getting accustomed to the heart-lurch and sense of impending doom, and telling myself this is part of the adventure of performance.

I am getting used to trusting that my fingers will be able to find their way back to harmony and beauty.

I am training my inner monologue not to equate a small stumble with a total collapse of the piece.

I am learning to hop my fingers out of the ditch of the wrong keys and back on the horse of the right keys.

I am realising that by starting at a manageable pace, I am more likely to be able to sustain a polished performance.

I am growing cannier in identifying ‘stepping stones’ where I will be able to regroup if I have a sudden nerve-jangling moment.

I am reminding myself to breathe deeply and be in the present before I set off.

I am noticing that if I look up at the music, if I anticipate a little,  I play better than if I look down at the keys.

I am discovering that mistakes are part of live performance, and it’s how you deal with them that counts.

I am learning how to live.

found poem, London, autumn 2014

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When was the last time you had a first time?

I forget where we were.

Desire or restlessness?
Sheer frustration inspires new design;

I can’t remember where we were, I mean.

Design solves problems.
Robin Day cleverly extended two short pencils lives
by joining them together
with a piece of metal tubing.

Every stone tells a story;
not a multiple choice.

I had a strong interest in housing,
the relationships between our homes and ourselves being a particular area of fascination.
However, this is an emotive subject and managing the enormity of the scope has probably been
my biggest challenge.

Bringing joy to everyday.

Now my heart turns to and fro,
In thinking what will the people say.
They who shall see my monument in after years,
And shall speak of what I have done.

everything that is letting happy in and other things life don’t give itself

Membership makes a difference.
Charity was born of the marriage of Poverty with Abundance,
and certainly it cannot come into existence
without the presence of the two,
side by side.

Unite in good cheer.
Engine rooms this way.
Make bold moves;
hop on hop off.

And the eyes of them both were opened,
and they knew that they were naked,
and they sewed fig leaves together,
and made themselves aprons.

take extra care of children

You never know what you are going to find.
I had to look at everything.

Notes on locations:  This is a more complex poem than the previous found poems. In order, the source texts are from: advert (Bakerloo line, Paddington, southbound), poster for concert, posters at Design Museum (DM), DM, overheard fragment of conversation, Robin Day studio replica at DM, advert, exhibition subtitle, James Christian quoted in DM (abridged), poster, Inscription on Hatsheput’s obelisk (DM), scrawled answer to question ‘What is good design?’ at DM, writing on a wall at Tower of London museum, quotation on fence around building site near Stonecutter Court, Starbucks poster, Sign at Tower Bridge, scrap of paper at DM, Routemaster Bus, Genesis 3:7 quoted at ‘Woman Fashion Power’ exhibition at DM, sign on tube, two fragments of David McCandless’s talk for the Royal Statistical Society, pattern on a scarf (DM).

inventory of subpersonalities – commentary

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The minute I heard the word ‘subpersonalities’, I was fascinated to find a concept that allowed me to explore different aspects of myself as if they were actual people.  The idea of different inner ‘me’s is something that I had been aware of for a little while.  My name lends itself to multiple nicknames, and it fascinated me why people chose a particular diminutive (interesting word) and what it meant to them and to me.  I also recalled my childhood love of playing roles from The Great Escape; I was fascinated by which role was chosen by which sibling, and by the potential revealed in those early choices.  I was aware too, of the odd diversity of my reading, which over the last two or three years has encompassed all my childhood favourites, mountaineering literature from the 1950s, Russian history and culture, stories from Bletchley Park, and several times, The Happiness Project.  The choices seemed so disparate as to belong to different readers, yet they were all me.

Since I started writing extraplorer, I’ve had the phrase ‘inventory of subpersonalities’ in my head as the starting point of a kind of poem.  Now that I’ve had a look back at the sheet of paper where I first drew and labelled them all, it occurs to me that it might prove interesting at some point to give each one an actual voice and see what happens.

A couple of notes on the poem:  The mixture of capitalised and lower case first letters is intentional as the words appeared in my mind complete with the variation in these aspects and I think it is significant.  Also, originally I just wrote down the list of subpersonalities, but it seemed incomplete.  Then I added the story of their discovery, but still the list itself seemed too clumsy, too concrete for something experienced as fleeting, shifting.  The addition of the inverted commas made the poem coincide with my inner feeling.  This makes the subpersonalities relational.  You can hear the poet identifying them, rather being faced with a flat kind of list.  This made the poem feel complete in a way that I felt happy with.

The inventory of subpersonalities might initially seem a bit spooky – after all we are reaching towards the fringes of our consciousness – but really it is merely a development of our ordinary everyday experience of the different roles we play – daughter, sister, worker, friend.  Some of the ones in the poem are everyday – (‘businesswoman’ for example) and some are metaphorical (‘enigma code-breaker’, sadly).  Each image holds a kind of magic and fascination that is big enough to grow into, or evocative enough provide a warning (it is not healthy to spend too long as an orphanage worker or speck).

inventory of subpersonalities

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drawn on a sheet of A2 paper,
in fine black ink,
and coloured in with caran d’ache,
labeled with more care than usual,
a window on an inner world:

‘enigma code-breaker’
‘French resistance worker’
‘Businesswoman-globetrotter’
‘Rebel with a cause (there’s no rebellion more radical than goodness)’

‘orphanage worker – or orphan’
‘good little girl’
‘Poet queen’
‘secret lover’

‘storyteller-pied piper’
‘speck’
‘dancer-choreographer’
‘Mountain climber’

an inventory of subpersonalities.