self

progress again

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One of the deepest joys of writing is to put into language tiny aspects of experience which rarely make it into words. It’s like this with my progress in these summer days. There is such quicksilver uncertainty if something is being made, what exactly?, anything?, and then suddenly there is a recognition, oh yes, there. There is something. It’s the flicker of an inner truth that a perspective has enlarged, that something hitherto hidden has revealed itself, that meaning has, even if almost imperceptibly deepened and strengthened, and most of all, its heralded by the unmistakeable presence of delight, an ancient barometer that is very rarely fooled, and often announces some wonder before the rest of perception has caught anywhere near up.

It’s been a quite peculiar few weeks of arduous struggle, in a friendship, digging deep, into self, into past selves, refreshing in drenched delights and pondering. And this is important: All along I have known that I was also being brewed. Tomorrow I set off for an adventure that I know will be confronting, beautiful, wild, difficult, vulnerable and tender. I am afraid and overjoyed.

And I am thankful for my own persevering in progress making, however uncertain, however unmeasurable, because now as I teeter on the brink of departure and arrival, I know that i have been equipped, and that quite soon I will really be Ready.

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.

progress

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Well, I seem to be making progress although the measurements of that progress are often contested.

How do I measure it?

It’s a certain feeling – strength – that I can see returning to me. The familiar places of physical demand are not so depleting, the balance of the equation has shifted. I’m less emotionally raw, although that may be because I have had a respite from certain circumstances.

But mostly, it’s because I am getting to things that have long been out of reach, either practically or metaphorically or both. Yesterday I started the rereading of a long-written book draft, ready to, eventually, edit the second half and Send It Out once and for all. I’m connecting with people whose requests I have long let drift, taking up the tools of places in myself that have been beyond my grasp due to demands and the sheer limitations of one person’s confinement in the human condition.

There is a giddy euphoria at the return of a recognisable self that often entails overly enthusiastic ambitions and subsequent disappointments. This may indeed recur, as it’s part of personality dynamics which my whole life I have not escaped. But I’m perhaps also a little wiser, taking more time, letting things establish themselves more fully before I gallivant everywhere for the sheer joy of feeling more true.

It’s so particular that this specific space, of writing, and in writing so discovering something, has so much power for me. I am thankful, despite the flimsiness, so it feels, of my reach.

reticence

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I went to the watercolour museum and, at the last minute, forgot my phone.

Hmm. Do I go back, arrive late?

Hmm. Will anyone miss me? Is it callous to disappear if someone might be worried?

On the tram I ask a stranger to borrow their device and smugly reproduce from memory the mobile number of my mother. Please can you text x and y so that they don’t worry.

(Later I heard that she’d glanced at the strange number and dismissed the message as a scam. <Delete>)

I was unexpectedly free.

We all know this. We’ve read the articles in newspapers, the lack of phone now noteworthy enough to represent paid-for content.

But it’s real, the freedom.

I caught a bus and was delivered both to the seaside, and to an earlier self, the one, perhaps, that traveled around Europe on a career break just in time to have witnessed those places before smart-phones, selfies and repeat-posing. In time to experience community with strangers in a way that would never exist again.

Well, that still did not exist.

Or to a deeper self, a more mysterious self, the self of summers and depth-of-winters and sweetness and the self that knows innocent things and yet has the wisdom of ancient and commonplace experience.

It was as if all my responsibilities had been left behind, both the real ones but also the symbolic ones in that device, and then the reticent self emerged and coalesced for a little while, and I didn’t dare think too much about it in case I lost her too suddenly.

We saw the exhibition. We ate lunch in the sun. We swam. We took photos of textures and time.

Then the end was coming and of course as I approached home, dozy with the sun and hum of a phone-less journey, she slipped away.

And I am left to ponder if there is any real-life-compatible way to appeal to her.

deplete, replenish

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In the struggle that is this perseverance to hold onto the self that is present in the piano playing, I find myself needfully sensitive to what enables and what undermines my ability to hold and extend this attitude.

It sometimes surprises me how much very small things can have a disproportionate power to boost or to drain. In these days of waking already a little on edge, my very ordinary morning rhythms have an almost mythic quality, so much do they stabilise me on waking. Likewise beautifully written texts, an autumn leaf in the sun, kindness whether to myself or witnessed to others, my favourite tea, perfectly brewed, candlelight.

Anything that jars me looms larger, as an enemy: a minor breakage, yet another lie ushered by a public figure, an angry voice, whether to myself or witnessed to another, not finding an outfit that expresses some highly precise inner feeling, taking longer than expected.

This sensitivity attracts old shame: ‘making a fuss’, ‘overdramatising’, ‘self-absorbed’. Yet it is an expression of something deeply mattering to me, of a kind of protectiveness of a treasure.

There is a high level of personal exposure in my life and artistic practice, modest as it is, in that I try to live very true to what is happening, not numbing myself with the usual hiding places. I can see from old seasons and many acquaintances, that much of life is often lived muffled, a blur. It is easy to lose oneself in Responsibilities, Children, Scrolling and Series.

The tools of my work are the very sensitivity I am protecting, to joy, fear, nuance, significance, tone, mood, gesture and language. And beauty, love, tenderness, mystery and grace.

It is good to remind myself, to strengthen up that I have chosen what I am doing and living, and I embrace the entirety of that choice.

Then also it is only wisdom to address the depletions and accentuate the replenishments, looking out for them as I live the day.