19th April 2023
It’s early in the morning, the birds are a-twitter outside. They, the birds, know nothing of Elon Musk and twittered long, long before the doyens of Social Media. I’ve come downstairs to the kitchen to write. Normally, in an old, different, life, when I woke up and came downstairs it was to read. It is unusual for me not to read for a couple of hours when I first get up of a day. But it’s as if I read when I come down at civilised hours and write when it’s still dark and the world, my part of the world (or at least the sensible members of it) is / are still asleep.
Dorothea Brande’s seminal 1929 Becoming a Writer, still my number one go-to self-help writing book, recommends a daily exercise where the would-be writer gets up and before exposure to any other kind of wordage, writes. No radio, internet, newspaper; just write. Anything. Doesn’t matter what. The idea is to tune the subconscious. There have been three or four occasions in my life where I have carried out — and sustained — this exercise and I think it is the best bit of advice I’ve had. Maybe there’s something residual in my psyche that returns to that habit in the early hours.
And yet. This morning there’s something else, too.
Something has changed. There are only three questions I can’t answer:
What?
How?
And Why?
Let’s feel our way in.
How. The easiest answer is I feel different. I often do though, as if about to start out on a new venture, or adventure, but the feeling fades by 8am when reality kicks in. This feeling of difference feels different in a different way. For a start it feels permanent, but permanent usually requires the fixing agent of time.
And there it is. How much time have I got?
This different is not the feeling of being at the start of a new journey, it is the feeling of the end of an old one. A speech by Winston Churchill, or a lyric by Brian Houston, conflating what are ends and beginnings and the morphing of one into the other. Not all ends need be the start of a beginning, surely?
So what are the instruments?
Creativity.
Creativity is one, somehow this feeling of creativity today comes with a direction. Not the steel outer casing of the compass’s container, the silky liquid of the vehicle or the fluid movement of the needle, but the liquid crystal of a laser, all molecules aligned. A new kind of compass, not one that points to North, for the north of a compasses attraction is forever changing, but one that points in the direction I need to go and is arrived at from a cumulation of all the wanderings and wonderings of the past. This ‘now’ that we’re all supposed to live in is an aggregation of the past. And anyway, if we all lived in the Now all of the time, we wouldn’t have pensions.
Creativity has always been with me, now it feels different. Tuned, layered. Purposeful.
This morning as I sit in someone else’s house, as dawn breaks and I turn off the supporting light and can still read Lars Mittens’ excellent ‘The Sixteen Trees of the Somme’, maybe it’s the flow of multiple coffees? creativity comes in a broad front with interlocking patterns. A new poem, the cartography of its terroir embedded in the text. A clear ‘vision’ of changes I need to turn ‘Silence’ from a functional OK novel into an artistic ‘Ahh!’, and this blog post from a tool of the past into a tool of the future. A triptych, three panels at the same time, three (components), one artist.
Yet. More than that too. I know what to do with the dog book, not ‘Zen and the Art of Woofery’, that too has been a constant companion, but ‘Tails’ (‘A Twist in the Tale’). I know why it’s lain dormant for half a decade and why there’s been a nagging doubt of completeness — in truth lower beneath the surface than nagging — and what it needs doing to it to finish it. To make it better.
As I’ve been writing the morning has morphed into daylight, the clock has ticked round to civilised, it’s time for another coffee. And to read.
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