19th May

... Somewhere in the world, there is a wedding dress, waiting to be worn.

(And I don't just mean the 'royal wedding' wedding dress. I could also mean lots of other dresses; but in particular one very nice dress which has just been made and which has just been tried on - yesterday, actually - and which in a few weeks' time will be worn, and danced in, and possibly a bit destroyed, depending on how much red wine is drunk, and spilled.  Somewhere in the world there is a wedding dress, and in a few weeks' time, someone gets to wear it...)

(A note on commitment: committing to a man - no problem. Committing to a DRESS, however: oh my God. There are SO MANY NICE ONES, and you are only supposed to pick the one (OK; maximum two...). How are you supposed to know which beautiful thing out of all the beautiful things you should definitely go for?...)

(And then you try it on, and as beautiful as it is, toucan't help but notice that there is one hanging just off to the side, behind you, which wasn't there last year, and which looks soul-crushingly lovely, but it would probably be weird if you now said 'Ooh, can I try it on?')

Committing to a PhD, when you don't really want to do your PhD, and want to play instead: annoyingly difficult.

Committing to a job: awful. How are you supposed to know if you are going for the right job, as you seek that permanent position and close off the other options?...

Somewhere in the world, a wedding dress waiting for the finishing touches. Somewhere else in the world (not too far from here), a job application (for a summer job this summer) waiting to be started. Deadline tomorrow.

Wish me LUCK!...


CN xx

Creativity Again: Insights from Days Gone By

This is one of those 'When I was Young' posts...

When I was a child, I was effortlessly creative. I would come home from school, sit down, and, if I felt like it, would make things. Or I would find a time at the weekend when no one needed my presence (not dinner time, not family TV time) and I would simply sit down on the floor, pull out all the materials I needed, and get creative. I used to make whatever toys I wanted (not that I lacked toys!). If I fancied a dolls' house with Victorian dolls in it, I would MAKE IT, using a shoebox for the room, some gift wrap with a fine pattern on it as wallpaper, and the dolls would be made out of white clay, and I would paint their faces a blush pink, and hand-stitch their clothes and make their hair out of wisps of thread. If I wanted, say, an enchanted forest full of unicorns and baby centaurs and weird creatures, I would MAKE IT out of Fimo (top tip: PVC glue mixed with a bit of pale blue paint produces a really nice 'clear-water-in-a-lake' effect when it dries). I ran across some of those toys in an old box during a house move and was amazed. I showed them to my partner. We found ourselves wondering whether archaeologists have in fact been wrong about a lot of things. You know when they show you tiny clay figurines of animals or people in museums, with captions like 'Animal Figurine, BC [whatever faraway date]', or 'Primitive goddess figure, BC [loooong ago]'? What if those weren't actually made by adults, but by children?... Has anyone considered the fact that these may just have been simple toys that enterprising kids had made, so they had something to play with?

I run across those 'Victorian' dolls recently (the 'family' is still there, including a lady in a pink dress and even a frickin' matching PARASOL that I actually MADE out of a lollipop stick and some fabric and  some ribbon bits and beads)  and I marvel at the determination of a young child to sit there and make these things, just because she decided that she would like them to exist and she would simply like to play with them. Mostly, I think about her unflappable concentration, and wonder how I might go back in time and bottle some of it, and transport it back again to today. I sure could use it.

I mean, at the time, I was a conscientious student with plenty of pressure to do well in school, and I had homework to do and stuff, but... whenever I decided I wanted to make stuff, I just made stuff. When I needed to write a story, I wrote it. When I was reading a good book, I stayed with that book until the end, and more often than not I found time to reread it, again and again. 

Stark contrast between that and, say, my PhD days, when I used to wonder how to capture that feeling of reeeeeally just wanting to work on your PhD, and how to feel the excitement of creating something that you wanted to simply bring into existence, and how to awaken the joy of rereading something you just wrote and thinking how much you love it and how you JUST want to read it one more time before you put it away... 

Today?... I just spent from about 9:12 til about 12.25 (now) procrastinating on the creative project for which I had saved this whole beautiful morning. (In my defence: this is the morning when the washing machine chose to break, mid-wash, and I obvs felt compelled to sort that out, although what I was doing putting the washing machine on in the first place, just before I was due to start my Creative Time, is beyond me.)  So far, I have sorted out the washing machine mess, used that as an excuse to mop all the floors, and generally, I have been trying to get around to the creative project, with no success. Unless you count procrastination as the essential part of creativity which it would increasingly appear to be, in which case - I am doing great this morning. 

I wonder if this is just generally the curse of being an adult - bills need paying, rooms need tidying (and no one will get around to it if not YOU), shit needs doing, grown-up jobs need finishing, and there is just generally less time to feel like your mind is empty and you can fill it with thoughts and visions of your choice. At the same time, I do seem to bring a lot of this on myself (I sit down to work, I decide I need coffee; I get up. On the way to coffee, I discover several other things to tidy or play with. I come back. I still haven't made coffee. I get out my work materials. I decide I need my glasses. On the way to get the glasses, I forget I was ever looking for them, and I find myself some other procrastinatey job to do.) (As I write this, my brain is thinking: office. You need an office. You need a studio space to escape to. You cannot do creativity at home. You like your home a lot, but it is not a creative space. It is a space of housewifery and drudgery and flower arranging and endlessly putting things away,  and cooking, and all the joyful and seductive but unpaid labour that the likes of Simone de Beauvoir warned you about. It actually saps your creativity and only lets you exercise it if you engage in its own forms of acceptable play. You need to take your creativity elsewhere.)

Maybe that's what I need. A playroom of my very own, where I can sit on the floor, and where no grown-up things like housework can possibly be conceived of, and nothing can distract me.