I woke shortly before my 8:30 pills, turned off the alarm, went out to the couch to lie for a bit more: engaged in an interesting (to me) psychological game, which had a depth that only gradually became evident – imagining myself differently, as someone who was going to get some things done today (marking postgraduate papers from last month, and above all writing of course). Not as someone who is perfect and on top of everything: imagining myself that way is an old pattern, and a useless one – but also rebuilding an image of myself in my head that is different from the expected one, the one who is disastrously behind on everything. Felt very strange and new, and rather powerful... then drifted back to sleep, and woke at about lunch time, confused, aching in a couple of joints, with all the clarity gone.
I continue to be useless, passive, inert. Yes, I'm more healthy/energetic than previous summers, and I have definitely recovered to some extent from the rage/misery I was experiencing when I crash-landed here in northern England, after being summarily ejected from Australia, which apparently ended my Pacific life and dumped me back into the more crowded, old-fashioned, guilt-ridden, chilly Atlantic cultures. I'm (despite that sentence) cheerier and more resigned, and work not done doesn't seem so awful.
But it's still fairly awful: or not awful, but silly – I have such ingrained patterns of not doing anything important that I don't think I can get started on anything that matters. Yes to surfing and downloading, no to writing; drafting articles happens very clumsily and at the last minute; and so on. I remain fairly dismayed at myself....
Virginia Woolf on the influence of acquaintances on one's creativity/productivity:
"For some reason one can't settle to read, and yet writing seems the proper channel for the unsettled irritable condition one is generally in. Perhaps this condition is intensified by tea... particularly if one happens to meet Roger in the Charing Cross Road... with four or five yellow French books under his arm. He is the centre of the whirlwind to me. Under this influence I was blown straight into a book shop, persuaded to lay out three shillings and seven pence on a French novel, made to fix a day for coming to Durbins, invited to a play and fairly overwhelmed – made to bristle all over with ideas, questions, possibilities which couldn't develop in the Charing Cross Road. Of course he was in a hurry to keep an appointment, and to produce one or two plays somewhere – ill too, he said, but somewhat relieved in his mind by reading Fabre, who makes him see that after all our war, hideous though it is – but here we parted." [Diaries, 8 April 1918]
Wonderful sentences; and a wonderful encounter, if a bit overwhelming. One of the problems here is that there is no one who has that effect on me – smart friends (all in the university, unfortunately – the same problem that I had in Hong Kong), but most of them, when we talk about writing, have only either a depressing or an intimidating effect, or simply have an impact on me that is off-center, as it were... they don't seem as close to my concerns and needs as, say, my beloved Trisha (in the far-off Pacific Southwest), or even Jenny down in London. Or other friends, mostly associated with California, with Australia, with warmer and more cheerful places, where people are more involved with each other's emotional lives.
And here's a Proust quote, from The Guermantes Way, that is attached to some of my e-mail signatures; on reading it, my old adviser responded to it with mild irritation, as she knows how ridiculously true it is of me:
"If only I had been able to start writing! But, whatever the conditions in which I approached the task (as, too, alas, the undertakings not to take alcohol, to go to bed early, to sleep, to keep fit), whether it was with enthusiasm, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing it and keeping it in reserve as a reward for industry, taking advantage of an hour of good health, utilizing the inactivity forced on me by a day's illness, what always emerged in the end from all my efforts was a virgin page, undefiled by any writing, ineluctable as that forced card which in certain tricks one invariably is made to draw, however carefully one may first have shuffled the pack."
I always want to identify, not with artists who were busy or successful, but the ones who were, at least at first, confused: Berg, Proust... people who took a long time getting started, and whose works show the marks of insecurity and indecision. Alfred Corn was kind enough to tell me last year about Amy Lowell, who he said only started writing in her sixties (though my dictionary makes it more like her late 30s) – he said: there's always hope....
[Art by Padley Wood.]
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