Here in northeastern England, a few miles from the North Sea, the winds of March – and of course of a number of other months, depending – can go on for days, even for weeks... at night gusts constantly tear at the chimney, and the faintly white clouds of the night sky, broken by a few dark patches, move past the window like an interminable avant-garde student film.
Continuing to worry about the long, free days of my research leave, during which, for the most part, I have nothing to do but write: ideal, almost – or they would be, if I weren't so inert, so hypnotized, so neurotically, insanely wasteful of this precious time. The only useful work I've done has been at Mitchell's behest: I begged him to help me with my procrastination, and lo! a casual command from his office in Los Angeles, and two days later I'd written a book proposal. Now, in a midnight phone call, he proclaims: bring me the head of John the Bap- – uh, no, bring me a draft of the chapter on film scores; in a week.
My initial reaction: it can't be done, not that chapter, I don't know what I'm talking about, it's too sketchy/improbable/chaotic. Then I start to get into it, list what I know and want to say: and, shortly after midnight, two pages of notes spring forth, groups of ideas and films and things that need to be said; there is probably a lot on this topic I don't know, but I won't worry about that. A pile of references from my four-and-a-half shelves of books devoted to AIDS, a bath, and bed by two a.m....
But now I'm slightly in trouble: my mind is moving so fast, working on this topic that I thought would be so opaque, that I realize I can't sleep: that, like the sky, my mind is being pushed by constantly shifting gusts of energy, of thoughts. The I Ching gives me 51, shock, thunder: images of vast dramatic change, a good if alarming stormy hexagram. But I really have to sleep, so a beta blocker (I've kept a bottle of propanolol around for years, ever since I first took them in 1997, just before my anxious overseas move to Hong Kong; as the mildest of anti-anxieties, they are useful from time to time) plus this blog entry, and now at four a.m. I should manage to get some rest.
Such a strange feeling: if the hypnotized emptiness of the weeks of my procrastinating, not-writing existence doesn't make any sense, this is its opposite that suddenly shows why that emptiness occurs – energetic work, even when it is not difficult, can have its own quality of vertigo, of change, of shock: of being torn apart, by stormy March winds....
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