Inspiration, concision

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Flowers

 

 Mostly when I write best I write quite fast, about a thing. Or I tell a story with a very A to Z narrative. Or I just describe things or places or experiences.

 I think the weaker stuff I do involves analysis of  a culture or history and indeed that is why I do very little of it. I am not much of a researcher as I'm too easily distracted.

And I don't care enough about facts anyway. I had, as a child, when relating an event to my parents the tendency to exaggerate incidents at school, and my parents would cross-examine me to discover that really I was melodramatising for sympathy or attention. Getting a reaction was more important than truth. It probably still is, which is why it is best that I focus on trivia or fiction.

My mode of writing is based largely on inspiration, a sudden electrical charge. Or a sense of fun. It's a commonplace that a lot of ideas come when the mind is relaxed and one is engaged in some other, usually undemanding, activity such as bathing, walking to a shop, or driving on a quiet road, and this is often the case for me. 

The ideas that come in those moments are rich or curious, and its always a good idea to note them down. 

I usually write in two stages. The first is exhalation  -brainstorming- when I write down with a minimum of equivocation  the things I want to say. Then usually I wait a few days to return to this with another mental set and greater objectivity for the second stage. This is a sifting and/or embellishment stage. Occasionally there are additional digressive thoughts which I add to the main narrative.

I find having an image to anchor the piece very useful and I like the possibility that the image sets up alternative narrative chains in the readers mind which they can contrast to mine.

I try to write short pieces. Concision is a virtue in art. 

 I'm suspicious of big works of art in all forms. It's rare that they have been properly edited and thus usually contain repetitions, verbosity and sloppy craftsmanship. 

Moreover, bigness in art implies and suggest megalomania on the part of their makers or patrons. Double albums almost always contain filler tracks. Proust needs editing. Let's  not talk about Wagner.

 The cathedrals of England are fabulous exceptions to this rule. 

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Painting in the woods

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Painting in the woods

I reckon most of these were painted in the afternoon. I didn't plan it that way, it is just how it happens because of my schedule and because it is somehow easier to go painting after lunch.

It`s not a long drive- up the motorway then curving swiftly inland and down that a winding unpaved road from Vargem Grande to Rio Vermelho. 

It takes just over half an hour, but it`s long enough to satisfy that need for a sense of transition between one place and other which is both a need for a ritual and also a process that allows me to arrive in a different state of mind before working. The journey is a transition to my work. The ritual is a way of possessing the work and the place, slowly pulling thoughts together. While I'm driving my mood often changes from annoyance or despair to a more constructive emotion. 

But I rarely leave the location much happier except for the feeling that I have at least tried, because so much of the work misses the mark. But that's the game, to fail and continue. The process of mixing colours is very enjoyable and a compensation for failure. I try to experiment with one thing or another each session- a new colour mixture or format or place or composition. That way even if the work is a failure at least I have learnt something.

I usually work in or at the edges of an area of planted pines which are close into the forest entry. The spacing of the trees is fairly regular and this contributes to the calm. The orderliness of the space is very gratifying as are the limited colours -russets, pinks and emerald greens. The slender trunks rise beautifully and they are not so closely packed to be indistinguishable. Their spacing varies here and there as does their maturity. Here and there a tree has fallen, as if to make some declaration. 

Excessive order is not gratifying, but sterile. In these woods there are also undulations of the land, occasional clearings and paths. But it is peaceful indeed especially in contrast to the natural forest which is much more anarchic and jungly.

Nobody bothers me much when I am working, which is a real plus, though there are some idiots who drive motorbikes through the woods to get to the sea that lies on the other side. There are also people who talk very loudly and their voices echo unpleasantly. And there are dogs which bark and this is not nice at all. I want to immerse myself in the woods, like a character in Hamsun. I need to be alone to follow my thoughts.

Basically this is as happy as I get in life. To paraphrase Matthew Parris (as I can't remember the original quote or where to find it)  a positive aspect of aging, and a compensation for the loss of energy or the sense of failure that any imaginative or normally ambitious person is likely to feel, is that one knows oneself and the world better and thus knows what works for one and what doesn't. Of course, that might lead to a lifeless conservatism in taste or action and one should indeed challenge oneself occasionally. But even in such forays into the new one departs from a point more secure than in one does in youth and the experience is more likely to be received positively. 

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The lights have gone out.

The lights have gone out. Actually, the internet went off first of all. I was watching “Of Mice and Men” when the screen went dead. I thought it was because I’d hit the cable with my foot but then I found the lights out too.

An hour later I’m stalking myself in the apartment: quiet. There are no lights in the corridors of the block. I go downstairs negotiating the blackened steps to see if there was a notice about the electricity being shut off for maintenance, but nothing. Near the notice board I see the electo-magnetic closer that holds the block’s front door shut has stopped working- the door swings, to and fro, an inch or two from a breeze outside.

I feel this sadness about everything. I make some coffee. The stove is a gas stove: I light it with a match. Everything happens very slowly. The kettle heats the water; the coffee percolates with a faint bubbling sound, I stand around. I dd milk. I don’t want coffee but I can’t think of anything left to do. It’s 5pm.

It’s not a great feeling, that listlessness, like a sort of Richard Brautigan feeling, like in “Trout Fishing in America”.

I’m not fed up enough to do anything radical, that’s part of the problem I guess.

The trees in the distance from the balcony are softly green in the drizzle that everywhere outside smothers. I shuffle from the kitchen to the balcony an back again holding my cup. For a moment I think of listening to some music but then I remember about the electricity. It’s sort of not quite raining. I lack the will to go out.

A girl with big boobs comes to the window of a flat in the block opposite. I watch her for a moment, then creep back into the flat. I know if she caught me looking she’d know I was looking would be just because of her boobs. It doesn’t help that she’s wearing the most diminutive vest-top imaginable. I guess her boobs are her main thing. I peer from within the room and see that’s she’s gone.

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It’s spitting with rain now and I stand on the balcony again hearing the birds chirp and the workmen on the site across the road. They’re banging on something. The sound echoes between the blocks. The light in the flat is wan.

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I have a feeling that now is a very bad time to be alive. Everything seems to be going wrong.

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Illustration: "Unknown Feelings", Monotype, 2009

Trying to write online and not succeeding...

I want to write very short strange pieces again, and I'm not sure if the internet is helping

It seems to me that trying to write things online isn't as easy as writing things when you don’t have the online distractions, although it can be useful to have various references (although, funnily, access to these references might be unhelpful too, because they so severely constrict the imagination when consulted. I mean, I look something up and I see immediately that my idea of what it is doesn't match my imagination and I can no longer use it as an element in what I'm writing. For instance, I might imagine the pyramids surrounded by desert, and then look them up online to see they are located in a suburb and thereby lose touch with the atmosphere I am trying to describe).

Some observations about working online:

1. The Internet is more like a magazine than book. This goes for the content- contemporaneous, with adverts and short, often trivial opinion pieces- as well as the presentation (colourful, visually disrupted and heavily reliant on images).

2. It is highly sexualized. Sex is fairly distracting at the best of times: the Internet makes it more accessible and invasive. I am not against pornography or sex but I think it isn't necessarily a good thing to have around all the time because sometimes I want to be free to think about other things.

3. It seems poor for concentrated reading. I cannot settle into long pieces easily. An essay of four paragraphs is a long online piece. I think this is partly to do with the glare of the screen which can become tiresome, and also to do with how moving from one screen to another to follow a narrative is tiresome. Books allow a certain pacing: you know more readily where the middle and end of a book is from the thickness of the pages, so you can pace your reading more easily.

Also, you can move a book about: it’s a physical thing, you can lie down, stand up with it, take it to the park, annotate it, lend it and earmark it's pages: things that are unavailable to the computer user (though the Kimble attempts a compromise). I think that physical movement is very necessary for thinking: the obligatorily sedentary nature of the computer encourages passivity.

4. There isn't a lot of advertising on the sites I look at but it does affect my ability to read pages easily.

5. I "flick" a lot, I don't settle. I "flick" with the mouse because I can, not because I need to. Of course this might be a tendency which is specific to my nature, and others don't , but I doubt it somehow.

6. The speed of the Internet is such that when one puts something online, say a comment on a column, or sends an email you know that you could conceivably receive a reply almost immediately, and it invites the tendency to repeatedly check inboxes and postings. This makes me "jumpy".

7. Fact checking is very easy. This is great for research, but perhaps not for fiction. What’s the proportion of creative writing online to factual commentary? How does that compare to the world of books? I’d bet the proportion of fiction writing on paper is greater than that online.

8. Trying to write things online isn't as easy as writing things when you don’t have the distractions, although it can be useful to have various references. It is difficult writing here, on Blogger, partly because you are only given a little space to write in, so you can't see everything you've written. I have started copying and pasting from word to write on Blogger to overcome this.

9. Imaginative reading seems hard for me online- indeed, I almost never do it. I think it is very hard to read imaginatively because the web is largely image led and it is hard for mental images to compete with the images on the computer and to maintain the sustained imaginative effort required to "get into" a novel.

10. While it is excellent for discovering new music through short samples, listening to things online is not for me as good as putting stuff on the stereo and lying on the sofa because there are too many things online to distract me (this is really an aural version of points 1, 3 and 8).

11. Likewise, while the Internet gives and excellent impression of art works, it is not like seeing the real thing. Such an obvious point needs to be made, amazingly, because I see that people make judgments about art from the images they get on their small computer screens, losing so many essential aspects of the artworks.

12. The Internet can be very addictive. I can go online and stay online for hours- I feel very aware that I'm not online when I am not, much as an alchoholic is aware he is not drinking when he isn't.

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I see, reading the above, that much of my concern is about my inability to settle and relax on Internet communications. I accept that my fidgetiness is my own responsibility, but I do not think I am alone with these difficulties, and I wonder what solutions we can, collectively, propose to allow us to do things which the seductive Internet makes harder, and which are so worthwhile?

Instinctively, I dislike paternalistic solutions but they may offer the best way to tackle the issue of internet distractions- recognizing the social value of having locations which are specifically designed for single activities – listening to music, reading, writing, talking or looking at artworks or simply sitting.

So, one answer, I think is not to make computers available in certain libraries, and not to have access in cafes, aeroplanes or trains.