A Good Book

I haven’t written for days, life seems to be getting in the way. The house, my job, friends, the endless circus in my head and more recently a haunting flu have suspended me unable to write, or really unwilling. I want writing to be like rich dark chocolate even when you don’t really feel like it you can squeeze in a block or two. I feel the rambling disconnected days I have been having, hazy with paint fumes, sniffly with a head cold, noisy with road works and boiling with pure anger would not really make for good reading. But having spent a sick day sleeping and reading Elliot Pearlman’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ it seems general misery makes for bloody good reading. Although over the mid book hump and steadily looking toward the end I am starting to hate the writer who has taken me into such a dark and dirty world, I am finding its grime difficult to wash away. Annie Dillard comments that reading a book is a stretch in comparison to living a tactile life, but I disagree a good book stops being read and becomes like a narrative from your brain, you can smell the story, you can hear the characters voices, you can feel the way they move, and soon you are squirming at the morality of their actions and pitying their lives as if they were real.

A good book is tranporting like nothing else.

Catching the Big Fish

I am settled at my computer after a whirlwind of activity and I feel like the washing machine stilled after the spin cycle. After a 4am start, flight to Melbourne, back to back meetings, a 5pm flight back and a 6.30 landing, I got home at 7 to clean my room, get dinner on the stove and now I’m writing for my blog which I have missed for 2 days. In between all of this I have managed to sandwich in David Lynch's little book titled “Catching the Big Fish”, after a beautiful beginning analogy about catching ideas like fish and going deeper to get the bigger ideas, deeper where the bigger fish reside, the rest of the book is a collection of random thoughts. However Lynch kept returning to his practice of transcendental meditation as his means of going deeper and touching the ‘unified field’ or that place of ultimate connection where, as the Beatles say, “I am you, you are me and we are we”.

After the bleak disconnection that I have been feeling this week, I wanted to transcend the amusement park which has become my head, its basically become all roller coasters, clowns oscillating, BB guns going off, and huge stuffed animals. All this action in my head is making my body feel like its on a constant sugar rush. The minutes have been melting away and life is feeling small and compacted. I like Lynch’s idea of using meditation to expand my consciousness and perhaps have that filter through into the rest my life.

Quantity over Quality

It’s the last day of the 21 days of writing and after an exhausting weekend of painting and socializing I am sitting down to complete the last 8 minutes of my commitment. Have things changed I wonder? Has this self imposed sentence had any gains, have my self cencoring and sabotaging habits been reformed, has my 21 day program seen a change for the better? In the last 21 days, I have not necessarily discovered more faith in my writing ability or miraculously come to the conclusion that I am a fabulous writer. What has happened is that I have written, I have committed to showing up to the page every day and producing something, pushing aside the need for it to be valid or good and focusing purely on the quantity. I remember once hearing about a class of sculpture students who were divided in two, half the group were instructed to produce one piece of excellent quality and the other half of the group to produce 200 pieces with no regard to quality. Invariably the group that produced 200 pieces discovered new techniques and ways of working and concentrated on their process rather than the product. The other group with only one piece to produce agonized over their choices and curbed risk in their work focusing solely on the product rather than the process. This is mostly what I have learnt over these 21 days, that quantity leads to quality and if your focus remains on your process and not your product invariably the product will be better.

Monsters in the Closet

Paint fumes are hovering in the inner cavities of my head and are playing tricks with my stomach and parching my throat as they struggle for an exit. Greg and I spent all day painting, it was steady process, room by room, inch by inch, nervous endlessness when starting and excited anticipation when ending. Between brush strokes, rollers and fumes, I had a lot of time to think today, about this house, this second installment in the Greg and Tanya future show. Was it going to work out, were we crazy, would the 10 years it would take to realize our investment be long difficult ones for the sake of a house, that I will never live in.

I think most of our choices have a 50/50 chance, I know the process of making decisions is to weigh it all up opting for choices in your favour, but the riskiest and juiciest choices are generally stacked against you, and you have to run the race to know the outcome. Buying this second house and positioning us in huge debt once loomed large in my mind as I tried to add up all the disasters and come up with exit plans and rescue measures. But rarely in any given moment do I not know exactly what to do, and every moment seems to come to its own fanciful conclusion, if it’s bad I learn a lot, if it’s good I learn a lot, at the end of the day all my experiences seem to take me to the same place. I don’t know if we have made a good decision I don’t know if we have made a bad decision, all I know is that everything is ok day, and any little hitches the spilt paint, the exhaustion were dealt with as they came, the only thing I can’t seem to deal with is the disasters of the mind.

It’s a bit like being scared of the monsters in the closet without really ever knowing if there are monsters in the closet.

Endings and Beginnings

It’s nearly a full moon tonight and the air is expectant, the heat of the day is now swirling into a cool wind and inviting a storm, teasing it out slowly. It’s Easter weekend and the city has spent hours emptying out, in preparation for the pared down quiet of Good Friday. It’s been so long since I have been to church or read the bible that I barely remember what Easter is about, Jesus dying and rising again. A time for endings and new beginnings in a way. Things are definitely beginning for Greg and I, our second house is in its last stressful stages of completion and we will be painting all weekend. This house was a long time realization for Greg who has wanted to build an empire and have his own plan rather than depending on someone else’s. For me I feel like a new era of both work and creativity are beginning and for the first time in a long time I feel like they can really work well together. I got a very significant pay rise today, which was amazing, my boss gave it to me without me having to ask, and said that I absolutely deserved it, it was very heartening and like a blessing from the universe that said yes, this working and writing thing can work had in hand. This afternoon I started making some plans for my writing also, I have picked out a few key shows that will help shape the book and I know if I work on it slowly that it will come together. As we drove home tonight, through the dewy darkness, I said to Greg, ‘life is good’ and I meant it.

Time to Gut It

I have started renovations on my writing desk, I have a writing nook that I used for four years while I was studying, it was here that I turned up the radio, sang along loudly and composed the essay’s that set me on fire with their ideas and the expression of those ideas onto the page. I am surrounded by images that I used to collect from galleries, book stores and from the university. They are tacked to my wall like post it notes reminding me of what is, was important to me in my life. Unfortunately they have been stuck in a time warp for the last 2 years and the reminders are stale. My used PC sits on the corner vying for my attention, which I am no longer willing to give. I realize that it all needs an overhaul, I need to gut it and start again. I need new reminders, I need space, and I need fresh energy. Today is the first day in 2 years that I have come here and written something, the fire and passion that used to course through my head and into my fingers has disappeared, as soon as I sat down, I felt tired. I thought it just needed a tidy up but my body tells me it time for everything to go.

Maybe Baby

I finished Joan Didon’s wonderful memoir last night, tears rolled down my cheeks and dammed in the crook beneath my chin for the entire last chapter. Her writing is so lyrical, yet her disorientation is spoken so clearly. Her sadness leaden but she does not cave to pure sentimental recall of her 40 year marriage, not that I would have minded that. I thought about my own short marriage in comparison, but a decade is a decade and living even a year without Greg seems unimaginable. She speaks particularly about the rituals built up in a marriage that don’t die with the partner, that same urge to deliver news about the most mundane things, consult about dinner plans, that first embrace when you get into bed. I once heard that marriage provides the only true witness to your life and the importance of it, with the loss of one partner does the other’s life diminish also. Didon speaks of feeling invisible after her husband died, perhaps because her witness was no longer there.

I have to admit I was glad to finish it, her writing transported me into her ‘mudgy’ as she calls it head, and I was too often confronted with questions of what I would do with the same loss. The true nature of grief seems a process of accepting the death of someone you love and then noticing moment by moment their absence within them.

My mind has not only been occupied with death but birth, Greg and I have decided to start a family and have been ‘trying’ to have a baby. After years of ‘trying’ not to have a baby, this reversal is strange and largely out of my control. The waiting game between periods is excruciating, the information on ovulation and conception conflicting, the guessing and gauging obsessive (as in, am I feeling a little nauseous or did I just eat too much). We have just started so I am sure after a few months of ‘trying’ I will find a rhythm with it, and hopefully not lose my mind in the process, when did I become such a control freak! It’s a huge transition that we take so for granted. One day your you and your husband and the next your you, a little creature inside of you and your husband (keep in mind having a little creature inside of you is the subject of quite scary sci fi films). Then your you, your husband and a new little person who is half you and half him (again quite a scary subject of sci fi films). Mary Kelly is a artist who has constructed a work about the over night (literally) transition of being a women, wife and daughter to being a mother and being expected to respond to that naturally. I find it funny that we make such a big deal out of home loans, new jobs, moving states and yet are expected to take so lightly the conception of a child.

It’s the uncertainty which has me off balance, having to live life ‘normally’ even though at any given moment, my whole way of life will change. As I run my fingers over the gold embossed quote on the back of Didon’s book, I notice it is unsettlingly true even though it refers to death and not life, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it end.” (Joan Didon), I guess at the end of the day it’s a fine line.