Balance #2

I know I wrote about the idea of balance a few weeks ago but this week I came across a wonderful quote by my mate Foucault, which said: 'I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.' I love this idea, particularly as I am a woman has undergone many changes in my life regarding 'who I am'. I have been a business woman, a wife (which didn't last long), I am still a mother and now a grandmother. I have become an academic but I have always been a writer. Ever since I can remember I wrote stories. Places to escape into probably. Even that has changed, as I spoke about in my post on doing creative writing degrees, I am not the writer I thought I was. I have become a writer of young adult fiction who dabbles in short stories and a bit of poetry.

The fact that I have been a writer for most of my life should tell me something about myself. But it is something I have only just worked out (I can be a bit slow) - I need to write.  This idea was further reinforced when I saw another quote this morning which says 'writing is about being alive.' (Roselle Angwin, Writing the Bright Moment, p.15) You will know from my recent posts that I have some more major rewrites to do but I haven't been able to get to them, work has got in the way. There have been several meetings and conferences. I have pulled together the latest edition of Write4Children  and rewritten an academic book proposal, but none of this has left me time to write what I need to write. My own stuff. During this time I have been having various conversations with Jen Webb and Nicky Schmidt (check out Nicky's blog http://absolutevanilla.blogspot.co.uk/) about feeling disaffected and almost feeling 'poisoned'. And though it feels a physical thing it is not, I need to answer that itch to write and to stop feeling guilty about it. Just go on do it, Ness!

But I don't think this just happens to me. I think if you have a creative bone in your body you have to ensure you  do whatever it is that makes you creative otherwise you lose balance in your life. I can see it in colleagues and good friends. I know so many in academia who are currently struggling with ill health. Often they will have to do a huge amount of academic writing rather than their own. I have watched colleagues and friends become increasingly stressed as they produce the necessary academic 'outputs' which must then be disseminated on a world-wide front and, therefore, suitably REF-able. Those in academia will understand exactly what I mean here. REF means Research Excellence Framework which is the new system for assessing the quality of research in UK universities. The pressure is huge. It is worth noting that often creative outputs do not count! When they are given the chance to take a step back and start doing their own work again there is a noticeable difference, their stress levels reduce and their spirits lift. They start to smile again.

Maybe there is a lesson in this for us all and I know it is one that both Jen and Nicky agree with - it is important to find balance. To create those moments to do your own work. To stop and breathe and remember why you do what you do - for me it is what makes me who I am these days, I write because it makes me feel alive.

Seems appropriate to play one of my favourties: Goyte's 'Somebody That I used to know'

Balance

A Diana Walles picture

Many people around me, and including me, are stressed and exhausted. We seem to be constantly running in order to stand still. It is not that anyone is shirking their job, there are just not enough hours in the day to do everything. For those of us who are creative practitioners this is a problem. In order to be creative we need a moment to stand still and breathe. In this beautiful picture by Diana Walles, she quotes Rumi: 'Let the water settle; you will see the moon and stars mirrored in your being.' This couldn't be more applicable.

I am a writer and I require balance. I need to find time to write otherwise I feel totally discombobulated. Disconnected from the person I really am. I am sure I am not the only one. Whether you work in academia or the NHS, or many of the other organisations being throttled by the current government, you are constantly fire-fighting leaving little time to stand still let alone notice the world around you.

I am sure this cannot be healthy for anyone, particularly those of us who, as previously mentioned, are creative practitioners. This is because there is the added pressure that as such we need to produce 'outputs' that justify our existence within academia. Where are these ivory towers where it is assumed we will go and be prolific?

I was sent this poem recently with the idea that perhaps it makes a gesture towards some answers as to why we are all so tired and over-wrought:

My life is not this steeply sloping hour (Rainer Maria Rilke)

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
                    And the song goes on, beautiful.


I think maybe it does. I need to find this life that is not this steeply sloping hour so I can allow the song to go on and be beautiful. So to all my stressed friends, I hope you find that moment to standstill, breathe and remember why you love doing what you do.


For some fun listen to Moxy Fruvous singing My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors. Thank you Judith Ridge, who works for the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project, for posting this on Facebook.


 

Connections and circles

During last week I was looking for an image I could use in a lecture. I came across this photograph by Martin Parr - one of my favourite photographers. He was at Manchester Poly along with my sister where they both studied photography together. Her life followed a very different path to his but I still see her as one of the best photographers I know even though her current career bears no relation to her past studying. I love the simplicity of her photographs and have a series of them on my wall that she gave me. Why am I mentioning this - well she was the first to introduce me to true creativity. I was very young when she was studying but I can still remember the power of her photographs - a simple green apple in a frosted glass to a stripper emblazoned across a curtain. At that point I started to understand what impact images can have, it was the beginning of one of my circles. I often use photographs to inspire my writing or I give students a selection of photographs in order to make the connection between a photo and a narrative because that's the point, every photograph has a story - real or fictional - it is just waiting there to be told.

The simplicity of my sister's photographs belies the richness of the images plus the (often) hours of thought behind them. It is this that I have been trying to achieve with my writing but have found recently instead that there is a fine line between no atmosphere and gag-enducing purple prose! I am looking for that balance.

My search for that balance has included loking back through some of my favourite books in order to try and make the connections between images that are barely there but are powerful enough to fill the reader's imgination and those that are blatant and blunt but just as effective. Several books came to mind including Cosmicomics, Holes, Palace Pier Blues, The Book Thief and The Bloody Chamber, All of which achieve to varying degrees the balance of simplicity and richness in their descriptions.

The Bloody Chamber came to mind as it is a book that I am lecturing on next week. This has lead to further connections as I have been reading about Angela Carter this afternoon and apparently with my PhD looking at the representation of sex entitles me to label myself a 'moral pornographer' (an image I quite like if I am honest). In that it is my aim with my thesis novel to construct a text where the woman's sole purpose is not to just gratify the man, instead it is the demystification of flesh and a reflection of the real world where all are equal and desire is not shame-faced. I felt that sort of connection this afternoon.