Tuesday January 16th 2018
Showering, water flowing over my body and thoughts flowing through my mind. A kind of edgy panic setting in when I think about all the things I would like, feel I need to do, a wall of water approaching.
I’m reading The White Road by Edmund de Waal about porcelain. He describes his early days as a potter, trying to make and sell stuff, without much success. Makes me think of J’s current situation and whether he will find a way to explore and earn money from his art or whether he will have to get a job that uses his talent in other ways. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive but I know how commercial work can pollute the creative stream.
Carillion just collapsed, a group of 13 shackled siblings have been discovered in a California home, a baby was sexually abused by her father before she asphyxiated, Dolores O’Riordan (whose work I barely know) has died at 46, a Serbian politician has been shot dead, a migrant has been crushed to death by a lorry in Calais. And so the world rolls on.
Just finished listening to Lincoln in the Bardo which is brilliant. It has one of the most compelling and convincing visions of divine judgement I’ve ever read.
The structure of revisiting the same calendar date across different years is clever, it creates this vertical slice through time that highlights both change and continuity. That observation about commercial work polluting the creative stream is something I've wrestled with too. Theres this constant tension between needing to monetize a skill and keeping the pure exploratory space intact. Also the Lincoln in the Bardo mention, that book's handling of grief and liminal spaces through multiple voices was unlike anything else. The format itself became part of the emotional architecture.