Sherlock ‘Holmes claims he does not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, as such information is irrelevant to his work. Directly after having heard that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget it. He says he believes that the mind has a finite capacity for information storage, and so learning useless things would merely reduce his ability to learn useful things. Dr. Watson subsequently assesses Holmes’s abilities thus:
Knowledge of Literature – nil.Knowledge of Philosophy – nil.Knowledge of Astronomy – nil.Knowledge of Politics – Feeble.Knowledge of Botany – Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.Knowledge of Geology – Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks, has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.Knowledge of Chemistry – Profound.Knowledge of Anatomy – Accurate, but unsystematic.Knowledge of Sensational Literature – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.Plays the violin well.Is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman.Has a good practical knowledge of British law.’
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes]
Time is a funny thing. I constantly complain that I do not have enough of it, it seems to mysteriously slip though my fingers. However, at work, time seems to laboriously elongate, and I stand there watching the spidery arms of my plastic watch crawl by. Today is my day off, and I am annoyed because it is half one and I am still in bed, things like getting up and showering, going to the shop, making dinner seem to encroach upon my day like an uninvited guest. I put them off for as long as possible, then resent the time I have to spend with them. So far today, I have eaten two breakfasts in bed – the pink landscape of my duvet seems to provoke a hunger in me – I have worked for two hours from the soft confines of my single bed (at 29 I seem to have regressed to the solitary confinement of my childhood cradle), I have replied to emails, dawdled across the pages of others creativity whilst indolently dreaming of my own, and when the need to move my body became too much for me, I embraced the pages of pornography to return once again to my slothful state.
And now, I sit here propped up upon paisley pinked pillows writing of my idle immobility, it’s a kind of ‘busy idleness’ that renders all of my willful ideas into a fatigued snooze. I possess a long list of the things that need to be done, and yet here I am, still in bed at 2pm. I am not alone in my static meanderings, for example there was the florid fancy of Alice in her Wonderland mis-adventures, the languid stupor of Sherlock Holmes in between his cases, the fatigued overstuffed creatures of Cosima von Bonin, where, for the time being reside in Witte de With’s 3rd and 4th floor gallery space in Rotterdam, bearing the term ‘dolce far niente’ which literally translates as ‘sweet doing nothing’, and indeed it is. In theory, most of the things that matter, can be done from my bed, and here I am doing one of them, writing…I may just be writing about my lethargy, but it’s a start – although perhaps I should watch out for the impression of my body on the mattress – I have been meaning to write for some time, not just spurts of writing – which I seem to sporadically produce, but something that formulates into more than just words….is that a tall task? So I may be indulgently lying here, supine, but I have accomplished one thing on the list, to start this blog. It is my hope that I can continue to write in this manner, as I am sick of having things floating around in my head, they need some materiality to them. Perhaps then I can step in to action….one thing at a time hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
