THIRD MONDAY
Drew ten leaves.
Thought about up and down and below and underground. About life and living and not living.
On this third day I began to feel under, low, slow, lethargic. I remembered a similar feeling when I did a residency in an underground gallery in Hastings three years ago.
Later from this low point and a sense of stoppedness, ideas began to arise, to come up, ideas about up and down, ups and downs, hills and lowlands. And the East Hill Lift. Rather peculiar. Especially as I had been thinking about roots and growth. Makes me think of Freud and the Interpretation of Dreams, puns and the many meanings of words.
Played about on my beloved blackboards, rubbing out and rewriting. Another idea comes up. Out of nothing, something can come. I have to learn yet again to ‘trust the process’. To trust the inner workings of the brain, the mind, the whatever it is inside us/outside us. If you wait and play with an openness then new ways to take the world/our surroundings can arrive. I can be mixed up, even feel devoid of any useful thoughts and from the confusion, the emptiness, the empty mess, something slightly different can come/become. I can take a sideways swipe at making something of the swirling mess inside myself and outside in the world.
READING: And then equally surprising, appropriate, peculiar as I dip into The Gift by Lewis Hyde I find:
An essential portion of any artist’s labour is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.
and
The imagination is not subject to the will of the artist.
see this review of the book: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-gift-by-lewis-hyde-424028.html
Now I have to make these ideas work.
