Random Meaningless Cubist Unblocking Post

'The Poet' - Pablo Picasso

'Oh, 500 channels and nothing on....' D'you ever get that feeling where there are so many things to do, so many thoughts to think, so many ideas to write about, that you can't possibly settle yourself to sit down to do just one???!

There are all these ideas floating around in my head like dust-motes right now, but until they're lit by a passing sunbeam (focus/inspiration/realisation/eureka/aha/yes), they'll just stay there as random meaningless entities. 

That's where I'm at at the minute. Synapses flaring, but nothing going to press. Yada, yada, yada/nada, nada, nada. I've been flirting with writing ideas for the last hour or so, but none gaining any worth in weight over the other. But I have to write something, so here it is - a nonsensical blabber about this existential grey area of writing (or any kind of creating - or doing - for that manner.)

I feel like a Cubist painting, a Picasso to be exact, all jagged pieces all over the place. (See aside and above). My blog posts are usually neat and themed and organised, so I thought I'd now chance a random roulette type of post, because that's all I got folks at the mo. And because today feels like a rock day, as Ernest Hemingway so bluntly put it: "Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

So here I go with the blasting. This blog set out to be mostly about thoughts on writing, so here's some I've been having. (Granted, written not today, but somewhat relevant I think - pardon my opportunism.)

This reflection would come in pretty handy at a writing group equivalent to AA; or as a defence to an editor when deadlines are passed; or as a definition of a writer's job description; or as a balm to calm the neurotic babblings of the inner writer self while in block or disillusion mode; or as a justification of the see-saw writing curse; or an explanation for that numbed zone, the Bermuda triangle of the mind so to speak (where I am now, latitudes, longitudes I no longer can see.)

***
Ah-hem...Here goes:

I am a reluctant/rampant writer. Schizophrenic, even. Meaning, I do and I don’t. Write that is. To write or not to write.? To be or not to be? Double-sided double-edged sword dilemma. 

Writer and non-writer. Pick up a pen, put it down. Jekyll, Hyde. Do, don’t.  Do or die. One side doesn’t know the other. Me and my doppelganger self. Lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) 

Binge, block - that’s my days. Stoicous, sober. From verbose to vacant. Overflowing to overwhelmed. Motor-mouth to mute. Raving random writer. Sometimes it’s white page wilderness. Big blank block. The weight of the world hanging over my words. Arctic cold isolation. Icy death. The page is too white; I could get lost there. 

Others, blessed white. Blessed blank, clean slate. The world hanging in my words. Arctic pristine landscape. Glittering ice-rink for show-stopping back-flips. I want to stun, shock. Fly free, trapeze through words.  Arctic wide open possibility. The page is so white; I could get found here.

I write to live, I live to write. Sometimes I think I have it. (The gift.) The tongue of flame, rain of words, lilt of language. The words write themselves, they write me. I write and feel right. I’m in a meadow of possibilities, blue skies, green daisy smiles, horizon inked with thousands of tonnes of pages. I’m the little mermaid, voice found, singing the song of myself. I’m every fairytale’s end. Sparking. Alive, alight. The world was blank; now my words colour it Impressionado style. 

And then, sometimes, I don’t. Sometimes it is transient, comes out of the elusive ether, like a snow-storm; settles, then melts away. Sloppy words and wishy-washy sentences. Dark, dank depths of winter quiet.

I can’t write, I can write. Angel of inspiration battles the devil of delusion and I shoulder the strife. The words stick, stutter, clog up the passages of thought and trapped, fester. They want out but I can’t let them. I can’t do them proud, will only sell them out. They fall to stick-image words, scrawl, and crawl away. I feel like a toddler muffled by a language I don‘t know. Tongue-tied-cotton-wool-stuffed-mouth silence. I’m deaf, dumb, blinded by the script of silence. I don’t write for a while and things feel numb. Bland. Like I’m colour-blind. Word-weary makes me world-weary. (Yawn).


Words come and go. They’re my allies, enemies. I live in words, I love words, I cower before their might. I listen carefully for them. Feel them float up from some hallowed place. Unknown portal. But first I have to put my hands to my ears and listen. Quiet the static. Quell the voices. Remember how to tell a story. Remember how to tell the story. 

I collect stories like a magpie, shiny silver fragments of life. I sift through days for the gold of poems. Little shavings of meaning I carve carefully into words. Putting them together is the hard part. So I stash them away. Until they grow. Grow up, grow old, stray away. Fall through my fingers like sand, unwrapped, untold. Sometimes I feel brave enough to write them, sometimes I don’t. I get rusty, out  of practice, afraid to get on the saddle again incase I fall off, fall to earth, break a leg, a wing, dream. 

So much to say. So much to tell. So many ways through the snow. Why can’t I write right? Is there a right way to write? The way is lonely, cold. The way is bright. Watch the pen shake in my hand. Watch it saunter, soar. Go-getter, then gone. Bound in words, blinded by words. I’m up, I’m down, written, un-written, black, white, blank.

I write and don’t write. Am and aren’t. Juxtaposing joker. Ambivalent anti-self, schizophrenic split-self scourge. I pop pills of placebo poetics, drink inspiration as a tonic, while I wait for the lightning strike. From depth of shadows to buoyancy of light.

But in the end, epilogue, last word honour, I am nothing without my verbal skin. Shed, re-grow, shed and grow again. I carry my word-world around as a satellite, seeing lamp, moon by my side; sometimes light, sometimes dark, full, fingernail-thin, but there, nonetheless. Always there. I feel it pull the tides of my mind. Keeping its quiet orbit. Keeping me in orbit. Writing keeping me right.

***

Until the next right time, 

~ Siobhán.

Midnight in Paris

What a perfect way to spend a Sunday night.... humming along to whimsical French violin notes and swooning thoughts of Paris, á la 'Midnight in Paris', the new Woody Allen movie, which is utterly and deliciously delightful. 

Paris, I love. Je t'aime, je t'aime, je t'adore. And this movie is yet another love letter to the city from the kooky director, but also a swansong to art and its 1920s heyday in Paris, when the city was a mecca for all the great artists and writers and musicians, the creative thrumming hub of the world. 

'Midnight in Paris' is a quirky, comical and magical tale, almost bordering on the fairytale-esque.  The main character is Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood screenwriter/wannabe novelist who is holidaying in Paris with his incompatible girlfriend. He is a nostalgic romantic who hankers back to periods like the 1920s when the golden age of Paris was in full swing. And  so, his nostalgia is indulged at midnight every night when he is transported back to the 1920s and gets to rub shoulders with the likes of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Picasso, just like that. See, Paris is magic - winks the underlying theme, and anything can happen here, especially at night. In the realm of Paris, every dream and dreamer is embraced.

I'm not usually dying about Owen Wilson in films, but here he does an excellent job of an unassuming, stuttering, unsure-of-himself writer. Especially when he comes face-to-face with Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald and the likes! And giving his manuscript to Gertrude Stein to read, ha, priceless! He is endearingly comic. One funny moment is when he pays hommage to the French practice of mistresses, telling tour guide Carla Bruni, that the French are more highly 'evolved' than Americans when it comes to this taboo of love and romance. The encounter with Salvador Dali in a café with his comparison of Gil to a rhinocerous was crazily accurate and funny. And I can't help but be impressed with Gil's earnest love for the city and openness to the inspiration it offers.

And what really struck me about the time period was how easy it was to declare yourself a writer or an artist. You were welcomed with open arms into the burgeoning community indeed as Gil was. Paris was (and is) unique as a community for the arts; it revelled in art, embraced it, was committed to the pursuit of it, valued art above all other things. Art and everything that went with it: love and passion, truth and freedom and living life to the full, the essence of la joie de vivre.  

Artists and writers were the celebrities of the day in 1920s Paris, not seeking fame, but excellence in their own genre. Take Hemingway for example. He is portrayed in the movie true-to-form as an extremely intense and devoted writer. One piece of advice he doles out to Gil goes along the lines of not letting other writers read your work, because they'll hate it if it's bad, and they'll hate it even worse if it's better than their own. Writers are competitive. Point taken like a bullet!

Paris of course, is the film's main star, spinning scenes into  wonder-filled whimsy. What the film does is capture that 'je ne sais quoi' element of Paris that is so hard to describe in words. The opening montage offers a luxuriously long take of Paris in all its glimpses: Eiffel tower with trees in foreground, sidewalk cafes with red brassieres, and black-tie waiters, cobblestones, rain lashing on streets, the lanterns, the steps of Montmartre, the many bridges,  the magnolia banks of the Seine, the Eiffel tower with twinkling lights at night. 

One of my favourite moments in the film is when Gil tries to describe the allure of Paris - how the fact of its very existence makes him happy, that everywhere in it is somehow a piece of art, a scene and a story, a poem and a painting. (See clip below).  And it's not as if he's star-struck, it's real, this love and awe for Paris. It gets in the heart like no other city, no other place. Especially if you're a creative person, and for most it's love at first sight, first visit, first postcard reverie, first black-and-white picture, first midnight musing.

At the beginning of the film, Gil dreams of living in Paris, which is deemed a 'fantasy' by his oh-so-down-to-earth-and-practical girlfriend, but becomes a reality at the end by way of magic and mischief and musing, and a realisation that although there are some people who live in reality and some people who live in dreams, there are also some people who turn one into another, and in Paris, this is exactly the thing to do. And art, art is a catalyst in this change. As Gertrude Stein comments to Gil who is beginning to despair about his 'perplexing' situation and the rewriting of his novel - 'artists don't despair, their purpose is to find the antidote to the emptiness of existence.' And this is what Gil is in the pursuit of and does, and what Woody Allen has done with this film.

And you would think it, but 'Midnight in Paris' doesn't require a suspension of disbelief, it was in its own right, believable. As well as being heartwarmingly humorous, endearing and witty, this offbeat and upbeat film will delight and inspire too. When the clock strikes midnight, who knows where you'll end up (in your head of course, but better still, in your heart....and what better place to be than in Paris???)

~ Siobhán.

*And if you like this movie and the 1920s era - you'll love Ernest Hemingway's memoir of the time in his book  'A Moveable Feast.'

'Midnight in Paris' Clip

 Movie trailer
 

Creativity, Cynicism & the Comets Inside

"Every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist when one grows up."  
 -Picasso

To remain an artist when grown up - well,  that requires courage, determination and  an almost constant child-like state of viewing the world; one of enthusiasm, awe,  an insatiable curiousity and an indestructible belief in magic.  

Most creatives are of the opinion that our inner artist self is an inner child. 'The Artist's Way' by Julia Cameron, the hugely popular and seminal text on creativity, strongly advances this theory. We must treat our artist self as a child, a child who looks at things anew and not with cynicism, who wants nothing more than to be let loose to experiment and express their love for the world and to have fun in the process.  (Read more here)

Also, to be an artist is to challenge reality. To challenge its artifice trappings and iron-bar rules and routines and imprisoning of imagination. To rebel aginst them, refuse them and reach beyond. To believe that everything isn't simple black and white 2D; that there is something more; that beneath the surface of things there beats many multi-coloured heartbeats, a kaleidoscope of imaginings unfurling and swirling colours of every hue, shapes of every reckoning, possibilities and viewpoints and meanings and layers upon layers of love and beauty that make up this 3D thing called life. 

To be an artist is to have access to this world within our world, to be blessed with the ability to transcribe it somehow, in paint, pen, music or many varied ways. To put the pulse in our 'living', to rupture routine with revelations and set fire to banalities with the truth of existence - that life is to be enjoyed not endured, a wonderland not a worryland.

Now I don't mean to sound all hippy-chick psychedelic far-out babbling, but creativity is far out. Far out from the rigmarole of routine and  reality, but not from each one of us. Not from our grasp. It's just been forgotton and laid aside by most of us in favour of more 'grown-up' things like materialism, status and security. 
 
And I'm writing this as a sort of affirmation for unfortunately I am in the shadows of disillusion  right now. I am just about sick of the attitude I encounter that creative pursuits are a waste of time, a la-de-dah hobby affair and not a full-hearted soul commitment. And I am getting tired of battling cynicism in my everyday environment. Cynicism and disillusion on all fronts and a great big blank ennui cast over the place like a dark toxic mushroom cloud suffocating any sign of life beneath it. It throws me in the doldrums at times, it really does.  

But I battle on against it, like all we creatives do. Tooth and nail and brick-by-brick goddammit. Battle against the slate-grey attitudes of people who believe in practicality first and foremost, the debunking of dreams, and the erasing of wonder, the stalemate that afflicts most of humankind, at some stage or other, but especially at present, especially where I am.

And just when it all seems hopeless, a handful of stars blow my way, proof of the great creative constellation I map my way by. I just happened to stumble upon this extract last night, from a young adult novel 'Boy's Life' by American author Robert Mc Cammon, which featured as a voiceover on one of my favourite TV shows 'One Tree Hill.' It's a coming-of-age story but from all accounts (I've been excessively googling), beautifully written and underpinned with a sense of creative 'magic'. The narrator, a young boy, who writes stories to get to grips with the world, and the whole book seems to focus on creativity and how it enchants, to those of us who embrace it, our view of the world. The adults are as always the bad guys, the cynics who belittle and cast aside the power of creativity in favour of the rigours and structure of routine.  This extract is truly wonderful. It zings and sparks and sends stars shooting up my spine everytime I read it. Goosebumps. Those wonderful tremors of truth. Look, read and believe:

"You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. 

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.  –'Boy’s Life' – Robert Mc Cammon

There you have it, a little piece of magic, a handful of stars, discovered by serendipity. The opening of a portal to a part of ourselves I'd almost lost sight of. A ta-da poof of proof when I needed it most  A remembrance and a reaffirmation, and a rebuke - to all those sceptics and naysayers and their black clouds.  

The lines have since embroidered themselves in gold in my heart, especially: "We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand." We are.  Our creativity is the consequence of this magic. It's our way back to that 'magic realm.' We are all entitled to honour it. 

No more disillusion and cynicism. Just a little flare of this magic would flame everything back into potential and possibility again, I'm sure of it. 

So that's what I'm going to focus on now. And see if I can spark the flint of everyday life  into the flames of art again, to sustain and nourish and warm the cold cynics out there (including the one hiding in some dark corner of my mind, planted there by reality...) And to convince myself again that this is worth it, that there is a magic in all of this that's worth fighting for. And as the anti-dote to my current doldrum drear - that I do believe it all, I do, I do, I do.

Keep creating,

~ Siobhán.

*This blog was soundtracked by: 

'Show Me What I'm Looking For'- Carolina Liar  (the search for something more...)
'Back When You Were Good' - The Hours  (reclaiming a better self...)
'Bring on the Comets' - VHS or Beta  (enthusiasm and high-thrills of possibilities...)
'Wake Up'- Arcade Fire (spine-tingling accompaniment to the trailer for 'Where the Wild Things Are', the movie of the book about growing up but never losing your childhood wonder and imagination...)

Check them out!

pics from www.weheartit.com as always, :-)

Solstice Sentiments

 

Oh, the summer night
Has a smile of light
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
                                                     ~Barry Cornwall

Today of course is the Solstice, the longest day of the year and the official beginning to summer. A magical point in the astrological calender when the sun 'stands still' in our Northern Hemisphere. Focusing its spotlight on us for a brief but precious interlude. Full of light and life-affirming golden ray glories. And outside, it's raining. Wahey, welcome to Irish weather...

A day for worshipping the sun (if we could only see it...!) Or at least for celebrating it. The sun is our life-force after all. It was even Superman's fuel of choice. It blooms and blossoms life. Lightens dark. Warms our skins and souls. It as as much a part of us as the air we breathe. I'm convinced that we Irish all have weather-vanes embedded in our souls that swing to a heartwarming emotional south when the sun smiles on us. Sunny days make sunny dispositions. We are sun-dependant and sun-resplendent.

But how to worship it exactly, without travelling to Stonehenge? Practise the Yoga sun salutation, feeling muscles arc and stretch into majestic gestures of praise?  Dance around the garden at sunset positively hippylicious? Or wake to greet the sunrise? Maybe wear yellow or orange all day?

I'd say just to revel in everything the sun represents. In its warmth and light.  Both physical and metaphorical. 'Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.' Be dazzled by its brilliant bastion of optimism, 'nature's Prozac' as it's been dubbed. Bask in being alive.  Be grateful for our prosperity and abundance. Salute the sun inside us, as Picasso suggested -  'the sun is a thousand rays in your belly.'

And to us writers, our inspiration. Gold ornate He-man of the sky inspiring and lighting. Blinding and brilliant. Apollo god of the sun, one of the most powerful of the Greek gods was also patron of the arts, specifically music and poetry. And leader of the Muses. So sunshine not only dictates our moods, but also our creative urges. All hail.

From the solstice, the sun will turn once more and start back on its winter journey. Now is the time to soak it up and enjoy. Let its presence fill us with golden light and warmth and light and illuminate all of our endeavours!

Solstice greetings!

~ Siobhán

'The Sun' - Mary Oliver

     Have you ever seen 
anything 
in your life 
more wonderful 

than the way the sun, 
every evening, 
relaxed and easy, 
floats toward the horizon 

and into the clouds or the hills, 
or the rumpled sea, 
and is gone-- 
and how it slides again 

out of the blackness, 
every morning, 
on the other side of the world, 
like a red flower 

streaming upward on its heavenly oils, 
say, on a morning in early summer, 
at its perfect imperial distance-- 
and have you ever felt for anything 
such wild love-- 
do you think there is anywhere, in any language, 
a word billowing enough 
for the pleasure 

that fills you, 
as the sun 
reaches out, 
as it warms you 

as you stand there, 
empty-handed-- 
or have you too 
turned from this world-- 

or have you too 
gone crazy 
for power, 
for things?