The creatives we were

Olivia Laing. Jordan Peterson. Alvaro Barrington

I am reading Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather essays.

They are essays about artists and writers’ lives, about art and writing, and they are spliced with social commentary and events happening in the times she is writing about.

I love the ones that introduce me to people I have never heard of before: Sargy Mann, Jane Bowles, Agnes Martin. I love hearing more about the writers and artists I do know; the alcoholism of Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bishop, how women artists dealt with gender stereotypes in the twentieth century, about David Hockney’s double portraits. I love the biographies; a brief whirl through these artists and writers’ lives, exploring what drove them, the themes they experimented with, the important friendships that marked them, their peak periods of productivity, the years they disappeared from view, how they spent the money they made, how they died.

As I read the essays, I get an adolescent feeling of excitement of there being a world to explore. I feel woken up to all the things I didn’t know about, all the people I have never heard of. Her writing is an antidote to feeling jaded with life.

Most of these lives were lived before we knew about climate change, before the possibility, the short cuts and the worry and threat of AI, before people even knew that smoking was bad for health. Reading about these analogue times is balm for any soul battered by the speed of change. This is not that long ago. Whenever I read about even recent history, I remember that talking to people used to have a premium on it, a phone call was precious, (this much I remember from teenage calls to my best friend on the centrally located telephone at the foot of the stairs at home where everyone else could hear the conversation) and travel was still a horizon-expanding and adventurous privilege, (I didn’t travel by plane until I was 17) or a case of being tipped into the soup of chance for those fleeing poverty or war. (This latter experience has not ceased to exist.)

I feel reassured by the form of the essay and how much can be covered in two or three pages; that it’s OK to see very far and feel very deep, and to flit about from thought to personal memory to a fleeting glimpse of something on social media, to art experienced, to ongoing devastation in the world. I have been reading one essay at a time, and allowing each to sink in before I start another. My mind reverberates as I go to the park to walk each one off.

And then, a familiar sense of doom when I read highly researched writing that I admire, how does she manage to read so widely and then condense so succinctly such an expanded universe into these few  concentrated pages?

I rue my wasted time not spent reading more, writing essays and publishing books. I list the things that have got in the way, including focusing on the things that have got in the way.

A friend asked me this morning, if I could wake up to a completed piece of work, what would it be? I named the experience of being moved and changed by what I write, it absolutely doesn’t matter what it is. And now I realise that it is a project to return to everything I have written to see ‘the collection’ in it. Yesterday, another friend mentioned how her artwork (from a while ago) is being included in an exhibition. The curators can see how it fits in with their programme. My friend feels a bunch of stuff about not currently creating art, similar, I imagine to how I feel, or how any writer feels when writing isn’t happening. My friend affirmed about how much this past work still means, how much of herself she put into it, validating for herself the intention and purpose at the time of making and that the work itself still resonates with this.

Past intention matters, past creativity matters. There might not be curators interested in my past creative endeavours, but I somehow need to see the outcomes of my own history of creativity to be able to keep writing. That is alongside the fact that it is the somatic memory of writing which keeps me yearning for somatic experience of writing; the experience of being so fully in the present, in the practice of emitting words, that nothing can disturb me. For hours at a time. This feels very appealing.

The other aspect of writing that I enjoy is starting with nothing and out of that nothing, a theme, a route and a destination emerges, which for the reader, is a moment of reading time which leads to a sense of something having changed; hence me wanting to put the book of Laing’s essays down after each one and go for a walk.  So much reading time, is actually browsing time, online. Browsing is not reading. I want to reserve the word reading for an actual step in an emotional or intellectual journey.

Yesterday, for example, while waiting for my artist friend, I was reading a review of Jordan Peterson’s new book We who wrestle with God. I learnt that  his focus remains on individual morals, on questioning the possibility of real compassion,  on damaging overidentification with certain identity groups. As I read this review, I remembered a visceral sense of Peterson, his high-pitched, Kermit-the-frog, crinkly, boyish voice, his plea to be heard. The review came to the conclusion that Peterson is using the bible to reinforce his own moral filter on the world; which I get, this attempt to go to the bible to give oneself  a sense of stability or meaning. That’s what 30% of the world does daily.

Was this chance encounter with a text browsing or reading? I guess it was reading, even though I didn’t quite finish the article and even though the essay was suggested to me by an algorithm which thought I might enjoy reading about Jordan Peterson. (I did.) The grapple with an outlier is taxing without always being rewarding, but it is necessary. People need to be heard. I need to be heard. I guess the skill is knowing when I’m done with hearing from someone else and turning my attention back to myself, which is such a key skill when listening to someone  you disagree with.

The fact that I am writing about the experience now, suggests that it was reading. The experience moved me somehow and the context was important. It was a moment of calm and focus, in the first half hour of opening, before the crowds, at Tate Britain, while sitting in Alvaro Barrington’s bamboo framed,plastic-covered seat/hammock, entitled ‘Grace’ created in homage to his Caribbean heritage and in particular his grandmother who was a safe haven for him. The experience was interrupted or shall I say bookended by the arrival of my friend, which was itself a pleasurable moment.

I started writing these words (the first eight paragraphs) about three weeks ago and I have since finished Funny Weather and even forgotten about it. This morning, I was looking through notes to find something to write and discovered the eight paragraphs. They reminded me of the strong visceral sense of hope I experienced while reading Laing’s book, while also being able to hold this in the same frame as my habit of disparaging my own writing practice. I am in the process of trusting the clues that come into my field of awareness; these things that only I can see and shape into something. Other people will notice different things.

So here we go; a theme, a route, a destination, an actual step in a journey.

I’m going to the park to walk this off.