When I was a little girl (hard to imagine now), I used to absorb songs. They were just THERE, somehow.

On the radio, in the air, in a book I found somewhere.

My father sang while he was shaving. In the bathroom getting ready for work. A cigarette on the go, always.

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Posted By Pen to A little life on 5/29/2011 02:05:00 AM

I have to go

I have to go to sleep now.

Up to my eyeballs

in wine

and

mourning

Tipping point

These last few days – warm, sunny, quiet. Just gorgeous. Green and beautiful.

College is on Easter holidays (I think. Days fly by without me noticing and, with each one, I come closer to not achieving the thing I most want to achieve.) Something is very wrong and I'm not sure what it is.

The most immediately worrying wrong thing is that I've lost all confidence in the work I've been doing. It looks shallow, meaningless and without soul. At one time it spoke to me; now it just thumbs its nose and blows a raspberry and the only thing it says is ner ner ne ner ner. While I thought I was gainfully employed I was, it seems, wasting my time.

Now I have to justify what I've been working on for the past year and I can find no justification for it at all.

I have, effectively, thought myself to a standstill.

I've read and read and read. I've read artists' diaries, critical theorists, thinkers. Poetry. Books about chaos, critical mass, emergence, synchronicity. I've dabbled in mental illness, going with the flow, mindfulness. Why artists do what they do (apparently it's all about the conflict between maternal and paternal aesthetics. Resolving the conflict between what's real and what's ideal).

I now know why traffic clumps up on the M25: a nervous driver panics at how fast s/he's going and puts the brakes on. Everybody else – who, until then, has been pootling along at what seems to them like a comfortable speed – is forced to brake, too. They all slow down despite the fact that there's nothing to slow down for. (Except the need not to crash into the car in front.)

I've learned all sorts of other stuff as well. Like that scientists of one sort of another are now using physics and maths and what they know about the behaviour of molecules and atoms and nano-particles (I made that one up, I think) to predict how humans will behave. In a nightclub. When fire breaks out.

When they meet in the street and do that funny dance-thing so's not to bump into each other. Or take turns going through a doorway.

They (the scientists) have come up with computer-based simulations to test their theories because setting fire to a real nightclub is not an option. They invent what they call peoploids (who behave like molecules and atoms and nano-particles) and watch what they do.

I like the idea of peoploids but not the idea that how I behave is as predictable as the behaviour of molecules. Which are, of course, unthinking and at the mercy of whatever happens around them.

I feel out of step
again

(not just because I fell over yesterday,
walking)

Dead bird

I am walking down the hallway

from the front room

where the computer is

past the living room

where Charlie Brooker is

(being clever

about the week's news)

or it might be Jimmy Carr

(I can't see him, only hear)

and someone who sounds a bit like Lauren Laverne

or who might be any one

of a number of smart

sassy

women

and in the middle of the hallway

(which is tiled with its original 1896 tiles, some of which are broken)

there are feathers

I am going to the kitchen

(from the front room, past the living room)

to get a new pack of cigarettes

having smoked the last one of the last pack

while trying to make myself on a photo

look like me

or the me I think I look like

when I see the feathers

There's an almost-intact wing

all of a piece

perfectly

beautiful

tiny fluffy down-like whispers of feathers

scattered

(some of which are stuck to the floor

but I don't know this

until I try to

pick

them up)

I think oh wow how beautiful

And then what I do

is

find a piece of white card

(which I have to rip off the back

of a document I was given years ago and is called

Engaging Fathers in their Children's Learning)

and

with it

I scoop up

the almost-intact wing

and

the tiny fluffy down-like whispers of feathers

I take the piece of white card

with the wing and its whispers

through the kitchen

I put it on the table

I spray it

I spray it with permanent repositional adhesive

(the point of

permanent repositional adhesive

being that it sticks things to other things

and lets you move them around a bit until they make a pleasing arrangement

and then you can just leave

the whole thing

alone

and it will stay there)

The permanent repositional adhesive

has an unexpected side effect. It

coats the feathers,

covers them

enfolds them

keeps them safe

It keeps them so safe

(in their dead beauty)

that I go back

I go back to the hallway where the rest of them are

and I scoop them up, too

on a piece of paper that came in the post

and says that from 11 APR 11 the amount of benefit I receive will change

and I spray them

as well

Fuck off

I thought I was doing quite well, but now I don't think I am at all. When my tutor was looking through my sketchbook yesterday and telling me about all the things it didn't have that 'they' want to see I suddenly felt completely out of my depth. Cut off at the knees. As if everything I've been doing and learning and making all this time is actually nothing.

In spite of everything my instincts and intuitions have been telling me, in the grand scheme of things that is the university rubric and 'the context' and 'the theory' what I am doing (and have been doing) is rubbish. Insignificant. It doesn't measure up.

Today I've read James Elkins The Object Stares Back and it's such a beautifully constructed argument about (among other things) how we see what we want to see and disregard the rest (Paul Simon mentions this in his song The Boxer, 1968) and all sorts of other complicated stuff that just blows me away when I try to get my head round it that I have no idea how I'm ever going to be able to deal with it.

Yesterday I read Berger On Drawing and I know that what I've been trying to do all this time is just feel my way towards something and wait and watch and see what happens (and in the meantime possibly create something that's worth looking at and is pleasing and makes people think) and now somebody is saying I have to look at what I'm doing and what it says and I'm not really ready to.

It's a work in progress. I'M a work in progress. It and I are not ready for scrutiny yet, especially scrutiny by someone whose objective is simply to measure us against some kind of wifflywaffly criteria that are hazy but sound good when they're written down until you try and work out what they actually mean.

What I really want to say now is 'Fuck OFF'. FUCK your rubric. FUCK your context. FUCK your theory.

So I have a choice (we always have a choice. I'm a child of the early years of Feminism so I know this. I have also been through years of counselling and psychotherapeutic drugs and the fact that I have a choice has always been both a consolation and a terror).

My choice now:

1 To continue
2 To give up