I can’t remember which story it was – an elderly English detective novel (Agatha Christie or some such) which featured a guru in residence at the dead man’s mansion. When questioned by the detective he says:
‘I want nothing’.
‘I want nothing’.
‘I want nothing’.
The clever English detective translates for us; he wants for nothing, he wants no thing, he desires nothingness. Which shows how poorly the antique gurus of the English countryside communicated their needs, and perhaps why they are not so common these days. But I do agree with him, for 2012 I very much want nothing.
This year has been a cat lady house; cats everywhere, a stench of them, cats squished on the carpet and ceiling, cats on top of and inside of other cats, so many that no particular cat is visible. So much happened this year and in such overlap that I can’t say I really tasted any of it. I haven’t yet laughed or grieved. Good, bad or ugly it doesn’t matter if you pour it down your throat so it never touches the sides.
Surely you share this sense of your mind being pushed and pulled apart by email addresses and deadlines, mobile devices, job roles, offices, communities, ‘friends’ … despite constantly closing them I still have 7 active email addresses, four phone numbers, I can’t remember which thought was temporarily stored where, sometimes can’t even think clearly because of the constant blinking and pinging and messaging and I’m not even on Facebook, God help those who are.
(I put up a ‘Gone On Leave’ on my work email. Then peeked at what was coming in. There was an urgent mail about a study deadline I’d missed. It was a shot across the bows – ‘where did you think you were going?’)
The result is a tiredness, a tepidness where nothing is particularly valuable. Achieve the goal, do it to specification. Fill the allotted space. Move on. All energy is spent in fitting the result and no time to flex, to sidetrack, to meander. There is no play.
Play, like all waste, is the mark of the highest castes; it (seemingly) wastes time.
If you can’t play, you don’t encounter the unexpected and inexplicable, which means your creativity remains stagnant and you become solidified, a mummy, a statue and the pressure on ‘artists’ is to do just this – it earns applause in the same way as obsessiveness is a cherished disease of the managerial class. The artist is constantly coerced into repetition of past glories.
In 2011 I did many things. I typed them all out here and then deleted it all, which was an apt ceremony.
In 2012 my resolutions:
- To play. To slack off.
- To count to ten before saying perhaps.
- To melt into the background.
- To imagine all the hassle before the supposed glory.
- To express sympathy while somehow avoiding offering a solution.
- To do one thing at a time. If that.
- Word.