[ad_1]
hat article won’t write itself, I tell myself, clearing away the breakfast things, sticking my plate in the dishwasher, rinsing out the coffee pot and putting the marmalade and the butter back on the top shelf of the fridge. But they do write themselves, don’t they, when things are going well; that’s exactly what they do. You get so engrossed you forget you are even doing it.
I guess it can be the same whatever you do, as you lose yourself in an idea, become lost in a craft or lost in equations, extemporising a lecture and being surprised and alarmed by the words coming out of your mouth, lost in a moment, lost in inventing a rhythm or a melody.
What comes easily today might not come at all tomorrow. There is no guarantee. So what’s stopping you, I ask myself. You have left the gas on. You did not close the trap-door that’s hidden under the carpet. The dog has not been walked and lunch will soon be upon us. Chimneys swept, surfaces wiped, laundry ironed, subscriptions up to date, roses dead-headed, beds made, rugs beaten, glasses polished, sinks unblocked, clothes-moths banished and all is good with the world. And yet. Not even early nights, moderate drinking, good intentions, a clear head, a straight back, an ergonomic working situation, perfect lighting, a clean bill of health, no pre-existing conditions, no underlying causes, can save you from the critic’s gnawing doubt.
Further tyrannical routines and rituals lead us towards evening. It is a mystery how one ever finds oneself seated at the desk. Sometimes the words still refuse to surface; or offer themselves so unwillingly and in such hopeless disarray that the task they are meant to perform will never be completed. The situation unfolds in its predicable, time-honoured way. It didn’t work last time so why should things be any different now? But you’ve got to start somewhere, even from here.
The broken-backed paragraphs lie around in disordered heaps. All those equivocations. All those ambiguities. The cloth-eared language and mind-numbing cliches leave me aghast. It is like looking at bad art, except art looks back at you and dares you. And how can you tell with art anyway? Dress it up right and any negative can be turned into a positive. Fine-tuned and finessed and cleverly de-skilled, the worst becomes the best, or something suspiciously like it. But bad writing is just bad writing.
The minutiae of my everyday life, with its subterfuges, displacements and self-sabotage fill my hours. But even the accomplishment of these self-imposed tasks still leaves me with the nagging suspicion that something, or rather someone, is holding me back. A shifty little back-seat homunculus who monitors my every move, an inner critic who stalks me, insinuating its own derisory little commentary in my ear and even shouting at me as I rush ahead, coat flapping, on the wet pavements. Flight impossible, inexorable the pursuit. My personal djinn, a doppelganger, my Dostoevskian double, my evil twin.
What if you’ve got it all wrong, he says, bamboozled by the art game and your so-called career? Who do you think you are? He’s the monkey on my back, the author of my imposter syndrome and my anxiety. On he goes, belittling and second-guessing my little schemes, telling me to get a haircut, check my privilege, check my ignorance, check my relevance.
But you can’t check out before you check in. Let’s say I am now at the office door, key in one hand and the last half-cup of coffee in the other. I put the cup down on the step, so I can turn the key and lift the handle. Think about it too much and even this simple act can leave you with coffee down your shirt. What is needed is not so much mindfulness as mindlessness. To catch a fish you must think like a fish, to paraphrase Izaak Walton. I stand there gulping, beached on the doorstep. “The hardest work is to have a head without any ideas in it,” John Cage said somewhere. Cage? Walton? What are they doing here? What I need is a different voice, one to drown out my own.
Then, quite suddenly, and appearing with neither announcement nor cajoling, the voice arrives and off you go. It can happen at any time. It isn’t even my voice, and certainly not my inner critic’s. I know his wheedling tone. There are several of these voices, these visitors who come to me unbidden, and I submit to becoming their stenographer and amanuensis, no more than a secretary. Sometimes these are dangerous, infectious voices, depending on whom I have been reading. Other writer’s rhythms and syntax and even their vocabulary can get to you. People talk about writers and artists and composers finding their voices, but they don’t just come out of nowhere. They’re in the ether, in everything you’ve read and seen and heard. It is certainly not yours alone, this voice of yours, this trademarked imprimatur of the authentic self. There isn’t one. Often it is the art itself that provides the voice, or at least the start of it – an inkling, a tone, a timbre, the pitch.
You wouldn’t get all flowery with Richard Serra, would you, though it might be fun to try. He asks for gravity and somnolence, plain words, the specifics of the moment. Duchamp, who was acutely aware of the performance that entailed being the artist Marcel Duchamp, makes me urbane, perverse and ironical. I know his little game. Menace and sarcasm and tartness for Luc Tuymans, languor and threat for Chris Ofili, and mournfulness for Mirosław Bałka. Demanding attention to the details, I use my sense of bafflement and curiosity to approach the knight’s-move thinking of Helen Marten or the mental and optical calisthenics of Tomma Abts. Ragnar Kjartansson catches me in his repetitive loops, and Danh Vo has me quoting from The Exorcist. Am I the priest, or am I the devil? I go knockabout and slapstick as I wade through a sludge of papier-mache and plaster with Phyllida Barlow. Doubting the solidity of his fabricated world, a sense of the uncanny creeps in as I write about Thomas Demand. Kara Walker makes me aware I’m part of the problem and Wolfgang Tillmans makes me hungry to see everything. I have to invent my own avatar to talk about Ed Atkins, and perform different versions of myself with Tino Sehgal.
All this is more than ventriloquism, mimicry or parody. It is a kind of identification, a way of letting yourself in and letting go. Getting lost, in other words, getting into the zone and becoming absorbed in finding a way to recapture what it was that brought you here in the first place. What a performance it all is.
[ad_2]
READ SOURCE
