Roughly a month has passed and no day has gone without tending to my hands, especially my thumbs. Several times over I thought I was healed, but that folly only led to more pain. I have no purple patches or sharp sustained pain. The strain tends to linger through to my elbow after I commit to works more disciplined than usual. Thus cooking, cleaning, and moving the bookcase have become listed as deadly covert actions in daily prayer. Still, know that I am here persevering. I spent the first three weeks avoiding everything visual that my hands used to work. Instead, I wrote and I am still getting lost and found in the word. The main achievement is that writing is rescuing my heart and setting me up for discovery when I return to the visual. The first accomplishment this year is a compilation of notes for text and design for an artist book edition and an altered book series.
Know that sitting still is not easy. Know that I am finding the trials of process to be persistent. Know that I am taking myself seriously.
Over these past four months, process in writing as revealed a world of blame, selfishness, and fear. Process has no qualms over a blank page. Time is spent wisely even when scrawling the page with a Bic pen. On the contrary, process defends the right to process. In other words, some days the trouble with writing is not just the writing itself. It is the environment.
I cleared the desk three months ago. I pledged to keep it clean and write from it like I did years ago. This time, writing at the desk was a desire to return to a regular rhythm of scripting mind and heart. Four days in, my plan fell apart. My nay-saying voices crept in a sabotaged anything fruitful coming from my work room. As a result, me and my thumbs tanked. To keep what little self-esteem I had left, I went back to reading. Good writers are good readers, I was told. That went on gloriously every night, until that too tanked. I still have four chapters muscling in my subconscious mind to be read. I want to finish the books, but I have no drive to do so.
Now the other impediments come. Let us just call them by their street name: blocks. I am returning to writing about my blocks with conviction. It happens with every new body of work and every resolve of a difficult task. Some creative management techniques say to flesh them out to identify them if and when they return. In other words, know your enemy. I write about my blocks as a gift of the muse. You too may find them useful to know.
Before the New Year, my self-esteem reduced to the point of bribing my blocks to go away. Before begging through whispers for the madness to end, the problem started with piles of obligations written on scraps of paper. Regularly making lists to organize work is now not enough to motivate action to start. First though, I must discuss more pressing impediments to progress. Namely, the problem is, I don't wanna. Courting listlessness these days, I sit with a festering bout of ennui. For now, desire for motivation scores out the limbs and nothing is the same. Filling the space in my arms and legs makes a sound like an overloaded circuit board. The resounding acoustics have sounds circle my head like flashes of light followed by small explosions. The trigger moves me out of my head and I forget everything I planned. The sound wants attention – everything else must fall away. She, one of my blocks full of light, sound, and fury, plays psychological games out of jealousy and spite. She wants more than any human being can give. She wants me to forget writing and do what women do. Apparently being an artist means you are a failure at womanhood.
Bargaining for my workflow every afternoon and night is not where I want to be, so I fight to work into the wee hours. I prize epiphany and bursts of imagination. She can not predict those, so I have a brief time to work. Right now, my work, lacking the strength of being born in silence reads like a first attempt at an eighth grade thesis. Pages are filled with trite broken phrases, poorly tensed verbs, lengthy compound sentences, and a complicated exaggerated style that are all jumbled into confusion. Still, the point is that I write. I write through the pain. I write because of fear of not writing. Usually I find flow, sense, and wisdom. These days I cannot form clear thoughts despite the silences. As a result, my defense reads like stringing ideas together. The work makes the poetry of a pretending heart.
My block, if it is fear, to feed it means loss to a two inch T-bone steak and duck eggs, air lifted Maine lobster bisque, and a mounded high plate of lounge fries. Forget that artists are poor and malnourished. My block is to live and live high. I fear to feed my block. Why? Feeding it means the block will grow to expanses I can not see over. Feeding my block means credit card bills I can not pay. I fear my block will get wiser, stronger, and squash my little concerns. I fear it to get drunk and take more time from me. I feed my black and I am done for the season and maybe a lifetime. You know if I feed my block and cater to its every demand I will lose myself.
I know that every ounce of energy I have garnered will be sacrificed at one in the afternoon; right when I pull back the curtains and search for a pen in the reflected sunlight. I have two hours before my other block takes over the streets. Then comes the fall into evening. There is no work, less there be no work and no dinner as well. The block puts itself to bed and I have the night until daybreak.
Another block insinuates I spend my energies on folly. According to his madness, I should be married and moved into more lush considerations. That shadow tells me I waste my time with writing and quilting. I need to spend the time in quality pursuits. None of which he explains. Later he screams for the neighborhood to pay attention to him. At everyone, every day, he rages at a distance to consume lingering time. After him I sense vampires some afternoons. Needless to say, my energies are shot through. Then again, I write; as I should. Still, I beg for long silences in the back of my throat that are metered by the rush of wind in the eaves and the ticking clock on the dining room wall.
In grace, muse, I fear, would reject my entreaties after I try to subdue my blocks by giving in to their neediness, their selfishness begging attention. Surely it would be confirmation of giving up on the work at hand to commit to that dalliance.
“You are strong enough,” Muse would say.
“Rest if you need, but know that I need you,” Muse would follow.
“Hmph,” I would echo.
What truly could these blocks be other than a regular painful pronouncements in my left brain? Reason would also settle my irrationality for the simplest reply: Who cares?
Just rest.
Otherwise, call my complaining what it is – a wasted afternoon.
As ever, stay hungry and curious,
N.A. Jones