Carpe Diem
A few days ago I was having an email conversation with a much younger friend who is also a writer and a blogger, and who reads Days in the Life. Among other things we were talking about keeping a blog fed. I was saying that I knew I did too much and that my life was Seriously Out of Control* . . . but that I still sat down some evenings to write a blog entry and thought, WHAT? WHAT? She wrote back, You get a lot done. It’s actually kind of scary from this side.
I’ve been thinking about this. It’s not like my friend sits at home and waits for her fairy godmother to solve her life for her.** And maybe it’s different for calmer, saner, better organised people whose gifts are not for space-cadetry like writing fantasy novels. But I think a certain kind of twitchy, wound-up, off the wall, over-blessed-with-imagination type of person does more stuff as she gets older. And maybe even some calm, sane and better organised people do too. It’s not just Time’s wingèd*** chariot hurrying near†, although that’s part of it: I’m 57. If I’m planning on acquiring any new skills I need to get at it. I have also noticed that I’m even buying fewer books. Five years ago I thought it was just the shock of losing the old house, and it may be that too, but it’s also that I’m really not going to read 300 books a week for the next fifty years†† so I might as well relax a little†††. And save Third House’s attic for backlist.
Maybe that sounds kind of morbid. It doesn’t feel morbid. It feels more like ‘whew’. But ‘whew’ is connected to the other side of doing more as you get older: you’ve now got your life. If you’ve been lucky, you’ve got one that suits you. Which means you don’t have to think about all that a lot any more. I wrote BEAUTY when I was 24; it came out when I was 25. Hey—I had the rest of my life charted, right? Wrong. I had no idea how I’d done what I’d done, nor whether I was going to be able to do it again. To some extent, this never goes away, and a good thing too. As soon as anyone, I think, who makes stuff up out of themselves, and that includes not just writing but all the arts and anything else that’s dependent on the individual eye or ear or creative input of the person doing it, as soon as any one of us spinners-out-of-nothing starts to feel too comfortable about it, what they spin‡ becomes dull.
I’m pretty sure I’ve said some of this before. But I feel it bears repeating. If you’re lucky you come to terms with what you are and what you do, and if you’re luckier still you like it. Which you then find leaves you with this . . . premium. Sort of the life version of having got your mortgage paid off so you have this extra money left over every month.‡‡ Hmmmm. . . .
I’ve been thinking about this too because even though I guess, cough cough, that possibly I overdo it a bit, cough cough cough cough, I am better off dragging myself away from my desk kind of a lot, and doing other stuff. I know writers who simply write, who can barely face eating‡‡‡ because it takes them away from Masterpiece in Progress. Total single-minded dedication works for some writers/spinners-out-of-nothing. I’ve done it this way, but it’s not good for me. I get sort of closed in or down on myself and lose the way out, and the world starts to look like a surrealist landscape. Not one of the cheerful ones. I think this is not only because I need contact with some form of reality, but because I am naturally rather a slow writer: which means that if I don’t get up and do something else I just sit there staring at the page/screen till the computer starts turning into a wiggly grey blancmange with evil little eyes and I become a giant aubergine.§
The balance is always tricky—would I be less behind on PEGASUS if I’d gone to fewer bell practises? Is adding voice lessons to the steaming salmagundi definitively one thing too many? But . . . I came back from ringing call changes for bishops last night feeling a lot brighter than when I left. I had a blast at my voice lesson today§§. And after it I went by Third House to water anything that needed watering, and it was such a gorgeous afternoon and things don’t need to be watered nearly as often if you just get them out of their pots and into the ground and furthermore I have thirty roses coming and I need the decks clear, and. . . .
Going back to PEGASUS now.
* * *
* And that I have occasional spasms of keeping little notebooks that are just a list of whatever I’ve managed to get done by the end of each day, to comfort myself that it isn’t all spinning my wheels and putting stuff off. Sometimes a spasm of notebook-keeping lasts a few months, but even a jotting notebook is One More Thing and the very last thing before I turn my light out is my final little handful of minutes for reading and I’m loath to give up even two or three of these. But since I’m usually reading countable-on-the-list nonfiction I don’t want to have done my notebook sooner, since the whole point is to have a nice long impressive list. Even if what it proves is that I’m a dingaling dilettante ditz.
** I don’t waste time on conversations with boring people.^
^ I don’t have time for conversations with interesting people, but that’s a different issue.
*** One of the many things that gets old about Word’s auto-spell thingy is that it invariably tidies up imported symbols. Like an e with a whatsit over it. Which means you have to ungleblarg around putting it in twice, since the second time the resident headmistress programme will let it stand (probably), with an accusatory red line under it. How often am I going to use wingèd? Is it really worth adding to the dictionary? And is the accent grave going to disappear again the minute I look in the other direction?
† http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm
I love this poem. (Especially ‘I by the tide of Humber would complain’.) Mind you, I’m on the lady’s side. Yo, Andrew, honey, you gonna marry me if I get pregnant? It’s the 17th century, and I’m not liking my options here too much. –I know the argument that Marvell was on the lady’s side too, but that’s not what comes over in the poem, and I’m a simple soul. I read the story for the story.
†† Yes. I probably did have 15,000 books at the old house.
††† I said a little. It’s not like bookstores aren’t still the most dangerous three-dimensional spaces on the planet.^
^ Until they develop better browsing techniques, on line bookstores are still a lot less fun . . . I mean hazardous.
‡ Or inspire, like teachers. Good teachery enthusiasm is highly creative.
‡‡ You could just bank the freller. —Blow that idea.
‡‡‡ . . . So you just eat at your computer. This only works if you (a) live alone or (b) are married to another writer. My laptop lives on the kitchen table at the mews.
§ Still better than a cockroach. My surrealist too-long-at-the-computer landscapes have become a degree or two more bizarre however thanks to the Posterior Vitreous Detachment, since there are now always small black leggy things cavorting around my peripheral vision on that side.
§§ Although gods know why, I still sound like a cat being strangled, and Blondel had the window open. I hope your neighbours have office jobs, I said. But he’s given me another song to play with: Caro mio ben by Giordani. He says it will help my Italian^, and that the phrases are nice and short, so I can worry less about running out of breath, which is still an issue with Sebben and Panis, although I have begun to realise this has as much to do with nerves as with diaphragmatic misbehaviour. There is really no getting out of singing for your singing teacher, you know? But it’s sometimes a kind of drawing and quartering, ow, ow, ow, what you do at home better/worse and what you do for your teacher better/worse. On the one hand I definitely need someone to say things like ‘don’t raise your shoulders’ and on the other hand I mostly don’t raise my shoulders when a professional singer with a gorgeous voice isn’t watching me. But he hears stuff that I don’t hear till he points it out and then it’s very often like . . . oh. Duuh. But I wouldn’t have noticed without a professional-singer-with-a-gorgeous-voice pointing it out. And then, of course, I come home and forget. I fear that I am already developing a tradition of going in each week and saying I forget what you told me last time about x/y/z/all of the above.
^ Snooooooork
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