One of the most down-to-earth talks on finding time for creativity that I’ve ever seen. Just short of ten minutes but he covers a lot of territory, from his life in the arts to the deeper meaning of creative pursuits for society and personal growth.
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Wiggling Through by Subtle Manoeuvres
Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life it not possible then one must try to wiggle through by subtle manoeuvres.
Franz Kafka, quote via Daily Rituals by Mason Currey
Kafka’s words, on trying to organise his life around his writing. Kafka’s works are notoriously dark and surreal, but his letters suggest anything but an effortless creative experience. The quote paints a picture of a generally hectic and cluttered life, where the free flow of ideas is staunched.
But closely tied to it is fatigue, and lack of proper rest. The full quote goes on to explain, “The satisfaction gained by manoeuvring one’s timetable successfully cannot be compared to the permanent misery of knowing that fatigue of any kind shows itself better and more clearly in writing than anything one is really trying to say.“
Following on from my last post, Kafka’s words go deeper into why rest is vital for creative output. Fatigue not only cuts off access to creative energy, but degrades the quality of the small amount that does get done.
But the quote offers no solution, only sober reality: the time will never come when conditions are perfect, when life resembles the stillest lake waters and the vistas of the mind are clear of mist. You have to make do with those subtle manoeuvres: rest in those brief respites between between breaking waves, and when you catch your breath, stumble through the mists, and over months and years, maybe make something new.
Creative Hiatus for Rest
Bill Hayes put out an article at LitHub in January: The Rest Principle: On the Necessity of Recovery, in Fitness and Writing. Taking a course for personal trainers while researching a book on exercise, the critical value of rest in making gains really hit him.
He talks about a gap in his writing career:
In some cases, it’s not just the writing that needs a breather but the writer, too. After completing my book The Anatomist, I wrote virtually nothing for almost three years. I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep. It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out.
My own experience with writing is similar. Some months, I’ll write four blog posts and fragments of three short stories, and a novel chapter, in a weekend. Other times, I’ll go whole months and barely write a thing.
I spend a lot of time researching how to do less, so that I can accomplish more of what really matters to me. Lately it’s led me to Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, Tom Hodgkinson’s Being Idle, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Cal Newport’s model of Slow Productivity, and Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals. (Full credit and appreciation to Austin Kleon, Matt Bell and Ezra Klein for making me aware of these.)
But, like almost everyone, I’m terrible at putting these ideas into practice. What I really want is time to write. Not to become a successful writer (though that sounds great), but to have the time to actually do the act of writing. There’s probably nothing special in that — it’s just flow state. Everyone has something that gives them that timeless sense of being fully engrossed.
But things get in the way. I wrote and edited four short stories I the first three months of this year. But for the last two months I’ve barely touched a writing project. It’s a brittle practice, sensitive to being crowded out by other things that, at the time, seem more pressing.
The ideal would be to have a robust practice, to organise my life so that the stable equilibrium would be a day with inviolable time and energy with which to focus on my writing projects. A disturbance inevitably arises that knocks me from equilibrium, but I relax back to that stable state.
The question is how to build such a life.
That brings me, long-windedly, to rest. Hayes writes:
Don’t work through the pain; it will only hurt. Give yourself sufficient time to refresh.
I suspect a lot of the stops and starts with my writing ultimately stem from chronic burnout, a lack of patience, and not being connected enough with my body to recognise when to stop and recharge.
Our life has been hectic the last few months, to say the least. Supporting my family through some hard times, working at a tech startup (which inevitably leads to working some nights and weekends), buying a house, my partner changing jobs, and ongoing health issues, have all taken a toll.
Whenever I get a spare few hours, a lull in the storm, I dive for the keyboard. For maybe an hour, I manage to convince myself that I can write an entire novel draft in a week, before life crashes over me again. I can do it, if I just arse-to-chair and force it.
But I’m not sure who wants to read something written by a mind that’s letting off the smell of burnt toast. Sleep deprivation can produce similar symptoms to being drunk, and impair attention, arithmetic ability, episodic memory, and working memory. Long-term burnout is even more insidious, lowering your baseline cognitive performance, so that you’re not only underperforming, but your ability to think about how to fix the problem is also shot.
Having read, Hayes’ article, I’m wondering whether it’s better to make the decision to not create anything for a while. There’s advice everywhere from creators about the discipline of grinding out your work, even if you’re not in the space (see Mason Curey’s Daily Rituals for plenty of examples). It’s about forming the habit, it’s about discipline.
But what’s the advantage of discipline if you’re barely present in the moment, existing on fumes?
This isn’t an announcement of abandoning creative pursuits, but it’s important to note this counterargument on what to do when times are tough. I have a note above my monitor that says “Stop. Breathe.” Hayes is arguing for us to listen to that more often:
My rule of thumb in fitness training is two-to-one: for every two days of intense workouts, a day off. However, “in cases of sustained high-level output,” according to my manual, full recovery may take longer. This is what had happened with me creatively. I needed a really, really long rest.
Real Boys and Xenomorphs
Alien is my favourite film. It’s horror at its finest: based on suspense and dramatic tension and dark mystique (the latter thanks to H. R. Giger‘s infamous design for the sets and the eponymous alien). The jump-scare is barely present. Like Jaws, the fear comes from not seeing the monster, only knowing it’s hiding somewhere just out of sight.
Image credit: Digital Spy
Five sequels have appeared since (not counting the Alien vs Predator crossovers). Following the fate of most sequels, they don’t approach the success of the original — with the exception of the first sequel, creatively titled Aliens, which is more of a science-fiction action adventure. But they each develop the mythos of the predatory aliens, known in the films as Xenomorphs.
I’ve recently rewatched the most recent, and perhaps the most vilified, instalments in the series: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Both are prequels to the original film, and the thirty year gap necessitated some stylistic changes.
These two films at first appear to sell themselves on the promise of exploring a prominent mystery from the original Alien: what is the Space Jockey, why was it carrying the Xenomorph eggs? The Space Jockey is found by the crew of the Nostromo after they pick up a distress call. They find an ancient crashed spaceship housing a giant, fossilised pilot: the Jockey. In the cargo hold they find thousands of eggs, one of which becomes the Xenomorph antagonist of the film.
Image credit: HeroCollector.com
Everyone loved the Space Jockey. There is huge mystique around it. Giger’s elephantine design, the strangely organic design of the chamber, the sheer scale of it (see the humans in the photo).
But ultimately the films are quite the disappointment in exploring the Space Jockey mythos. They turn out to be a race of super intelligent psychopaths who seeded the Earth with life millions of years ago, and since then somehow decided to kill all life with deadly bioweapons (the Xenomorphs). A mixture of bad story decisions, and probably some editorial interference from the studio, meant that the films simply didn’t live up to the hype.
I don’t think they could have possibly succeeded anyway, as the imagination always trumps reality. That is the primary reason the original film was so effective. The Jockey storyline was doomed to failure.
Image credit: Den of Geek
But I still love both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, for another reason entirely. I think that the heart of these films is the android David. Throughout the films he has his own quiet, sinister subplot: he murders various people in pursuit of discovering more about the creation of life, the Jockeys, and the Xenomorphs. In the course of two films, he overthrows his tyrannical ‘father’ (who delights in telling David that he created him, but is bitterly jealous of his immortality) and becomes a cross between a philosophising monk and mad scientist.
David is Pinocchio’s dark side.
Committing genocide against the Xenomorphs’ creators, experimenting on humans, crafting the Xenomorph form in pursuit of the “perfect organism”, David spends both films pursuing the power of God, the power to create life. In doing so, he is looking for a way to become a real boy.
This aspect of both films is often overlooked, and on repeated viewing it is the standout storyline — the one that delivers. Michael Fassbender‘s performance brings it all together, and I find David to be the most believable and interesting quietly-mad character in modern film.
If there’s another Alien film in the pipeline, I’d rather see a David spin-off than anything else. Take a watch of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant if you haven’t already, and take note of David. I’m convinced it’s a masterclass in character creation.
H is for Hawk: when words fly
I recently finished H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald. It’s a stunner.
I’ve read a lot of non-fiction books lately where you initially wonder how a publisher ended up green-lighting the book. Somebody’s dad dies to they buy a hawk and try to train it?
I mean, okay, sounds a bit off-the-wall, but I’ll give it a shot. It starts off smooth enough, and I thought it would be a bit avant-garde, a book about hawks that might be tenuously linked to some aspect of modern life. I was happy enough.
Then it span around and kneed me in the delicates.
The book rapidly becomes a beautiful account of a woman struggling with spiralling depression after her dad dies, as her regression into a childhood obsession with hawks. There are a lot of parallels drawn between her experiences and those of the writer T.H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King.
The style is strange, with autobiographical elements mixed with fictionalised snippets of White’s life. But this recipe makes the whole thing come alive. The prose could cut glass.
Some favourite snippets:
We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.
Like a good academic, I thought books were for answers.
The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent.
We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.
Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn’t yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing breaks, bicycles with unoiled wheels – and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow. I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.