Necessary Procrastination

With my mum in hospital and the uncertainty around her care, and then all the running about that having a close relative in hospital involves, it has been difficult to find headspace for writing at all, and writing for my DYCP project specifically. Rather appropriately, I started vaguely reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (Abacus, 1997) in which Dyer wants to write a book about D. H. Lawrence but finds himself doing anything but writing a book about D. H. Lawrence. This is my current experience with my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project. At least my ACE grant is about developing practice and doesn’t expect a big shiny outcome other than a report on the development of your practice. But I do really want a manuscript to come out of it. So I’m carving snatches of time between hospital runs to write something, even if it’s skirting the edges of what I really want and ought to be writing about. Plus it’s cathartic, getting stuff out of your brain, and I’m all for decluttering in general these days.

Back in summer 2021 I wrote a blog post about finding a way back to research inspired by a visit to the Newcastle University student art show. It set me on a path of remembering the importance and sheer joy of art over a year after the first pandemic lockdown began and I ran out of steam because my work felt frivolous in the face of global trauma. A bit like Dyer, I have found it all too easy since my Covid infection in September there to find ways of not cracking on with my established project. I have plenty of ways of seeing the Treasures works again through photographs and electronic copies of books and guides (including some which were very kindly shared by Amie Corry who worked on them). It’s a shallow excuse, but I do better with physical objects, especially when I’m typing up and only have the use of one smallish screen. I need a word with myself about just getting on with it by whatever means necessary because the only way to do it is to do it – a mantra I repeated throughout my PhD. And having watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (dir. Marielle Heller, 2019) a few months ago, I feel validated that Mr Rogers gave similar encouragement.

I’m not doing very well at reading, though, because my concentration is shattered by driving again after 5 years of avoiding it, by what laundry needs to be kept on top of, by what my mum wants taped on the TV for her eventual return home, by making sure my sister and I are eating properly and getting enough rest, by trying to talk to medical staff for updates because my mum is forgetting and misunderstanding things after not being properly informed in the first place, by coaching myself through the emotional landmines going off as my mum’s moods shift and her demands feel too much, by still recovering from a serious Covid infection and battling with fatigue and brain fog and my mum seeming not to be aware that I’m struggling, by finding time and capacity for the judging work on fiction writing competitions that I’m really enjoying, by missing my partner and our life together over 300 miles away on the far side of a different island, by the adjustments likely needed to a house I don’t live in, by keeping on top of communications while my sister is at work, by trying to keep warm in a cold house and worrying about heating costs, by managing my chronic pain and keeping quiet about it because of the much worse pain my mum is in, by remembering my mum’s car MOT is booked for 21 December and I’ll have to be here to take it and then in January we’ll need to decide what to do with her car because she won’t be able to drive with manual gear shift again if at all, and by confusions over my mum’s needs because the NHS is under tremendous strain and the ward staff are trying to free the bed for someone stuck in a corridor but my mum is not able to move by herself and needs rehabilitative care but the place was full so they tried to send her somewhere inappropriate and it all came to an upsetting head but it’s okay now that the right person is dealing with it.

Mustard.

I’m only on page 54 of Out of Sheer Rage and Dyer and his special human are recovering from their moped crashing into a cliff face on the Greek island of Alonissos. They’ve gone back to Laura’s home in Rome and are now travelling to Sicily for Dyer to get on with writing a book about D. H. Lawrence, but really he ended up writing a book about the various mishaps and procrastinations that prevented him from writing a book about D. H. Lawrence. There are no chapter breaks that I can see, just the occasional space break, usually between shifts in location. It is a continuous stream of writing about not writing a book about D. H. Lawrence. 

I must say, while Dyer’s experience from where I am feels like a privileged approach to not writing a book about D. H. Lawrence, it is making me feel better that I’m not quite managing to knuckle down and write a book about my own D. H., that is, the Treasures show by Damien Hirst. I have, however, been keeping a wide eye on Hirst’s Instagram account as sometimes there are shots of Treasures works in their new homes. I don’t know the locations, but the latest two I saw were Mermaid and The Diver – two impressive and imposing sculptures. I was also following his NFT antics where he incinerated a bunch of his original paintings, of which their digital versions will live on as non-fungible tokens in the block-chain (and even though I’ve read up what all that means I can’t retain the information, most likely because I don’t care).

I am trying to re-establish contact with Amie who wrote and edited the Treasures texts and haven’t heard back yet. I’m hoping she doesn’t think I’m a total head-melt between Covid and family emergencies. Honestly, I feel like one of those kids at school who had persistent excuses for never doing their homework. If you know me at all you’d know I’d have rather died than not done my homework. The idea of it maybe happening still makes me feel shame even though I was a total nerd about homework - even homework I didn’t like. And now I’m an excuse-maker and an appointment breaker. I don’t like it, but you have to relinquish control or risk burn-out, and I’ve had quite enough of those thank you. I imagine Amie is just busy, largely because she told me she had a busy spell coming up. There is no urgency anyway, and she’s already been great. I just want to make sure I can get paying her too. I ought to read through the materials she sent me. If I have a deadline of a call with her then I’d make myself do it, but I’m so anxious to just write something that I’m wittering on here.

I must mind that before leaving Newcastle I took photos from my ACE books of passages to use as writing prompts. Participating in the New Writing North writing hour sessions has been good at getting me into the mindset of writing from prompts and it really helps to overcome blockages. If you distract yourself by writing loads of stuff that’s different from what you’re meant to be writing about, then you might either find your way back to the stuff you’re meant to be writing about or having other stuff to write about that’s coming to you more easily, and either way stuff gets written and you are a writer. Dyer’s book seems to be testament to that. I certainly appreciate now more than I likely would have at any other time before that he’s made an engaging narrative out of not getting any work done. Here I am, curled up in bed swaddled in blankets with my laptop on top of my lap not getting any work done and not writing a book about a D. H., and yet the word count creeps up. Can I make it to 1500 words? Most certainly if I write even more nonsense.

I am feeling very weary and tired now, and cold too, so I will read a bit more from Geoff Dyer and see what they’re at in Sicily. When I left them they were having to humour the bloke driving them by talking to his romantic partner on the phone. I will hope that this bit of doing something by doing nothing will be another tiny step towards enabling me to work on what I’m supposed to be working on, if only because I don’t want my DYCP project to become a book about not writing a book about a D. H.

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe and visit https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peablair to support my work - thank you!