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Her life’s work
Common Ground is a co-working space in Oxford with no pretensions. Nothing goes with anything else, not even in way that’s meant to communicate stylish insouciance. Extension cables web across the untreated concrete floor. Students work quietly, except for short, intense, enlightening and often amusing interchanges that are an eavesdropper’s feast. Mostly they sit reading (actual books) on tatty couches, or writing notes or typing.
For the first two hours of working there, I was the oldest person in the room. Then a tiny chick of a woman with silver hair bunched up on her head came in and went around collecting scatter cushions until she had four of them on the chair at the table where she had decided to spread out her tools.
She started a conversation with me when I went to the toilet. Someone had left a backpack on a bench there and she was fussing about whose it could be. She looked nervous, a hooked finger over her lips as she told me how she recently left her ‘life’s work’ on a bus, and how she found it again. She spoke so softly, I could hardly hear her. Her blue eyes darted about.
She told me about how ‘all children in the world’ have access to paper. I didn’t know why were suddenly talking about this, but the one loo was occupied and here I was.
It was her life’s mission to let children learn the joy of drawing, which is something all children could do.
I agree that all children can draw (or tell stories or sing or dance), but I don’t agree that all children have access to tools. I thought about a conversation last year with the artist Stephanus du Toit in which he told me about how he likes to take the children in the area where he lives out into the veld to make art and tools (pens, ink) from what they find. But she wasn’t after a discussion so I didn’t talk about that. She had things to say. My job was to attend.
She told me about her website where people could buy art for whatever price they could afford. All the proceeds go to children. How? In what form? None of this was clear. She muddled the website name several times and I couldn’t find it using the clues she’d given me. It was a tantalising but non-productive conversation fuelled by an urgent need to communicate something that couldn’t quite be expressed.
On my way back from the toilet, I walked by her perch of cushions where she was fussily cutting tiny pieces of cardboard to stick on to a drawing she was doing. She said, ‘Look, look, this is what I believe,’ and reached for a spiral-bound sketch book labelled ‘Russian grammar’ in loopy handwriting. She flipped it open.
I made the requisite cooing noises. I asked her her name. She said ‘Oh, my name doesn’t matter. It’s Julia, but it could just as well be Marigold.’
Walking heads
Aaliyah said: ‘You must feel so stimulated and inspired.’
I don’t. I am emptied out. Whole but hollow. Like a mixing bowl.
After two months of being outside of my life, I’ve entered such a blankness, I have separated from myself. My mind waits, like a cupped hand above a stream, for me to return.
Whether this is good or bad or neither or both, I can’t say. Is this regeneration or entropy? Forward motion or backsliding? Rest or laziness? I can’t even summon the critical energy required to judge it.
I cannot tell what I’m thinking. Or whether I’m thinking at all.
About a decade ago, I became concussed. For months or weeks (I can’t remember), the inside of my head (is that where thought happens?) hummed. Things arrived in my consciousness, and were noted, and then they passed on to become whatever they were in someone else’s consciousness. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
It was just very quiet.
What are you thinking when you are not thinking? What is happening in the place where thinking usually happens? Where does thinking happen? And if you’re not problem-solving, just absorbing, is that a kind of thinking?
I don’t read. I have no desires, except to walk when I am not working. Apart from one half year at the lowest point in my divorce, I have never not read, but now the urge to open a book has gone away. I want to open the front door instead. My feet want to move across the outside like my eyes usually move across the page.
Annie Murphy Paul this week wrote an article about how the prefrontal cortex goes offline during exercise and how this could be a way to access creativity. She explains that it requires one to work beyond your easy-breathing zone. I don’t really do that with this compulsive need of mine to scissor my way across new landscapes but I still feel as though my prefrontal cortex – the place in the brain implicated in planning, decision-making, working memory – has gone offline.
Where am I walking to? Will I find new thoughts there?
Lots of love,
Kowski
Sorry about the dull feeling. I think in times like these there is a lot going on subconsciously and walking might just be the best way to let it become integrated without too much thinking. The fountain will bubble up again. xxx