Tag: creative insight

The thing about Cornwall is it rains every day.

Greater Bird’s-foot trefoil

Rather like Wales but further south and therefore a bit warmer, Cornwall has its very own special kind of rain – like a tiny hole in a leaky hose it can soak you through in minutes and you never know where it’s coming from. When we woke up yesterday morning rain was beading up and running down the campervan windows, and just beyond was an impenetrable sea-mist. We turned as always to the Met Office to lift our mood but drew a blank. They referred to a “wobbly front” which is seemingly weaving a narrow band of misery across Roseland and northeast passing anywhere else we might think of escaping to. We made a cup of tea and sat in bed looking at the window. Driving home seemed, and remained a good option throughout the morning so we dried out the groundsheet, emptied the cludger, topped up the drinking water, blew up the tyres and packed away the table. Then we changed our minds (it was still drizzling) and I went down the field to take some macro photos of a plant that needed a closer look (see above) and suddenly for no reason at all we felt cheerful.

There’s an upside to rainy days in the campervan and that’s because it gives us an excuse to read books and do whatever we want without getting wet. So Madame read and I finally transformed my eccentric records into compliant form using AI and a staggering amount of memory and data. Then we ate pasta for the 73rd time this week and lived like students for a few hours. I absolutely love getting into a topic and hammering it. I can feel my brain straining and the synapses making novel networks until it feels like new life spreading through me; and no – apart from a syrupy and fiercely bitter espresso coffee first thing – (a holiday treat) – no recreational chemicals were involved.

Heath Bedsraw

Anyway I’m sharing this next photo because it’s a lot more representative of the tiny details that I spend most of my campervan time looking for. It’s just a bit of a leaf, but if you look very closely (the leaf is barely 5 mm long), you’ll see a line of tiny spike-like hairs and whether they point forwards or backwards is a determining feature between two species. The thing is that close-up examination with a hand lens reveals a truly exciting new perspective. Things that once looked identical look a bit different under 10x magnification; even more different under 20x and under a microscope oh wow! When I enlarge a macro photograph on a big screen when I get home I can see details that until the invention of the lens in the thirteenth century had probably never been seen by a human being. Many people tend to assume that science is driven by numbers and rooted in solid facts. In fact it’s driven by wonder and curiosity. It’s people with neither of those faculties who give science a bad name. We’re bedevilled by binaries and especially the ones that divide science from art. Mathematicians will willingly admit that theorems and solutions to old conundrums tend to come in inspirational flashes leaving all of the work to be done in proving the insight. They talk about “knowing” that a theorem is true because it’s beautiful or elegant. Philosophers agonise about mind/brain binaries when that may be an artificial division. Maybe they’re one and the same thing; mind, body, spirit, brain, even – dare I say – male, female, human and non human, native and foreigner. Fragments of a whole waiting to be reunited in a kinder vision – the kind of vision that a child is gifted with and is taught to forget.

When we were at Falmouth Art School the Head of Sculpture was something of a reclusive genius. Without ever exchanging more than a nod with him – (Ray Exworth was pretty terrifying) – he taught me one of my most important life lessons. He worked every day except (it was rumoured) Christmas day. Even as fashions were changing and it was taken as read that creativity was like a special gland that only some people had – so whatever they did would be art on account of the secret gland – Ray Exworth just worked. I fell upon Samuel Beckett’s words when I first read them ;

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Sitting here in the campervan lost in a sea mist, the ghostly voices whisper words of discouragement and I tell them to piss off and go bother someone else. There’s a blackbird singing outside and soon the voluble family of crows will start their day-long group chat. The last few remaining campers are all lingering in bed like us, waiting for the sun to appear. It may take a couple of days yet, after all this is Cornwall where it rains every day. Hotter fiercer weather is on the way and this holiday will soon fade as the solstice takes us towards autumn. We’ll revert to our late summer heatwave timetable on the allotment and rise early to weed and water.

Life really is very simple if we allow it. Take out greed, petty disputes, ambition, pride and fearfulness and that leaves space for pondering, for growing, harvesting, cooking and eating, loving and allowing ourselves to be loved, and following our curiosity and wonder wherever it might take us and inviting those discoveries to share our lives and help us to fail better.

A rainy day in St Davids

Bye By Brook – finding the well

By brook at Slaughterford

We’re not done with you yet sir

Last Friday I got yet another message from the hospital requiring an urgent phone consultation on Tuesday regarding a test I’d failed miserably. I imagined a large number of health professionals rushing to the red phone. to deal with my case. I’ve soaked up an incredible amount of NHS time in the last six months and I’m so grateful for it. It’s an odd privilege to be fast tracked twice in a month on suspicion of completely different cancers but I’ve noticed that the doctors are constantly changing and often poorly prepared for our encounters, and so there’s never time for them to sit back and observe, chat, prod – all the things that I know from long experience are essential to drill down to the heart of the problem. But, being retired, have got time to explore and read the NICE guidance about the drugs which I’ve been prescribed and I know that some of the problems I experience are actually caused by them. They’re called iatrogenic symptoms – caused – if you like – by the very medications that are supposed to keep me well.

Time is possibly the greatest unused skill in the caring profession. I’ve never forgotten a pastoral conversation with an oncologist who was being broken by his workload, and who told me that at its worst his first thought when a patient came into the room was how can I get rid of this person? He wasn’t bad or lazy, just exhausted, burnt out and lost. There was never enough time to listen deeply to the person in front of him When I was running writers’ groups I got very used to the back pocket poet syndrome. Someone would sit silently in the class for an hour, too shy often to make a contribution and then they would produce a crumpled sheet of paper just as they were leaving. Such contributions were often very good.

Smiling, or being smiled at by strangers is a rare treat in a paranoid world.

David Isitt, one of my finest teachers would sometimes gather a group of us, all mature students on retreat, and on a fine day we would sit under a tree and he would run one of his CAT sessions. CAT stands for close attention to text and we could sometimes spend an hour pondering the multiple meanings of a single phrase. Close attention is a powerful tool for psychotherapists, doctors, partners and – as I proved to myself on Monday – for home bakers. On this the fourth or maybe the fifth heatwave of the summer, I had a sourdough loaf overprove and almost collapse. That one was turned into breadcrumbs, but then I needed to make bread urgently and so I did what I should have done all along, and I paid close attention to the rising dough. In the 25C heat, my usual 36 hour timetable easily condensed into a single working day and I came out with a good sourdough loaf. On another occasion and another retreat, a group of us – all strangers to one another – were invited to join hands in couples and behold one another. It was uncomfortable, challenging and revelatory to lock my gaze with a stranger and allow some sort of understanding to pass between us. The absolute opposite of hurrying down the street wearing headphones and looking at a mobile; avoiding any eye contact. Smiling, or being smiled at by strangers is a rare treat in a paranoid world.

Anyway, enough of all that; because the real point is that all this unsettling news has let the black dog back into the room and I spent a night that combined 3 hours sleep with about five of restless pondering which rewarded me with something of a vision. My mind drifted back to my early twenties when I had a long spell of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety. I became convinced that I was about to die, and this actually changed the physical appearance of everything around me. Even the leafless winter trees looked like the bronchioles and alveoli of dying lungs. Eventually, under threat of being thrown out of art school I saw our GP and he told me that although he could give me some medication, it would be better for me – that’s to say Madame and me – to take ourselves off to the pub for some human company. His advice worked perfectly and within a few weeks I had a visionary moment and thought to myself – of course I’m going to die, but not yet! Ironically, some months later I was at a party, standing at the top of a rather grand Georgian flight of stairs holding a glass of wine and he came up and said to me “I see you took my advice” and promptly toppled cartwheel style back down the stairs, as drunk as a skunk.

However, apart from reminding myself how much a state of mind can even change the appearance of the world, I remembered how I began tentatively drawing again sitting on the side of By Brook, the small river that rises in Gloucestershire, runs through the Castle Combe valley, and below the farm where we were living; eventually joining the river Avon outside Bath. I made a laborious drawing (using hard pencils) of the knotted roots of a tree on the opposite bank – a drawing that sadly I can’t find anywhere- so I had to settle for a photo I took in Slaughterford last year. It was the drawing that unblocked me. Back in the day there were wild trout in abundance but nowadays it’s a shadow of its former self – milky, polluted and desperately in need of recovery. Fortunately there’s a group of volunteers improving water quality by improving the flow with rills and riffles, but I imagine many of the problems are caused by excessive abstraction.

Old bull looking at the sunset – Llyn peninsula this July

So in my mind’s eye, during my sleepless night, I was back there on the bank, and the clearest notion came to me that whatever my state of health, my creative wellsprings are still intact. My body ages – as it must – but creatively I’m still young, still capable of being inspired and driven by the sight of an unknown plant, still able to write to the best of my ability and, to use a phrase I overheard on a bus many years ago, to tell shit from pudding. Of course it’s a bit harder to get back to that place than it once was but real creativity has always been the combination of inspiration with technical understanding. Without technical understanding, inspiration is a mess of unresolved thoughts. Without inspiration, technique is dull and dead. I think of myself as being profoundly fortunate to have (at last) both – and now I know where to find the well.

The road-bridge at Slaughterford

After Fern Hill

Is poetry – or maybe drawing, painting: is any manifestation of creativity catching; is it contagious in the sense that being close to one of the inspirational places or people could arouse a sleeping talent within you and bring it to birth? This morning I was making tea in the kitchen here on Lleyn and wondered for a (very) brief moment if – after so many years of scepticism – such an idea might have a sliver of truth in it; because thousands of people believe something similar. How many visitors to Bath secretly buy an extremely expensive notebook or a new and hideously expensive fountain pen for the beginning (inspired by Jane Austin of course) of a new novel? How many visitors to St Ives seal their resolution to learn to paint with the purchase of a watercolour sketchbook at an eye watering price? I share the temptation of course but never believed in the magic until this morning, while making the tea and my mind filled with Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas’s famous poem.

Here’s me, blathering on in full romantic flow about RS Thomas whilst staying in his North Wales parish, putting the teabags into the pot and thinking about a poem by a South Wales poet. For a brief orgasmic (i.e. it didn’t last long) moment I thought I’d contracted poetry by contagion. Later I looked out of the window and counted four ferns – Male fern, Hart’s-tongue fern, Maidenhair spleenwort and of course Bracken all close to the back door. The winner, naturally, was the bracken which drives out all other competitors.

Competition plays a big part in plant life. I also spotted one of the smallest Dove’s-foot cranesbill I’ve ever noticed, growing close-cropped on the well maintained lawn. Another struggling plant caught my eye at the same time, this one a Navelwort barely two inches tall, subsisting on a bed of moss. To grow a fine plant we need to provide sufficient food and light and a suitable environment. But we tend not to think that the same criteria apply to poets and painters. You can read a dozen biographies of successful artists and writers without once being told about the family money that kept them afloat. The persistent and useful myth of artists starving in garrets fills in the many gaps in the ledgers of the famous. The upshot is that many self-effacing little gems are passed over in favour of the big, the tarty and the obvious; the Dahlias and Gladioli of the creative arts.

Navelwort, the leaves shrivelled by drought

So do I think the gift – whatever it is – can rub off on another person? Well yes I do, but not by visiting their haunts, drinking their favourite beer or buying a printed coaster in the local gift shop. Not will the gift embrace you when you arm yourself with pen and ink or laptop and sit there gazing into space waiting for some inspiration somehow to descend on you. But reading and studying their work with real emotional intensity does at least help you to discern something of the vision that drove them. Out there, in the world of the ten thousand things – as the Taoists say – are all the pieces of the puzzle. We just have to be patient until we’ve found them.

Dove’s-foot cranesbill, constantly shorn by the mower.

The stream of consciousness – a creative affliction.

Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor. March 2016

I said to Madame yesterday while we were walking through Bath – “I think I’m living in the 1940’s and 50’s”. She, being an avid reader of history and biographies, knew exactly what I was saying. She’s presently finishing the last of C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels and living in the Tudor period. Not having to explain things is one of the great blessings of our long relationship. Of course the imagination can play tricks and too lax an attitude towards truth telling could lead all the way to prison or even to 10 Downing Street; but in the manner of a psychoanalytic session – by allowing the mind to range freely and without comment, connections of the utmost significance can be forged.

So, if you’re a Potwell Inn regular you’ll know I’ve been thinking about and researching Geoffrey Grigson – author of “An Englishman’s Flora” and husband of Jane Grigson the great food writer. Chains of thought often take us on a journey and in this case it involved reconnecting with the village above By Brook where we lived for two and a half years while we were at art school; and a hairy drive over to Slaughterford in search of a pub that was actually one village further upstream on the little trout river which runs for around twenty miles between Castle Combe and the Avon at Bathampton . In the course of our day and in subsequent reading we discovered that Slaughterford is probably not the site of a famous battle between Alfred the Great and a small army of Danish raiders. and that the name probably derives from the Anglo Saxon term for the crossing near the place where the Blackthorns grow.

But this turned out to be much more than an antiquarian story. Immersing ourselves in a landscape in which we’d lived the early years of our relationship stirred up the strata of many memories. The melodious sound of the small river, for instance became the river that runs through the Potwell Inn garden in HG Wells’ novel – “A History of Mr Polly” as well as being the real place where we’d attempted unsuccessfully to poach brown trout and where I’d spent days drawing a tangle of tree roots. Being an artist or a writer seems to involve a huge struggle to lay hold of something significant. That laying hold rarely seems to work and we are left empty handed. The poet RS Thomas brilliantly describes it as being like placing your hand in the warmth of a hare form which a hare has recently fled. The creative life is full of almost and not quite.

Standing next to the river, memories resurfaced of moments in galleries and museums when suddenly, as if a flare has gone off in the mind, you can see clearly for the first time. Once, unexpectedly bursting into tears in front of a Renoir painting I’d only ever seen poorly reproduced less than the size of a postcard. Being young, passionate and raw the memories never leave you. The paintings that had given us a whole expressive language floated through my head and so in a wild yomp through the unconscious I remembered John Minton and, the imagination being capable of leaping over impossible fences, suddenly brought a roomful of associations – Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, MFK Fisher, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Davidson; who would all have known one another. Geoffrey Grigson would probably not have figured in too many Christmas card lists having been rude to, or about, so many people.

I’ve got a proof/review copy of Francis Spalding’s biography of John Minton “Dance ’til the stars come down” * which I bought quite cheaply because I couldn’t afford the original. It has no illustrations but in searching the secondhand booksellers today the book came up with his familiar self-portrait on the cover. Completely unexpectedly I almost welled up with grief as I recalled his melancholia, alcoholism and eventual suicide. A man I never met evoked a sense of loss that took me completely by surprise and the terrible thought came to me that this, perhaps, was the beginning of the end. The moment when the dark forces of conservatism began their fight back against post-war optimism and freedom. Since then they’ve synthesised joy and sold it back to us by subscription – one trivial experience at a time. We seem to have lost touch with the ordinary, everyday moments that used to make us dance ’till the stars came down. Art’s now a business, patrolled by curators and gallerists, and art schools run courses on keeping accounts, tax returns, building a website, networking effectively and staying in touch with the fashion of the moment.

I’m filled with the need to go and sit quietly on the bank next to the river once more to listen to what the spirits of the place still have to say to me. They, at least, have not been silenced by the self appointed magistrates of taste!

Postscript

The title of the Minton biography is a borrowing from W H Auden’s poem, which is itself a representation of the medieval “Danse Macabre” and equally a working of Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird. The idea was very much in the air and was echoed in all sorts of media, not least in Bernard Leach’s rediscovery of 17th century English slipware. I’m thinking of the pelican in her piety. With two world wars in mind, there’s less hope in Auden’s poem – “not to be born is best for man”. A kind of mad defiance in the face of an overwhelming threat is his prescription.

Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W H Auden – Death’s Echo