Parameters

sans frontières

Standing in the shower, hot water blasting my head with needle point piercing till I turn the dial to cold.... my daily practice and it’s here that my thinking really sharpens up. I think about my writing and the fact that I have a couple of online courses booked where I can study tutorials from the experts to improve my writing style and collaging skills. I realise that I’ve quite deliberately avoided them. In the shower I question whether improvement can be made by the implementation of rules around a creative process. Think I’ve always resisted boundaries on creativity by the application of rules around art/writing/music. I can see how it might be helpful, but does it then limit and regulate the process so that it conforms to an expectation? Or maybe I just don’t like being told what to do....goes back a long way.

Years ago I bought a book by Mary Oliver, a favourite poet of mine, it’s a teaching tool, not a poetry book. She taught at Case Western Reserve University, was Poet in Residence at Bucknell University and much much more in an illustrious career spanning many years before her death in 2019. Yet the teaching book left me utterly cold and unable to understand the necessity of finishing a storyline in a certain way or other bewildering suggestions for good sentence structure, grammar and syntax. As I read it, her majesty was being erased with every comma and block quote. The content is so far from how I understand her and her writing (don’t forget she wrote this book) that I just couldn’t carry on with it and still hope to enjoy her poetry.

The brilliance is stolen out of her poems by the explanation of doing a, b and c to achieve a specific end result. Like being shown how one of Tommy Cooper’s magic tricks is done. Explaining the magic spoils everything. I prefer to wonder and adore the simple nature of his magical prowess. Of course, it isn’t simple, far from it, he’s a master of his craft and some of it is learned at the hands of The Magic Circle, but the true genius is gift. It’s him being him, being different.

So, too, with digging into the nuts and bolts of successful writing. I think ‘successful’ in today’s world, reads as best seller and lucrative... winning a prize... nothing wrong with all of that, but it isn’t it. I think you’re either good and have an innate talent or you’re not. You simply know when something reads well. It’s possible to learn things and then go through the appropriate motions to produce your saleable product, but is that creative? I love to write. I love words, the use of language, punctuation, clever combinations of sounds in a line on a page. Communication. I am a writer. Perhaps if I say it often enough, I’ll come to believe it. Sad to say, but so many writers struggle to say this about themselves. I read a lot and for me, this is my classroom. The style, vocabulary and storytelling are my teachers.

Artists in time have studied under or through the work of great masters, but to become great themselves they had to then go back in order to go forward, unlearn and break all the rules, giving free expression to their own creative vision. We can acquire skill about textures, colour mixing, shape and line but your own hand to the canvas and ignoring the rule book brings fresh licence to what slides off the brush. It’s uniquely and unquestionably yours and who is anyone else to validate the success or otherwise of your work. You are the artist. If it’s all about making a living, then yes, conformity will help in making you saleable. If it’s about the action of creating and expressing, then let ‘sans frontières’ freedom steer your mind and a vigilant hand guide your pen or brush.

Certain pieces of music stay with us, they appeal to a wider population. They’ve been written and constructed that way. Jingles for example are synonymous with certain products, we can trip them off the tongue years after the product is defunct. I’m thinking of the Pepsodent jingle of 1957. I can still sing it now.... I was a year old when it first came out. Or the Coke ad. ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing...’

https://youtu.be/4FpF-DU0Iew?si=SJtiI_zhyQsVUWzO

Brilliance in music requires using those same 12 notes but in such a way that they penetrate the surface of us and create a response, we cry or feel each single resonating sound. You know what I mean. Not a jingle but a rhythm that connects to our souls like any other piece of art. We’re broadened by it, we hear something that’s flying free and lifts us up in the process. Sent out into the same air that we breathe, hanging invisibly for the single moment it’s produced and is then received first by our ears and then by somewhere else, deep inside.... tangibly experienced. The Beatles are possibly the best known example of not playing by the rules while achieving extraordinary success.

I look at Schiaparelli, art for the body. More than a dress. More than a bow. The detail, extraordinary shape and line, the materials and how they are moulded to fit, hold and frame a body, go beyond wildest imaginings. Other designers produce inspired collections, clothes that seduce us and create desire, but Schiaparelli blow our minds. There are no rules....they may use cloth, paper, metal, thread, pins, needles, rivets. Tapes to measure and chalk to mark, but what comes off their runway is other worldly. It is a mind

without boundary poured onto a page and constructed on the body and then into the making of something not thought of before. It is always original.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFF_LgQOTQJ/? igsh=MXRxM2VjbmlpMHVpeQ==

Even though we’re all so uniquely different, we seem to share a common desire for a certain order, rule of thumb or musical resonance. Helps us to know where we stand in the grander scheme of things. So even as we rebel, we cling to the safety net of conformity.

It’s odd because I am, by nature, a person of discipline. I’ve known real crippling fear when things get anarchic, out of control. Can’t go to football matches, anything stadium, or underground. It’s taken years of work to overcome claustrophobia. If I think about the current world state, an overwhelming sense of suffocation rises up inside and threatens or feels to threaten my life. Rationally I know I’m safe, but fear isn’t rational. I adore uniform. Pattern. Ritual. Love order and the peace it brings, but there is clearly something of a rebel simmering below the surface, a rebel that seeks to ditch the rules and play my own game... at least in the creative process. I am at odds with myself here. Pushing and pulling in two opposing directions.

Trying to understand what motivates our actions, why we respond to regulation or anarchy in a particular way can be explained to a certain degree by our upbringing. Ours was a home of strict discipline fostered by a man who had been a life-long rule breaker. Perhaps my confliction is genetic? Nature or nurture? Part of my DNA or a result of watching him as I grew up? All of it, non of it, some? He imposed an ironclad will in our household, while flouting the rules around style for men, food, how he lived out his life, everything and somehow he managed to get away with it. There was a carnage of emotion within our walls and a sea of hidden destruction in his wake, but he had his suits made with deep cuffs and deep lapels. Drank kidney killing quantities of booze. Smoked cigars and inhaled. Ate raw fish before it was a thing, raw garlic, raw. Attacking life with an indestructible energy, running almost entirely on adrenaline and cortisol. 86 years and still rebelling in his own inimitable way. It’s 10 years since his death. February 13th. I got my first tattoo at the age of 50. The rebel lives on...

till the next time

A