It would be cheap just to write —
I despair
and leave it at that.
But I do.
I despair, just like you do.
(I assume.)
So, let me be more specific.
If I turn on the radio in the kitchen and listen to the news headlines at 7am, I despair.
And if I pick up my phone and look at what’s trending on X/Twitter.
Therefore I delay encountering either of those things before I’ve got some hopefully undespairing work done.
I go to my desk and start writing and rewriting. On paper.
I do this on days I’m teaching as well as weekends.
But this is a problem, isn’t it? The conscious avoidance of despair.
Doesn’t that mean I’ve bracketed off the world, in order to keep it from bothering me?
Meanwhile, something else. Something safe. Some garden where I feel secure.
I realise that we each have to find a way to keep going, and yet I really don’t want to find myself saying or thinking right now, I’m prioritising my self-care.
(Even if, essentially, that is what I am doing.)
For this hour, then, I have decided not to see or think about the horrible specifics, because I will work better — be more productive — that way.
Clearly, the slightest possibility of this choice and this time is a privilege.
Straight off to the commute, or to comforting a crying baby, or to a hospital appointment — that’s more than likely. (Or fetching water or looking for food.)
But it’s not just writing. All these things can be gone through despairingly or not. And that despair can have been sought out, or it can have proved unavoidable.
It is perhaps good advice, to suggest that the first mindspace a writer inhabits after waking from dreaming be their own, be their fictional one. That way it isn’t a return from elsewhere, it’s a centre of its own. It gains that integrity.
Is it honest, though? Is it going to result in honest work?
On this, I don’t have answers.
[Image credit: Virginia Astley, Hope in a Darkened Heart album cover.]
Good points Toby. Yes. Distractions and the despair of that, the world at large whether in macro or micro. I do switch on radio 4, yes, and really do reach for phone - insta, facebook, emails, messages - not twitter though. And I do it most often before I'm even fully awake. Dawn, birds so lovely but far too quickly eclipsed by the world's worst and best and the chat and ideas, the wars and the powers and money and ups and downs and fires and deaths, all the noise. And you're right to suggest we protect those first moments for our mind so it's more free and unpolluted. I promise myself, but then succumb to the lure of media. I bet my writing would improve if I could do it. Sometimes I do it, coffee then maybe chant first, then write or vice versa without switching on. Ideally I'd do the - up, coffee, chant, walk on the green by my house, stretch breath, yoga maybe then write and all in a very compact sequence before any radio or phone checks. And we all know it's much better that way. I have friends who do that, stay pure. And it works. I think I only really managed it by waking early during those first silent and awful yet magical weeks of the pandemic. Then it was like that. We had to take the news in batches and perhaps not first thing or we'd be too overwhelmed & despairing. The presence of nature, birds and sky was all more apparent then, in the quiet, it was very good for mental space.
I did it! this morning I rose at 5,30 am - okay I did check phone and listen to the radio but very quick and then switched to radio 6 at least, and with coffee, I wrote without checking phone or emails again until 7am so your writers diary entry on this subject actually worked Toby!