Pen Hanley

  • ‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ Ghandi said that. It makes me happy just thinking about it.

    Although for most of us it is more an ideal to strive towards as we flounder our way through life trying to earn a living. In our society almost totally geared to maximising financial profits for the few (someone called our system Totalitarian Capitalism) it is extremely hard to find worthwhile work. I’m lucky enough to have two worthwhile jobs I believe in: writing for the National Rural Health Alliance and writing a book for the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

    More on these another time. I’m also doing an ANU Centre for Continuing Education course, taken by Roy Forward. It is an erudite, witty ride through much stimulating aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. It’s on Art and Film. Roy said that aesthetics can give you a sense of infinite possibility, of the renewal of life, he spoke about the amazing capacity of art to catch us unawares and open up life for us once more.

    It was such a pleasure being able to immerse myself in art when I was writing my latest novel, Beyond the Pale. This novel was inspired by an artist Roy talked about the other night in class: Camille Claudel. A film about her life (Camille Claudel) was directed by Bruno Nuyttens in 1988. This film was based on a biography of Camille Claudel that the Canberra Times asked me to with some others, then the editor said, no, we haven’t got the space for that Camille Claudel one, you just keep it and write about the others. It was too early in my writing career to take on this complicated subject so I wrote a simpler one first (Full House, Simon & Schuster, 1993) but I always knew I’d come back to Camille.

    Camille Claudel was a talented sculptor who did not get along with her mother and who was determined to follow her passion, sculpting – and she was in love with her teacher and mentor Rodin, and he with her. When her father died she lost her protector. It’s a tragic tale that ends up with her being forced into the asylum in Paris where she stays for decades, until dying in the middle of World War II. If you read my novel you’d recognise almost nothing of this because I was burning to write a novel where I gave her a happy ending – and not by some sentimental deus ex machina.

    What intrigued me about the biography of Camille Claudel was that there were a couple of unexplained, lengthy absences in the country before she was incarcerated. You should see her sculptures of small children. They tear at the heart! I kept thinking: What if…? What if…? I imagined she might have had a baby, out of wedlock of course, and he/she was looked after by a woman in the country, and that was where Camille went, to visit sometimes. I kept thinking that her life would have been different if only she … if only she … I kept thinking, What if…? What if…? What if she hopped on a boat and sailed to Australia? What if she could have had a second chance in a slightly more forgiving social climate?

    What I did in my novel was bring her dates forward so she could have more of the 20th century in Australia plus I made her Irish because that’s my own background and plenty of Irish immigrated to Australia in those days but surely hardly any French? (Although I recently discovered the name of my paternal great grandmother – Ginnane – that sounds pretty French! What a French women might have been doing in Cairns, Queensland in the 19th century is anyone’s guess.) So my Camille Claudel became Deirdre Wild and was a surrealist painter who had an illegitimate daughter and settled in Clovelly, Sydney, in the 1920s.

    That first novel was a comedy but this one is more serious, and involves three generations of women. It was great to immerse myself in the modernist art world of 20th century Sydney all the time I was writing that novel. And the cemetery at Clovelly, Waverley Cemetery – vast and on a cliff above the sea – inspired me. There were a lot of Irish names there too. The whole place was so intriguing. (As was a trip to the Blasket Islands in County Kerry – a whole ’nother story, as my American friend Susan says.) My stepdaughter was renting a Clovelly flat and I stayed there sometimes, walking the streets, exploring the cemetery, snorkelling in the bay, dreaming about the Razor Gang and Deirdre’s best friend who got mixed up with them and wound up in Callan Park asylum. Broughton Hall it was called then.

    This novel has a happy ending but it’s hard to have a happy ending for everybody. Someone’s happiness might be at the expense of another person’s. What Deirdre Wild, the artist in Beyond the Pale thinks, says and does are in harmony, at least by the end, but that’s a long journey she’s taken, with sacrifices along the way. She sacrifices things for her art, but most people – including her daughter – sacrifice things for their children, so this novel is also about parent/child relationships. The mother/daughter ones I knew from the start would feature heavily, but the father/daughter relationship theme is one that took me by surprise.

    Pan Macmillan is considering the novel MS. I say that not because there’s a probability that they will eventually accept it, but because this is about as good as it usually gets in the fiction game. I feel good because it’s very hard to get a publisher to just read the whole MS these days if you haven’t got an agent. Reasons leading up to the fact that it’s now harder to get an agent than it used to be to get a publisher is a blog in itself. In the meantime we writers try to make a living and have what we think, what we say and what we do remain in harmony, and some of us continue to write fiction on the side. Even if you’re successful there’s no money in it except for a tiny percentage (that’s another blog’s worth of reasons) but we do it because we love it, we love playing with words, we love following where our curiosity leads us, we love trying to find the answer to those What if…? What if…? questions.

  • ‘Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.’ Helmut Jahn. That’s out of a book by Alena Hennessy called Cultivating Your Creative Life. I buy these things but never have time to read them. But I can flip through them and get a lot from the gorgeous images and little quotations like the above. When I retire I can read them properly!
    That quotation in the first line reminded me of one I heard long ago: ‘Life is getting rid of everything that is dead.’ It’s an instinctive thing I do in interior design. It’s a kind of visual editing. In my editing career spanning 20 years or so, it was common to be able to delete one third of a person’s writing to improve it. (Yes, I was very diplomatic.) Most people write very repetitively, as you will know from editing your own work. The electronic cut-and-paste options made so easy with computers exacerbated this tendency.
    I mentioned interior design. I’ve never done that professionally, though looking back, that would have been an obvious career path. In the days when I was at high school art was where I shone. But did we have career guidance? Nope. And at this new school I was allowed to drop Maths, which I hated. And so I did. The place to go after leaving school – the only place – the place where every famous artist had gone to in those days – was East Sydney Tech. No one told me and I was without the nous to find out that in order to get into East Sydney Tech, one needed not only to be great at Art but to have Maths.
    In my uncompromisingly adolescent way, after I left home at 17 straight after the Higher School Certificate, I worked at a variety of jobs and only had time to paint on weekends, and I decided that I didn’t want to be a “Sunday painter”, so I dropped it. Idiot!
    I’m sure that the sudden loss of creative expression contributed to my severe depressions in the following years. Through a circuitous route of different jobs and different countries, those experiences led to Canberra (Queanbean, actually next door to Canberra but in a different State: New South Wales – through my now ex-husband’s job at a high school there) and to ANU, that’s the Australian National University, and an English (Hons) degree. And after that a writing and editing career. And along the way, I had the worst depression of my life – and was forced to go to a counsellor someone recommended.
    I was so clueless that, even though I couldn’t stop crying, I thought I’d just go once. I remember that was the first time I heard the word, ‘ongoing’. She was American and Australians didn’t use that word then. But I picked up the meaning from the context, and said, ‘Do you mean I have to come again?!’ Ha! Okay, 18 months of sessions later, I’d done it – got to the bottom of those apparently random, meaningless depressions that had been incapacitating me from time to time for 15 or so years. It was to do with repeated loss when I was little, when too young to make sense of it or to conceptualise the future – that the future would be different from this, that this was definitely temporary, something my older siblings could work out.
    And after I’d worked out the reasons for my depressions intellectually there was another six months before that knowledge was incorporated into my emotional self. So it was a long process, involving one of those horrible tendencies in life of things to get worse before they can get better, but afterwards I was free. I was 33 and I was free of those debilitating depressions for good! I knew that there would still be pain and loss, I knew that there would be grief, but I knew that I’d never suffer depression again, and I was right. And it’s very good to create from a clear psychic/emotional space.
    Some Zen person figured out this metaphor for what I mean: you want to pour some tea into a cup. If that cup is already full, when you pour the tea will overflow. But when you pour into an empty cup the tea will simply fill that space without any messy spilling over. Does that make sense? It made sense to me at the time, although now I can see it might be a bit simplistic.
    I prefer to think of it as when painting a picture you want to put your beautiful colours onto a white or pale piece of paper so they’re clear and not onto paper with paint already there, which would sully your new colours.
    Eliminating the inessential – that tenet of creativity above – is expressed by blogger Sarah Wilson in many of her posts. She lives simply and eats simply. I love her way of life and her writing – and her recipes. I’ve mentioned her before but her blog is at www.sarahwilson.com
    And you can get her Friday missives once a week with great sugar-free recipes and her advice about interior design etc. She is a creative person and seems very smart and generous and kind. She and Jules Clancy www.stonesoup.com.au are my two favourite food and nutrition people.
    For the moment – well actually for the next year and a half – I must eliminate the inessential in all aspects of my life in order to finish the book I’ve been commissioned to write. More about this another time. In the mean time, remember that less is more, to eat simply and well (see those websites above), and that creative expression is very important.

  • ‘I’m hoping that the Greeks will discover a long-lost patent on the isosceles triangle. They could then threaten to bankrupt all northern economies by collecting unpaid royalties, and then forgive our debt providing we abolish corporations.’
    Rob Newman in The New Internationalist, May 2013, p. 38.

    Rob Newman is an English comedian. He has written a novel called The Trade Secret. He came across the true story of some Elizabethans who discovered oil, coffee and messenger pigeons in Persia. They left an account of what they saw, including an oil well in Fallujah called The Valley of Pitch.

    Sounds like what Canberra is turning into. Ha! The Valley of Pitch – sounds Hellish. There must be a certain number of cars in a town which, when that number is reached, turns the town from a pleasant, large country town full of birds and trees and clean, sweet air into a filthy black valley of pitch – a seething, dirty, polluted city like any other, full of grid-locked traffic, road rage and crammed concrete multi-storey car parks.

    Am I exaggerating?

    Not by much, not compared with what it used to be like. There’s an overriding assumption in our society that more and more traffic simply has to be accommodated somehow. Two books I’ve read recently dispute that. The authors are not the enemies of cars; of course we can’t go back to horses and carriages and nor would we want to – they just believe that we can regain our civilised towns and cities, making them creative and happy places to live and work in. A large part of the Australian David Engwicht’s work is devoted to helping communities rediscover their lively, humane, friendly communities by making their streets safer. His book is called Street Reclaiming: Creating livable streets and vibrant communities. Pluto Press, 1999.

    I’ve mentioned before Lynn Sloman’s Car Sick: Solutions for our car-addicted culture. Green Books, 2006. She outlines ways in which cities can become less car dependent. By the way, she lives in a Welsh village – without a car. She gives examples of successes in lots of countries and even in some places in Australia!

    She argues for a move away from a car-centred society to a people-centred society. There is an alternative to the mass motorisation that has made us obese, destroyed local shops and ruptured community ties. If people think about their choices instead of reaching for their car keys all this can be changed. She shows how de-motorisation works: instead of traffic we can have safe streets and vibrant city centres.

    She gives the evidence that many surveys have proved that the vast majority of car trips are under five miles. Half are under two miles. There is a startling chart that shows the statistics for “soft” solutions to driving less compared with essential trips, and it works out to 40 % of car trips that there is a green alternative readily available (so would cost no money, no changes in infrastructure etc), 40 % of car trips which could be made with green modes of transport (which would require a bit of govt money – but of course a small bit cf building more roads) and only 20 % of trips are stubbornly resistant to any change – for which cars are in fact essential.

    Engwicht has an intriguing parallel with rubbish recycling. There is no time to go into this here but the parallels are amazing – how we changed our behaviour and community expectations about recycling rubbish in quite a short time, and getting people to use their cars less is a process just like that. Both authors quote tons of places in the world where people started cycling more, demanding better public transport and walking more plus doing a range of things to make their streets safer for children and older people etc.

    And it sounds really wonderful. And there are places in the world where I’d like to move immediately so I could cycle with no danger and no hostility from motorists in huge four-wheel drives who bitterly resent my trying to cross their road.

    The authors say that we made people change their minds about smoking and drink driving in quite a short time. And we can get people to change their minds about only driving their cars when it is really necessary. It sounds hopeful.

    Except that in my country it’s different. Australians feel about their inalienable right to drive their car whenever and wherever they want to (and for many as fast as they want to) just about as strongly as most Americans feel about their right to own guns.

  • ‘At our most moving moments are we not all without words?’
    Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime artist said that. Or wrote it, I suppose. It’s enigmatic and powerful, I reckon, because it says so much. Doris Lessing had a phrase about the thinning of language against the density of our experience. But you wouldn’t be reading this unless you were interested in language and words, and people like us will try to find the words, no matter what.
    A friend of mine died. He had a rare cancer. He was 52 but he still looked like a schoolboy. That was what was holding my words back. And part of why I didn’t write a blog for the past fortnight.
    Homer wrote, ‘There is a time for many words, and there is a time for sleep.’ It seems so apt for Paul Mees http://theconversation.com/vale-paul-mees-australias-leading-transport-and-land-use-researcher-15385 whose words flew so fast and furiously and funnily about public transport and politics and people and everything under the sun. And he is out of his pain now, having his time for sleep.
    Psychoanalysts believe that insomnia can sometimes be a fear of death – that long sleep. I would never suffer from that, even if I were afraid of death. I’m a champion sleeper. Is this hereditary? Some of my siblings seem to have inherited our mother’s chronic insomnia. Not me, and not my brother who died recently. We inherited our sleeping patterns from our father, who died young too of the same heart-related thing. We neither of us got along with him. But he gave us the gift of sleep. Priceless. No matter how bad things get, I almost always can sleep – and when things get bad one really needs that sleep! So I’m lucky that way.
    If on a rare night I can’t sleep I get up and have a chamomile tea and scribble in a notebook to tease out what is bothering me, and resolve it, and then go back to bed and sleep like a dead person. Chamomile tea is a soporific substance; have two teabags in a mug – double strength – and fall asleep at the kitchen table! I don’t take drugs or medicines so herbs affect me a lot, I guess. They seem really strong to my system.
    I’ve inherited something else: osteoarthritis. It was getting so I’d wake up in the morning feeling as if I was suffering the early stages of rigor mortis. Whoahh! You’re really not supposed to be that way in your fifties.
    This stopped it: acupuncture took the pain away (that’s a scientifically verified effect of acupuncture, the only thing the scientists could verify about it with their western methods) plus a horrible rigmarole involving cod liver oil, more on this later, plus tai chi.
    The cod liver oil thing, got from a very old and tattered book found in my mother’s house when we were cleaning it out after she died: for six months, every day you first of all, drink a big glass of hot water. (That’s the worst part.) You can’t have eaten or drunk for three hours before. So that makes first thing in the morning a suitable time, but of course you’re going to miss that tea or coffee first thing, it really mucks up your morning. You can time it for between meals, just before dinner, say. Second thing is you wait ten minutes after the water. Thenm, third, you drink a tablespoon of cod liver oil or flax seed oil mixed with two tablespoons of strained fresh orange juice or of milk. Not nearly as bad as it sounds. Then after, (fourth thing) don’t eat or drink for at least 30 minutes. Every day for six months (during which your skin will look amazing – a nice side effect), then just a few times a week. For the rest of your life. (Ugh.)
    The tai chi? It’s pretty easy to learn the basics but like the English language not easy to get really good at it. My teacher, Fontane, is like a little tiny peach blossom, so petite and graceful and pretty. She’s good on the philosophy of it too, a very good teacher.
    It has been a time consuming journey over the past year which I’ll write about at another time but those three things have made me much, much better. And the more I practise tai chi the better I will get, the more flexible, the stronger. I will never be a little peach blossom like my teacher; I’m a giant in comparison, two inches taller than the average western woman and with my father’s big swimmer’s shoulders – but in my own way, I will become more graceful and refined. (Ha! Refined – me?!) Plus tai chi is a sort of meditation. It is calming and you focus just on it so, practised regularly, it helps you come to terms with people you love dying young, for example.

  • This blog is about language and literature and health and life so today I’m going to share the websites and blogs of three people who improve our mental and physical lives by their brilliant ideas – the first one is Jules Clancy, the second Sarah Wilson and the third a Canadian guy called James Harbeck.

    The first two are wonderful young Australian women who have great ideas on things like nutrition and cooking, chocolate and health, and how to save time and have more energy. All three are really good writers. I notice that about Nigella Lawson too – she was a journalist before she was a food presenter and cook book writer, and it really shows. At our house she is popular for a number of reasons, but one of my reasons is that I can curl up on the sofa with one of her cook books for the sheer pleasure of reading her prose.

    Reading the prose of the following three people is a joy too.

    Jules Clanchy looks like this (photo didn’t paste but you can see it on her website) and has the following to say about herself:

    : Ready to discover the secret to quick & easy cooking?
    Stonesoup is all about helping YOU become the best cook you can be.
    The thing is, you can make delicious, healthy meals without spending hours in the kitchen.
    This is her website:
    www.stonesoup.com.au

    Jules Clancy is a country girl and her recipes are fabulous – easy, quick, nutritious and she makes a feature of vegetables. She makes them really exciting.

    Sarah Wilson’s website and blog can be found at www.sarahwilson.com.au
    This is a quote from her site:
    I’m a journalist + TV presenter. I write about how to make life better. If I had a resume it would list the following: editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, host of MasterChef Australia, Sunday Life columnist, host + producer of the Lifestyle YOU channel (under “hobbies” it would say: eating + riding a bike).
    I’m on a mission to find ways to make life bigger, more meaningful, nicer, smarter, heartier.

    James Harbeck can be found by googling his name or his blog, Sesquiotica. Many of his monologues are on You Tube. The linguistic analysis of seven rude sounds teenagers make is a favourite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY2R_K3NFPo

    These three make life richer and funnier and better in so many other ways. Bon appetite!

  • In Seneca’s time, ‘Elite, literate Romans were discovering the great paradox of information: the more of it that’s available, the harder it is to be truly knowledgeable. It was impossible to process it all in a thoughtful way. So there was a tendency to graze, skim the surface, look for shortcuts.’ (William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry, p. 112)
    This is just like today – except surely our situation is worse in this respect. Seneca tells his friend Lucilius, ‘Measure your life: it does not have room for so much.’ (Powers, p. 113) Just like today. There is too much to do, too much work, too much ‘stuff’, too many responsibilities, too many deadlines, too many new digital toys – and the learning curve never ends.
    Someone said, ‘The theft of our time is the theft of life itself.’ She was talking about work hours but it could apply to many other aspects of our society, such as the time it necessarily takes to learn the ever-changing technologies for communicating – or for doing almost anything these days.
    If I have to fiddle with a computer or device for ages – and it always takes ages – it feels like dead time. It’s not stimulating or relaxing or entertaining or challenging (there’s that awful word again) – it’s just unbelievably tedious. Whereas when I paint I feel happy and calm and free. When I write I feel stimulated and infused with a calm awareness as my mind makes connections and remembers relevant facts and sparks ideas. I’m drawing on a lifetime’s education and experience, I’m using every level of myself. I feel alive and happy.
    But we can’t live without computers and digital technology now. And there are plenty of good things about them, specially concerning communication. Powers in Hamlet’s Blackberry presents advice about how to deal with new technologies from philosophers and inventers etc throughout history in his intriguing book. He points out that instead of celebrity philosophers we have celebrity chefs. But they never tell us how delicious life itself could be if we followed a different recipe.
    Marshall McLuhan said that our reality is shaped, even created, by our tools. Human freedom and happiness should come before technology. Our digital devices have a big influence on our lives of course, but we should control them, not the other way around. Powers quotes Thoreau and states, ‘Walden shows that, even in the midst of a frenetic world, one can create a zone where simplicity and inwardness reign – a sanctuary from the crowd. The need is far more pressing now.’ (p. 190)
    Powers writes that the only way of cultivating a happy inner life is to spend time there, [in the depths of your mind] and that’s impossible when you’re constantly attending to the latest distraction.’ (p. 201)
    So Powers and his family have a rule: no digital anything over the weekend. Every weekend. As a result they communicate better, are more creative, have more time for outdoor life, conversation, books and friends. They are healthier, physically and emotionally. That’s a tall order today – to not open up a computer or Facebook or text friends. But the author reckons both parts of life are invigorated by it – that they approach work and school refreshed and look forward to the digital world on Mondays, and in turn appreciate the refreshing peace from the digital world on their weekends.
    Could I do it? Phew – let me think this over. I might compromise. Maybe I could just do this blog on Sunday nights.

  • William Powers in his provocative, accessible book Hamlet’s Blackberry (Scribe, 2010), relates what happened while he was leaning from his boat to disentangle a propeller blade from a piece of rope mooring another boat to the jetty: he fell in to the water – splash! After some floundering and embarrassing moments he climbed back up to his boat and turned out his pockets. His mobile was in there. It was now dead. Absolutely dead.
    At first he was angry and panicked. He was freelance and his clients needed to be able to call him. But pretty soon the initial frustrated rage was replaced by a strange sense of elation, a feeling of expansive freedom such as he had not felt in a long, long time. No one knew where he was. He breathed deeply of the sea air; he was in a beautiful place surrounded by water on a sunny day, and nobody knew where he was!
    It started him thinking about the possible dangers of our contemporary state of being constantly connected to everyone everywhere. I am only a quarter through but so far I am impressed with this author’s reasoning and his lucid writing. We are too connected and it does our emotional and physical health much good to have regular breaks from being digitally connected. For depth and fulfilment we need to have time when we are alone and concentrating on one thing, and without the possibility of being interrupted by phone calls or emails or Facebook etc.
    With that advice in mind, this blog entry will be brief – to allow more time for me to read, to write, to think! I’m going to conclude with the contents of two telegrams I heard about long ago. A fortnight ago I related Robert Hughes’ funny mock telegram about a looming deadline. I have two other favourites. The first is about the Algonquin Group, the famous group of American writers including Dorothy Parker and Richard Benchley – Richard? The father of the guy who wrote Jaws, I think that was the one) – anyway, they used to regularly meet in the Algonquin room in New York, and one of them went overseas for the first time. He bade them farewell and set off on his journey, and the first place he visited was Venice.
    He sent them a telegram: STREETS FULL OF WATER STOP PLEASE ADVISE STOP
    (I don’t know the technical reason but they couldn’t do punctuation so they used to put STOP for a fullstop.)
    Another one, surely apocryphal, was that prankster in a high position in his town sent the five most highly respected, posh pillars of the community a telegram one evening, stating simply: ALL HAS BEEN REVEALED STOP FLEE!
    And the following morning, four of the five had left town.
    Somehow I can’t see texting ever achieving the satirical scope that composers of telegrams were sometimes capable of.

  • A businessman was on holiday in a small Greek coastal village where he started chatting to a humble Greek fisherman who had just come in with his small fishing boat with his morning’s catch. When asked why he had come in after only a few hours’ fishing, the fisherman replied he had enough for his family and to give to some friends.
    ‘But what do you do with the rest of your time?’
    The fisherman smiled. ‘I eat with my family, play with my children on the beach and take a siesta with my wife.’
    ‘But you could spend twice as much time at sea, catch twice as many fish and sell them.’
    ‘And then?’ the fisherman replied.
    ‘After a few years you would have saved enough money to buy another boat, employ someone and within a few years you could have a fleet of boats.’
    ‘And then?’ the fisherman asked.
    ‘You could open a fish processing plant and with another few years could control all the seafood processing and distribution in Greece.’
    ‘And then?’ the fisherman replied again.
    ‘You can retire and spend quality time with your family, go fishing in the mornings, play with your grandchildren on the beach and take a siesta with your wife.’

    That story has been around for a while and but it bears repeating; this version is from Trisha Dixon’s Adagio: Living and Gardening Mindfully (Murdoch Books, 2012, p. 37). As that author writes, ‘So easy and yet so hard to just live life instead of racing through it.’ (p. 39)
    And this society’s aggressive capitalism – someone recently coined ‘totalitarian capitalism’ for what it is – makes it very hard to slow down and really do what we want to do and find out who we are and what we want. We’re supposed to be out shopping for white goods or clothes or whatever or working to earn the money to buy the white goods or clothes or whatever.
    The best book I’ve read on the global financial crisis is John Lanchester’s Whoops: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay (Penguin, 2010). Lucid, funny, accessible. Lanchester has written a novel about the financial situation too, called Capital. When I have time I’ll read it; definitely on my list.
    ‘For every dollar spent on UN peacekeeping, $2,000 is expended for warmaking by member nations. Four of the five members of the UN Security Council, which has veto power over all U.N. resolutions are the top weapons dealers in the world: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia.’
    (Paul Hawken. Blessed Unrest: How the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world. Penguin, 2007)
    Depressing. But that book isn’t. It is a book full of hope. And as Voltaire advised about what to do when politics etc is distressingly malevolent – cultivate your garden. And our garden is writing, art, books, ideas or anything creative. Or indeed for some of us it is gardening. I used to have a green thumb. But then I had a change in circumstances that necessitated living in flats for many years and I lost the habit – and maybe even the talent. And now I don’t have time – But I love having a garden. It reminds me of that saying: ‘I love work. I can watch it for hours.’ Someone else does the work in the garden and I get to reap the benefits. I do the simple things like strawberries and jonquils.
    My mind is not on this blog because I feel guilty not working on the commissioned book. So I am going to finish this one with a quotation from somewhere – it is quoted in Sir Ken Robinson’s The Element. (Fabulous book on creativity and how our education system does us no favours in this respect.) I’ve got two years for this thing (somewhat less than that now) but I’m approaching the third phase.
    The six phases
    Enthusiasm
    Disillusion
    Panic
    Search for the guilty
    Punishment of the innocent
    Praise for the non-participants

  • It was the old days of telegrams. You paid per word for the speedy delivery of your message, so they often had a particular tone of terse urgency. They had a tendency to contain either very good or very bad news, news that could not wait for the post. Robert Hughes, late with his commissioned book, Art of Australia (published in 1970), in a spirit of affectionate mockery, wrote to his editor/publisher Geoffrey Dutton, exaggerating the flavour of Dutton’s previous telegrams to him:

    ‘DO YOU SERIOUSLY PROPOSE WRITING THIRTYFIVE THOUSAND REMAINING WORDS IN TWENTYFOUR HOURS WHAT IS HAPPENING DESPERATELY DUTTON’.

    My situation will be like that if I don’t start seriously writing my own commissioned book soon. There is always so much else to do. (What did I say last week about time management, in ‘Big Rocks’? I need to heed my own advice.)

    But we seem to have had so much more time before electronic communication was invented. In the bush my mother posted our correspondence ‘sets’ when we’d done all the work in them and we received the month’s new set by the post. I can’t remember how we got our post (once a fortnight?) but it was exciting when it happened. In the city it came twice a day. In Charles Darwin’s time the post came five times a day, which is practically as good as email. I guess it went gradually down until today’s once a day.

    We’ve gained much from our instant electronic communication but I can’t help feeling we’ve lost much too. The speed of contemporary life can give you vertigo. Just like the speed of the cars. Last week’s book, Car Sick: Solutions for our car-addicted culture by Lynn Sloman does indeed have solutions. It is a very accessible book, fascinating, illuminating, full of hope and beautifully written. One of the solutions is decreasing the speed limit in suburbs, which radically reduces the accident, injury and death rates plus changes the feeling of places by making them safe for children and cyclists and improving social life and social cohesion.

    We, most of us, have a tendency to go too fast in every area of our lives. There is always too much to do. And when are we supposed to squeeze in our art: our writing or singing or painting or dancing? Okay: two solutions. The first lies in Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle (2004) and the second in Marcia Hughes’ The Two Percent Solution.

    How to be Idle describes the slow food movement or the International Movement for the Defense of and the Right to Pleasure. Founded in 1986 by a group of left-wing Italians who were appalled by the cultural ascendancy of fast food, it aimed to bring pleasure, quality, variety and humanity back to the production and eating of food. It spread all over Europe and is now in the US and here as well. Their logo is a snail.

    Their philosophy goes beyond food and is a protest against the dehumanising mechanisation of life. Their Manifesto states: ‘Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilisation, first invented the machine and took it as its life model. … We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life … May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.’ (p. 65)

    So how are we to write or paint or practise our art in these times of unprecedented frenzy? Another way is proposed by Marcia Hughes in The Two Percent Solution. She reckons that all we need to practise our art and then become fulfilled and happy is 2% of our day, ie, 30 minutes. Surely we can all squeeze 30 minutes for ourselves and our art every day?

    Yeats wrote, ‘Art only comes when there is abandon, and a world of dreaming and waiting and passionate meditation.’ Could we get into that state within 30 minutes? Well, let me close with another quotation, from Marcia Hughes’ The Two Percent Solution: ‘Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.’ (Anon, p. 33 of Hughes). So I think we can.

  • I’m working on a commissioned book (more on that another time), I have a four day a week writing job already plus I go routinely to the library and borrow the books I’ve reserved and try to find the time to read them before their due date. Some of the books relate to the commissioned book, but many don’t. Hmmm … most don’t. Is my ambition to read the following list of books within three weeks an unrealistic commitment of my time?

    A Spirit of Play by David Malouf
    Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers
    Car Sick: Solutions for our car-addicted culture by Lynn Sloman
    In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honorée
    The Engagement by Chloe Hooper
    and also a captivating book I bought at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, Paul Klee for Children by the beautifully named Silke Vry.

    I didn’t buy Paul Klee for Children for a child. I bought it for me. It is a fabulous book about creativity. I’ve always thought that it’s the child in me that creates. One needs that spirit of play, to let go and take risks, to have a holiday from that habitual state that our society forces us into most of the time, the right-brained, logical, linear approach to life.

    To answer the question above about unrealistic assessments of what I can do in a given time, I probably can read that number of books in three weeks because of the spectacular inefficiency of the Canberra public transport system or at least the bus routes by which I have to travel to work. I could look at the scenic tour of the eight suburbs the No 2 bus meanders through while en route to Deakin West, or I can use that time to read. (Car Sick by Lynn Sloman is about English transport conditions; if you want to read about Australian conditions and solutions, read anything by Paul Mees. Fantastic writer and creative thinker.)

    Knowing that most people drive, however, I realise that it’s a problem finding time to read, let alone time to be a child and to paint or write or do other creative things. I find it difficult myself to be as creative as I’d like to be, so this following little parable is a case of ‘Do what I say, not Do what I do’. The story of Big Rocks makes it clear what we have to do if we are serious about squeezing our creative pursuits into our too-busy, too-full, frenetic lives.

    “Big Rocks

    A man teaching a class had a wide-mouthed jar, which represented the amount of time per week – or day. He filled the jar with big rocks.
    ‘Is it full?’ he asked his class.
    ‘Yes,’ they answered.
    ‘No.’ He filled it with gravel. ‘Is it full now?’
    ‘Maybe,’ the class answered.
    ‘No.’ He filled it with sand.
    ‘Is it full now?’
    ‘Probably not,’ the class answered.
    ‘Correct.’ And he filled it with water.

    If you don’t put the big rocks in first, they will never fit into the jar because it will be full of small things. What you must decide is: What are your big rocks?”

    L. K. Ludwig. Creative Wildfire. Mass., Quarry, 2010.

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