Abandoning My Art

In September 2014 I started attending a creative writing class to motivate me and to focus my attention on writing and so that one day of the week, at least, I could call myself a writer.

My writing consisted of editing my book, writing for my MA and this blog I started in a effort to stimulate learning and a postitive outlook and motivation. On the 29th of September I set out to do One Thing Every Day that scared me, including submitting my book to agents. On the 3rd of October in  Yesterday's Fear I talked about the crisis of finding something lacking in my book I couldn't identify and when I did figure it out, how the editing process opened up again. On the 18th of October I wrote a post Eating the Elephant (having given the first 3 chapters to people to read) discussing the fear of it being read out loud in class and getting feedback. It all went surprisingly well and the feedback was useful so I set out to start work again on the first three chapters for submission based on the feedback. I then started thinking about the rest of the book and how it lacked the polish the first chapters had got. On the 9th of December in The Art of Writing: SMART Blogging and Elephant Eating I set a SMART goal to be achieved by the 6th of January, to get the rest of the book up to the same standard. Again this deadline passed, for various reasons, although I was still writing and working through issues in the book. 

I am eating the elephant one bite at a time, but its taking longer than I expected. Whether its because the elephant is larger than I thought, or parts are unpallitable or because some bits need a lot more chewing than others, its all the same.

On the 24th of January, preparing to go to my writing class I thought about why I still had so much to do with my book. Why I couldn't even figure out what it was I had to do. Why I couldn't even see some parts of the elephant I was trying to eat.

I realised that there was a problem with the ending, and while I showered, ate my cereal, travelled on the bus to class I came up with, not only the ending, but the last word of the ending and possibly an opportunity for a sequel.

Maybe when we fear something we have created isn't good enough yet - maybe we are right. If I had sent my book out without all the work I have done on it from September to now it would not be half the book I am capable of writing.

Of course I can't edit forever and one day I will abandon it. As Paul Valery said, and I mentioned in the post of December 9th :

Art is never finished only abandoned.

I continue to work on the abandonment of my art.

The Artists, Feelers and Thinkers will Save Us

"[I]ts the artists of this world, the feelers and thinkers, who will ultimately save us, who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing, and shout the big dreams. Only the artists can turn the “not-yet” into reality.

How do you do it? Find out what you can do well, uniquely well, and then do it for all you’re worth. And I don’t mean “doing your own thing” in the hip sense. That’s passivity, that’s dropping out, that’s not doing anything. I’m talking about doing, which means serving your community, whether it’s a tiny town or six continents."
(Bernstein, 1982)

Some artists, feelers and thinkers this week:

• A young woman who used to be attend our centre returns to ask for support as she decides on a less lucrative change of career to pursue her creative interests and degree subject and train to be a youth worker to share her gift in art and design with young people.
• A four year old paints a robin suncatcher for me, the same 4 year old who, in Pass-the-Parcel, when the music stops,  tries to give the next person in the circle, the parcel.
• In Circle-time with the 5-8 year olds, when asked what their Wishes for the World would be for Christmas, a 7 year old's wish was for it to rain  food for everyone who's hungry,  and a six year old's wish was for fairy lights around the world, with balloons added by a 5 year old.
• When carol singing, a man gives a £5, paying it forward because our organization gave him £5 when he was homeless.
• A teenage girl overcame her lack of confidence to help run a Christmas Party for a group of young people with complex needs and sang and learned the sign language for some carols for a video for the carol service.
• An octogenarian, who had suffered brain damage from a blow to the head years before, bed bound in hospital from a fall and on a drip for a chest infection, remembered how to play dominoes, sang When the Saints Go Marching In with me and still clapped with joy each time either of us won.

Like I said in Circle-time with the children, those creative thinkers were going to be the ones to make the world a better place. The Artists, Feelers and Thinkers will, indeed, save us. They save me every day.

Bernstein, L. (1982) Boston Globe Words and Music by Leonard Bernstein: Excerpts from Findings, Boston

Art is Infinite: An Argument for Qualitative Evaluation

"Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."

(Pablo Picasso, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views)

Punch (1998) discusses qualitative and quantitative research and their merits or what I would call the 'How of Things' or the 'How Much and How Many of Things'. Picasso gives, what I consider to be, the most brilliant argument for qualitative evaluation over quantitative in the quote above and is a perfect acknowledgement of why some things can't be measured in numeric terms. Trying to measure success or achievement or anything that tells us about an individual in terms of numbers can be a false economy with so many hidden variables. 

Numbers

Numbers can tell us nothing about the person, yet we apply them all the time. 

• We categorise by age, restricting our children's lives to experiences of their peers. 
• We categorise by test, exam and assessment levels, when someone who has done a degree in a subject like youth and community work may very well be an excellent academic but not a good youth and community work practitioner. 
• We categorise by income and class and if it were used to right the balance of equality it would say something but instead it is merely there to fence it off and maintain the capitalist status quo. 
• We categorise by metres, cms, feet and inches whether in terms of height and shape and by numbers...as soon as we are born – everything is counted – from limbs to fingers and toes.

Yes, we may say someone has 2 eyes and two ears. What does that tell us about the person? Not that they can see or hear or are colour blind or like music. Or love to watch romantic movies or that they wear their hair to hide their ears. Or that their eyes change colour like their grandmothers. Or how when they hear the sound of a cuckoo it makes them sad. Or how they love to read under the blanket with a torch. Or how they love camping for the sounds of the night.

A person should not be defined by a number, unless infinity could be a number. We are all infinite. Our possibilities are infinite.

Every individual is so different from the next, with attributes so varied and vast they are far past anything that can be counted or even understood.

Does a song sound better if you know the time signature or number or crochets, quavers or minims or whether the notes are FACE or EGBDF?

My IQ, income, age, height or number of body organs or limbs do not define me. Numbers do not define me. I am infinite.

"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them."

(PABLO PICASSO, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views)

Picasso, P. (1988) Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. Ashton, D., Da Capo

Punch, K. (1998) Introduction to Social Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches, London, Sage