Repetition and originality, or a sense of home

I could be writing. Writing important, sensical, emotionally charged and evidential environmental things. But I’m listening to music and avoiding doing laundry instead.

Jo’s trying to gather up everything bridesmaidy for her friends wedding tomorrow.

Jo got her brown bridesmaid dress on the same day that other rommate Amanda got her red one piece vintage Christian Dior bathing suit, the one she bought from the “hot hippie cowboy”, as she calls him. They put on their wonderful newnesses, and I put on my sassy red dress, and we had an impromptu midnight dance party to Paul Simon. That’s what I love about living with roommates-there’s always something fun and slightly crazy going on.

This apartment is really starting to feel like home. My home. I spend so much time here, that it really should. I sleep in my wonderful bed that Ann left me ( thank you miss annie, you have furnished my apartment for me, and I think about you all the time because the structure of my life, the foundations upon which many parts of me rest are the ones that were once yours, that you gave to me.). My room used to be where Adriana lived, where Jo lived before she moved into the big room, and I still have the odd yet wonderful white dresser she lent me. Although Frances is away and travelling, her green dress hangs in the right hand corner of my closet, waiting for a wedding. In a way, I’m always surrounded by some form, some essence or remembrance of four of the people I love dearly.

I love the corner of the living room that is my workspace. As I sit here during the day, waiting for the phone to ring, answering e-mails, proofreading, just listening to music and writing this blog ( which I consider to be my primary work, artistic or otherwise, at the moment), I feel as though I have a pretty good job. That I am beginning to have meaningful ways to spend my days, while still making enough money to pay the rent and eat. I’m not sacrificing my sparse and useful time to companies whose models of business I hate, that I’m not wasting my time having to make small talk and sandwiches, or folding clothes.

Instead, my words and I are together. Still, I struggle daily with the immediacy and necessity of writing, of stringing words together on paper, or re-spoken in a memorized and saturated fashion. I see so many books, so much writing that falls by the wayside, that is just there, seemingly having no impact on the world, on peoples lives. Then, I suppose I have to go back to the simples form of importance, to a place of smallness- that of the reader, of the one audience member being enough. That having an effect on even one person is an extraordinary achievement. That in the potent face of extreme fame and the potential of audience numbers in the millions, the individual, the intimate interpersonal relationship is still of primary importance.

Which is one of the reasons why I decided to start writing in this almost ridiculously autobiographical ( I just judged myself there) and public manner. I think we hide things from each other too much, and I want to be a part of coming to a point of true, with myself, and with the world. I don’t want to hide what’s truly going on with me because it’s deemed socially innapropriate to express certain experiences.

A couple of days ago I was watching an interview with Charlotte Martin on youtube, and the last question asked was soemthing like “why will people listen to your music?”, and her answer was “ because I’m true”. She said it with such simplicity and sincerity that it really was a punch to the gut, and a bit of a headspin of “yes! Of Course!”. And that, simply put, is what I want. I want to be true, to the deepest possible level. No posing, no posturing, no more intentional masks constructed of fear and glued together with attempts at unreachable perfection. I do realize that I am constantly re-iterating and re-speaking the same ideas here, oer and over again. I’m just trying to discover different ways of expressing something, giving in to the fact that the first attempt does not need to be perfect, that I can do and re-do as often as I please, until all of the parts tangle together to become an ever changing whole, instead of just one version that is the definitive version.

I actually really love the idea of different versions of ostensibly the same thing. In artistic terms, the novels of Jean Rhys are an excellent example. When reading her work, I almost feel as though she is writing the same story over and over again, trying to find the deepest, truest version of it. Or looked at in another way, not looking for the perfection of it, but experiencing and notating those experiences in slightly different ways. Her work has always been about the difficulty in conveying certain emotions, less about what happens, but what the internal life of the character is as life occurs.

We have a tendency to criticize artist’s work when they are not “original” enough, or not creating enough new material, but I think that working on one piece continuously, and creating and recreating it is just as valid as coming up with something new and unique each and every time. One of my most valuable and wonderful projects was having the chance to direct the same play twice with different casts, in very different contexts. I was much happier with the second version, as I learned so much about myself and my process during the first version that I could apply to the second. Namely, that when I try to create work that fits into the mold of “traditional”, or “acceptable” theatre, when I follow the instructions ( kind hearted and well intentioned as they may be) of others at the expense of my own desires and impulses, then I am not happy with what I create.