exposure

I'm two-thirds of the way through a complex dressmaking project. It's a 1970s dress, and like all the greatest 1970s dresses it's a reworking of ideas from the 1940s, refracted through the prism of polyester crepe and clingy nylon undergarments. I guess those things are not actually very prismatic but it doesn't matter much since I am making up mine not in polyester crepe but in a lush black silk crepe de chine printed with licorice allsorts. I already own a cardigan with a design of licorice allsorts knitted into it, so draw your own conclusions about what's going to happen. The complexity of the project is not because any of the construction is technically difficult, it's just because it's put together in a very weird way - there is a right-angled dart in the front bodice, for instance, and a zip in the centre back which has bizarre consequences given there is a wide lapel collar and button front. I began sewing it simply because I think it's pretty but now it's also become one of those projects I sometimes take on, of making something meticulously and exactly via dumbarse method prescribed to and by the people from the olden days; it's a way of understanding something (nebulous, but tangible) about how they used to think. This dress won't be finished till later in the week, if then. It's going to be the first thing I've started and finished in my new home.

While sewing I've been thinking about a different project that came with me unfinished to this house and which I have set myself the goal of finishing by the end of August. I'm writing a further iteration of this narrative, with the intention of selling it to a magazine. I want to make some money from writing and also to get some fresh material to put onto my resume. If I can do this one I can do more like it. The essay is about self-exposure, and is self-exposure, in that region which interests and fascinates me so much; ambiguously intentional or accidental, serving personal needs and public ends, making a creative tool of personal pain. Rewriting it may also offer me opportunities to think through my habit of distancing myself from my own feelings and noticing them in the same way that a disinterested* observer notices phenomena to which she has no personal connection. I won't know really if I can get there, without becoming uselessly meta, until I've done it or not done it. But the material contains that possibility.

I've been talking about creativity with my doctor recently. I've had stretches of being miserable - irritable and impatient - because I feel the need to work and I just have so little time to do it in. Writing takes time. It has to gestate. She reminded me, gently not gently, that I work full time and when Lenny is with me I parent full time, and it's true. But then, where and when's that time when I'm just myself? I described the essay to her and she looked like she always looks when I tell her about how much I put myself out there in some of the writing I have done: she looks deeply concerned. 

While sewing and thinking I was listening to my dear Talking Heads, foolishly; having earlier today been working on a different little bit of writing exploring the idea that the very best music, revisited again and again across your life can thus acquire a preternatural, soul-piercing quality which will grab you by the throat and try to kill you when you are least expecting it, just about exactly that happened when I heard David Byrne sing

home is where I want to be

but I guess I'm already there 

This place where I am living is very pleasant and comfortable. I like coming in at the end of the day. I like cooking int he kitchen and reading on the couch. I like the view from the windows. I like drawing the blinds at night, slipping into my warm, clean, soft, quiet, deeply private bed, and closing my eyes, drawing down other blinds on another peaceful, quiet, inalienably private place. I like all this; as a home, though, I'm acutely conscious that it is thin and fragile. But I haven't got any other.

 

* I mean 'disinterested' not in current illiterate usage, but proper disinterested