The Ripe Brain

I didn't want to go to work this morning. I really wanted a duvet day. I felt ready and excited by ideas and I wanted to fulfill them. I wanted to agree to the urge and follow it. I wanted to let things flow, open a tap, let the natural thing happen. Forget yourself, he shouted, the only way to write the thing is to write the bloody thing. Or something like that. I was so rapt I forgot to minute-ise these wisdoms. Forget you, he said, it was all about Forgetting You, putting the tiny percentage aside, There, Tiny Percentage, sit, and opening up a flood of you-have-no-idea (yet). You. The conscious knows only part of the story. The conscious is trendy, post, after, over. The unconscious, that's where the cool new lies.

The problem is, it takes the conscious You to make the effort to sit down and begin. Stop checking the roast veg, stop researching doctors' surgeries and foreign flights, stop moaning that your back hurts, your shoulder hurts, there's not enough lemon in my water. Oh look, there's a pile of stuff that needs washing. No, boring conscious, boring You, take control and Just Write The Bloody Thing. He talked of momentum. Start, and it breeds, runs, blazes, catches, travels, goes bloody wild. You have the key, and these secrets just pour out. The You can't help it, because by then it's sitting back, removed, and barely even watching what's happened until it's done.

More research is needed here, if my brain can bend enough to get determinism. You have to take the (conscious) initiative to sit and place you hands above keys, or have pen hovering over paper. Put yourself in the potential position. Then, something catches. The unconscious sparks mix with the conscious and somehow get catapulted out as a thought. The unconscious sets alight, and it blazes a trail that feels a bit like fate. Stuff you knew 'needed' to be said is so. And when you don't take action to sit and do this, it kind of builds up and constipates itself. The natural course of events is faulting, moments overlapping and building up and driving each other deeper down, though never actually dissolving, but becoming knotted and dangerous.

So, the problem is time. When (stirs roast veg and does twelve sun salutations, ok, not the sun salutations, because White Heat starts in 11 minutes and they take at least fifteen) there's so much to do, and the largest chunk of one's day is given over to something not conducive to anything personally productive, this leaves little time to work out what's important. I want to read my new book, knit my cardi, cook a meal, watch a serial while I still pay for cable, and all this before even beginning to think of socialising and leaving the house. I want to write OF COURSE but it somehow falls to the bottom quite quickly because you can't eat it or wear it or talk about in at work tomorrow, and it's frigging terrifying.

(Boils rice, watches White Heat, reads some Philip Larkin, sleeps nine hours, does fifteen minutes of yoga, reads last weekend's paper, has a shower, eats a Basics fromage frais) (writes paragraph, becomes mildly late for work...)

I never could answer the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up, because I only just realised the answer is 'retired'.