A torpid afternoon

Oh, I am feeling unbelievably torpid and aimless right now. It’s 4:30 and we’re probably leaving to go have dinner with Karen around 6, so it’s a reasonable time to be winding down the work day, but I just feel so incredibly dumb. What I probably need is just some good focused work to screw my head back on tight; I’ll go do some sketch practice after I finish up here.

Or perhaps I won’t. I’m so stupid right now I couldn’t even finish this entry in one go; after I wrote the above paragraph I went and played Scramble (badly) for half an hour, and now it’s 5:00.

At any rate my ankle is feeling much much better.

I finished Stuffed this morning, an industry-insider look at American food production, which was interesting and a quick read. I haven’t read much nonfiction lately so it was fun to get back into it, but this book didn’t teach me anything about writing at all — but for the same reason it didn’t take anything out of me to read it.

I tried brainstorming my new novel in the shower, and that worked a bit. I got a little panicky partway through because the ideas were coming fairly quickly and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to remember them all to write them down, but I think I did. I wrote slightly more than 1000 words of planning and left those happily to go have lunch.

After lunch, three more years of Virginia Woolf’s diary — very grueling entries they were this time, full of her struggles writing The Years — and then typing those up. And that brings us up to the present. Still feeling very dumb.

Here’s something I wrote in my morning pages yesterday to post in here:

It was quite a shift to be reading Pema Chödrön and then go to Woolf. I think I’d read a full half of Pema’s book, finishing it, typing up quotations and sharing them on Facebook. I must have done this for nearly three hours, so I really was steeping in Buddhist philosophy for quite some time. The book is gently humorous and wise and wonderful, but its end point was not just to step into uncertainty with grace — as Kimber likes to remind us — but to know and embrace true groundlessness. I kept thinking as I read, “But what about creation? What about art, and having a critical eye and a particular point of view, and being ambitious and disciplined and making as much art as possible?”

Then I broke for lunch and afterward devoted a couple of hours to Woolf, and that was wisdom of a totally different sort. Her focus was all on her art, and it was her grounding and her philosophy and her trial as well as her comfort.

So now I am left wondering how to reconcile these two visions, for I know there must be a way, and likely that way will be very helpful to me. Some of Pema’s teachings are directly applicable to art-making: venture forward in full experience of life and emotions, without attachment, without fear. But how is a critical eye possible if there is nothing for our grounding? How is revision possible if I must simply rest with what’s so? And how can one have artistic ambitions without grasping?

Still no answers yet to these questions, and I feel as stupid as ever. Maybe I’ll go tear magazine pages and sing, instead of drawing. I don’t know. I don’t want to do anything, and yet I can’t bear to do nothing. Bleh. If only I were feeling better I could walk around, but I still need to rest.