Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Summer Better End Soon...

And then I can put my cat o'nine tails down and get back to writing.  The cat o'nine tails is the implement with which I castigate myself for processing vegetables instead of words.  I do this all day long, every day, and it is getting old. 

But what can I do?  There is a loud litany of edible stuff--eggplants, tomatoes, beans, greens, broccoli--in fauve-bright purple, red, orange, and green, right there before my eyes, every hour of every one of these bright-blue, crisp September days  (the optimism and energy of which will be forever tinged with sadness, as with a touch of premature frost).

Unlike ripe vegetables, thoughts and words do not compel me to go do something about them right away.  They are not red, purple, orange or green, but basic, boring black. They can wait...or so it seems.

Everything that I've ever read or been told about writing tells me that this isn't true.  Words can't wait.  Use it or lose it.  Nulla die sine linea--not a day without a line, Horace advised.  How many times have I heard that this, the inability to write every day (or paint, or compose) because of interruptions by children, spouses or gardens, is the reason there aren't more women writers, painters, composers?

But I remember Tasha Tudor, the illustrator and writer and gardener who enacted a 19th century way of life just over the mountain from here until she died recently in her tenth decade.   She used to say that she only painted in the winter, after the garden was done.  I wonder if she felt guilty about that?

But I don't think she felt guilty about anything much.  She raised four children on her own, wrote and illustrated dozens of books, made puppets and put on shows, and once grew a shirt from seed (she planted the flax, harvested it, processed it somehow, and wove it into cloth which she then cut and sewed into a shirt).

So to whom should I listen--Horace or Tasha?  What would you do?

12 comments :

  1. HMMmmm...I go with the seasons, of garden in the spring/summer, weaving in the fall/winter...perhaps a line a day and good notes in the summer..jotting down ideas so as to hold them as much as possible?

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    1. Can't tell you what a romantic picture this conjures up of you weaving by the fireside.

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  2. I wouldn't listen to anyone else and just do whatever you thought was best and most fit your time and energy. Everything you do has value.

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  3. Surely going with the seasons is more natural. I like Jaimie's suggestion.

    I know too that I have always felt as if writing was an indulgence, something I could only do after I'd finished everything else. I'm trying to change that.

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  4. I'd be lucky to stick with the Tasha method.

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  5. So far, including FB, the Tashas FAR outnumber poor Horace. Where are all the whip-cracking disciplinarians?

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  6. A line a day. Now really, how difficult could that be?

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  7. You're right. Off to write my line right now...

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