1. In This Concrete Moment
I have a splitting headache, caused by redoing footnotes. This onerous task is in itself enough to cause a splitting headache. And I now get splitting headaches from academic writing, anyway, so in this circumstance, I have a double splitting headache.
Academic writing has not always given me splitting headaches. It does not require the degree of soul power creative and other freer writing does. I was almost always able to ‘just do it,’ no matter what the circumstance. I began to get splitting headaches from it because so many extraneous persons with whom I have had to deal – not academics, I might add – have had so many extraneous, yet oddly powerful stakes in what I wrote. These were emanations of the Shadow, whose mist I am still brushing from my coat.
The voices of the Shadow have been documented by Joanna Russ. I had read her book before the Shadow descended, but the Shadow was wily and I was blind, and I did not recognize these voices for what they were.
Earlier on, I had not had the statements Russ documents directed toward me. Nor had I heard all of them, all at once, as I did from the Shadow. I had heard some of them on occasion, and laughed. They certainly did not come to mind when I wrote. Instead, as I wrote, I merely thought, “this is interesting.”
2. Allegory of the Studio
Each ceramic piece goes through several stages of production before it is finished. Each stage must be completed before the clay is too dry, or by the day the kiln is lit, or the night the reduction fire is manned, for glazes. At each stage, something may fail.
Each piece, nevertheless, has its own value. The artists complete each stage in its allotted time and to the best of their ability on a given day. It helps to be careful, as a strong structure and smooth edges are important. Too much care will cause the piece to dry out or fall down. Each artist uses his or her judgment.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
i pray this is not the start of the flu — this is exactly how mine began
drink plenty of fluids…and
i like the allegory of writing to the ceramic studio…it’s funny i’ve always thought of it like that..
Graz, Azgoddess, and I’ll watch that flu! Writing, it really is like that. I had always thought of it like making mosaics, myself (my mother makes mosaics). But when I got assailed by writer’s block, which is a downright disease that has very little to do with procrastination, it was the discovery of the ceramics studio that got me started again.
The ceramics studio forces you to be present: you have to put your body and your centered energy into what you are doing. This clears the mind and allows you to see the work.
If you try to just “get it done” [get anything done, but see also my vituperations from earlier today] – without doing that, whatever is floating in your mind, or distracting your body, gets in the way. You have to clear this out first. If not, trying to just “get it done” only gums up the works. Your pot does not center itself, and your structure falls, even as you put in an exagerrated amount of effort.
Prof,
at the first sign of flu…here’s the cure:
goldenseal (tincture is best) 4-6 drops 4x daily(really nasty but effective)
zinc (tabs) 2x daily
vitamin c w/ rosehips 1000mg 3x daily
I swear by this and it chases away whatever bug tries to attach itself to your body!
Thanks Barbie! I am going to have to keep these supplies on hand!!
I just had another thought on writing/ceramics. Namely: I envy my ceramics professor because he does not have to care where he is. Wherever he is, he gets a great big studio, and gets to live in his world.
Not so me, since so much of what I do depends on the nature and quality of an outside world which I cannot control in the way my ceramics professor gets to control his environment.
I have also looked in amazement, although not envied the colleagues I have had in my own field who were so nerdy that they did not care where they were either, they just shut themselves up in their offices and wrote.
Why can I not do this? I wondered. Am I in the wrong field? Am I simply not dedicated enough?
For a long time, I thought I was just more environment-sensitive than some people. Moon and Jupiter, and a few more planets, in Libra in the 5th house: someone like me really, really cares about atmosphere and setting.
However, my new insight is: I, too, can shut myself up for hours and write, and not care where I am, *as long as I am allowed to choose my own topic.* Even more: shutting myself up for hours and writing *is in fact what I have always liked to do*.
AHA. *That* has been my error all of this time … and the book contract I accepted, and tried but failed to fulfill (I was talking about this with Undine on the “Calling All Professors” thread), I knew from the outset I did not want.
Not for any complicated reason: it was just poor timing and the wrong topic. AHA. And the simplest answers tend to be the truest, I have found.