Ruminations on practice

It took longer to hit that first key than anticipated. My mind flashed back to school days, the blank piece of cartridge paper stretched out on the desk in front, charcoal or pencil poised, an impotent abject terror prohibiting any rapprochement between hand and void. I knew I couldn’t draw. Those assigned the task of affecting such a mindset only reinforced it. Later, I took up the challenge and taught myself some mimetic observation skills. The fear of the blank page began to recede. Look. Make a mark. Look again. Make more marks. Though you can teach an old (or young) dog new tricks, changing an engrained mindset is another matter entirely.

With words it was different. It was as if we were always close confidantes, soul mates even, from a young age. There was a time when I felt my peer group was restricted: I wanted more lexical friends. I looked enviously at peers more grammatically well endowed. A risky business in an all boys' school. Luckily the onset of the mixed co-ed saved my blushes. Those feelings of wordy frustration were akin to wanting more from the relationship, not a feeling that the relationship didn’t exist. I hark back now, only because the sensation itself takes me back; not to a fear of the void per se, more to that struggle for the right phrase. It goes beyond just a fleeting memory. It is something more tangible. There is a physicality to it: the furrowed brow, the staring into space, the searching beyond the passing clouds. I’m aware of being taken back.

Back to now. Back to the page, the blank page. Now no longer blank. Words dance across the screen as fingers tap with greater fluency. Muscle memory begins to restore. Sentences take shape. As paragraphs appear, fear evaporates, pixels proliferate. Backspace. Insert. Edit. Any promise not to correct eradicated by the misspelt or the mistyped. This is no edited text but neither is it entirely without reflection. For want of a better phrase, it’s Reflection-Lite.  

I began today with the very idea of the blank page. The charcoal armed child was more than just a memory, there was also the deliberate search for allusion, one which stirred in that unanticipated way. I began with the idea of an analogy. Not just in terms of the blank page but of the agent acting upon that page. Make a mark. Make something appear. Make something visible. Leave it. Leave it unfinished. Abandon it. Shade bits, leave others. Move onto another blank page. Repeat. Repeat. Abandon. Work, rework, erase. Add tone. Add texture. Shade. Some light and dark. Start again. Elsewhere. Elsewhere on the page. The unblank page. Turn over. Start again. Work. Rework. Now, what is it? What have you created? We marvel at the quirky sketches of the sculptor, the meanderings of the artist’s pencil, the quick fire throw aways, the daubs and dabbles, the annotations, the crossings out, the marks left, the marks removed: the work.  

A musician picks up the sax and plays. The random act of practice. Without practice, no musician can play. Practice, seen from afar, would seem to be the musician’s soul mate. Practice and play become one: the former the latter with an audience of one. And the more you play for an audience, the better you get. So play becomes practice, practice play.  

Practice. The word itself begins to transform in use. I find it odd that this same word is contemporaneously appended to an artist’s work and not the work of so many other practitioners. We talk of a medical practice, a dental practice and in recent times an art practice. Less so, I think, a writing practice, a writer’s practice. So writers don’t need to practice. And what are a writer’s words if not both practice and part of a practice.  

Back to another fear. Naming. The art of naming. Naming is essentially part of the writer’s art and simultaneously lacking in the writer’s practice.

Act: the artist draws. Product: a drawing.

Act: the author writes. Product: a writing?

Another paradox. Process and product are the very essence of a contemporary art practice and yet almost prohibited, by nomenclature, in the writer’s practice.

Returning to writing after a pause, a long pause, one measured in years not adequately captured by a paragraph space, I am most aware of the need to practise. But not to practise for something. This is not training for a marathon, there is no tournament or match. Not even a book, a play or a poem. At least, I hope not. This is about pleasure in the practice. Precision delayed but not ignored. Meanings sought but not dwelt upon. Ideas alluded to but left half formed. Not with the intention of returning to later but in the hope that they will later return of their own accord. More developed, more formed, perhaps a little more grown up.

I am aware that when I left writing, if you ever can be said to leave something which in part defines you, but if you can, I was aware that I had lost the nerve to be a novelist, I lacked the endurance to write at great length, I had no desire to focus upon minutia, to be restricted by stanza or form. I had no pressing need or urgency to name or define what I wanted it to be. Just to write, to write writing. Not even to be read. To be readable. The internet seemed temporarily to open up a space. One that was quickly closed by its own meta language. A blog, a post or a tweet later, and form becomes product, neatly labeled and packaged for the digital age. Perhaps my own involvement in art was a similar search for a space. Initially, something resembling that appeared to open up in front of me: it promised so much but in the end flattered to deceive. Later, labeled and labelable, enmeshed in its own labeling and unlabelability, and finally confused by its own obsession with what it is to be labeled, that once alluring and inviting blank page seemed densely cross hatched and eventually entirely opaque.

I had approached today’s practice laden down with neat metaphors. The ball juggling footballer, the tennis player volleying, the cricketer in the nets. Practice makes perfect. Ten thousand repetitions. The fossilisation of muscle memory. The habit engrained.

But it’s not as simple as that. In going back to practice, I see again that it is more nuanced, more random. Less focused, less formed. There is both freedom and constraint, elucidation and contradiction, clarity and confusion, meanings lost and others inadvertently made.

And finally there is the author’s ego. The naming. The publishing. The vanity for all to see. The Schrodinger’s cat pre quantum. Does this even exist if it’s not read? If it is indeed practice, devoid of any other authorial intent, then why publish? Why run the gauntlet of the naming and shaming? Why the desire to publish and be damned. If it’s unedited, why condemn it? If it’s unfinished, why sign it off? If it is practice, why put it into play?

The fact it is practice, affords the above questions all too little reflection. So without further ado, and not forgetting to season with clichés, even in the absence of reflection there is a sense that it should be somewhere. Somewhere I can learn from the practice. Somewhere I can reflect on the words. Somewhere to go back to with an ‘if only’. Entirely unpublished it is open to the abuse of an edit, an unwanted intrusive visit, a tinkering here and there, and finally transforming what was only intended as practice into product. Right now, here, it is unfinished and thankfully, as such, unfinishable. But as with any writing, to be writing, it is readable. Even if, in the end, it remains unread.