drossbucket

I’m going to start reintroducing a few tumblr-style posts without much editing, as this thing is starting to develop a stodgy Real Blog atmosphere where I feel like I need to post Proper Serious Writing.

This is supposed to be more of a workbook, and I think I’ll learn faster if I up the percentage of experimental/embarrassing/badly-thought-out posts.

There’s this mindset I sometimes kick myself into, which is roughly ‘I’m going to work hard at this thing, and I’m going to like it.‘

It’s got a very specific emotional tone and a specific range of application. I wouldn’t bother trying to use it for utterly dull stuff like the washing up where I do not care at all. On the other hand, there’s a definite theatrical aspect (the ‘and I’m going to like it’ bit) where I’m kind of faking up the enthusiasm in the hope that some genuine enthusiasm will follow. Getting up early in the winter and working when it’s still dark outside is the right sort of situation for it.

I’d never really thought consciously about this before, but I noticed the other morning that it’s got three different images attached to it in my head. By ‘image’ I don’t mean a vivid mental picture (I don’t have much of a visual imagination at all, oddly for someone who loves geometry), just vague sort-of-images or bits of phrases that cluster round the thing.

The first one is a half-remembered line from The Waste Land, something about ‘the boat responded gaily to the slightest touch’. The real version turns out to be ‘Damyata: The boat responds / Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar’.

This is highly relevant. It contains the right sort of things: precision and responsiveness and genuine enjoyment. I’m actually impressed with whatever part of my brain came up with that, apparently without much conscious supervision.

After that the images go downhill fast. The second is something to do with oxen yoked to a plough. Which is not imaginative at all, and also a pretty miserable vision of the potential rewards of hard work. I guess there’s a kind of stoic, stubborn element that’s useful here.

Also, I have never in my life thought clearly about what oxen yoked to a plough actually look like (though of course I’m googling it now). The words in my head are something about oxen yoked to a plough, but the image is more like an old-fashioned heavy leather horse harness.

The third part, ludicrously, is something like one of those glaucoma testing machines you get at the opticians. I can’t quickly find a public domain image, just google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not imagining the bit that puffs an unpleasant jet of air into your eye, but the bar bit you push your forehead against in order to keep your face aligned properly.

Apparently this is how I’m taking the image of the harness, which is attached to the ox, and applying it to myself. Sticking my forehead against this machine is how I’m yoking myself to the badly-imagined plough – it’s the crucial image that makes the other two apply to me specifically.

I had no idea I was imagining something so specific and weird. Imagine trying to consciously think up this crap! But somehow it kind of hangs together as something inspiring, if you don’t look at the component parts: fluid delicacy mixed with stolid determination, joined (of course) at the forehead. By a glaucoma machine!

It’s hopeless to try and write about this sort of thing accurately, because so much of what’s going on is not language-based. (And there’s a mess of other associations when I start thinking about this. I’m not sure the process stops, there’s just more and more of this nonsense.) But it’s also fun to try, because it’s all so entertainingly stupid!