He called them little paints when he suggested they go for a walk together. This man who was my friend’s friend but is no more for many reasons, one of them that, a build-up of twatship and fuckery that buckled a human connection. You can bring your little paints to my friend who is mighty and exquisite, an artist in her bones and blood, the finest hand and eye but all he could focus on was the woman part of her seen through his own narrow view. We laugh about it now, we say to her, are you bringing your little paints? when we go somewhere together, and we call him #LittlePaints - a joy in his foolishness that has long outlived his efforts at two people going for a walk. I get it too, not necessarily from men, but from anyone who watches this action of writing or imagines it and doesn’t see the huge and difficult task behind it. I’ve always rather thought of writing a book they’ll say having asked me thirty second’s worth of questions. Well, go on then I think back, nodding, smiling, giving them the space to find out. But for all the annoyance we get the prize, don’t we, us artists, we get to live the sheer wonder of it, sitting down before blank space, the magic. This direct line between me and god, and mine is a web not Christian man but the word is universal, you all know what I mean so I use it. This direct line between here and somewhere other than here, that it comes to me, to us, it’s a wonder. Nowhere do I feel more complete, more whole than when I write, this contact that knows me absolutely. I feel words, the rhythm of sentences, I read them aloud and the tempo is obvious. They back up and pour out and have certain things to say, even sometimes, often, images and structures and uses of themselves that make no sense to me. Or rather they do but only as a whole, as if, if I tore them about into reasonable definitions they would become gobbledygook yet together they work and I know that the thing that is trying to make itself known has succeeded. Writing, the transcription of sensation to language and onto the page is all about focus on these exacting points, like the man who focused his mind on the version of my friend he wanted to see. He told a story. Never mind that it was funny and exhausting, his was an act like this, a translation into words that spoke the tale of his world in one sentence. I almost love him for it if he wasn’t such a park bench idiot for whom I have no time and neither does my friend who at this moment has gone off to paint. And I sit here and write and ideas say explain me and I dig into these moments and can’t resist and can’t rest until I’ve got it right. These, my little paints. My little words.
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Such a beautiful description of writing.
The best. Really. You inspire me so.