The virtues and joys of being still

As soon as I was able to clear my plate, I decided to take a cue from the winter landscape around me and let myself lie fallow. Pic/Rosalyn D`Mello

Because, for the first time in almost 15 years, I am allowing myself the luxury of not actively soliciting work, I am able to bask in stillness. Since I moved to Tramin in June last year, I had been shouldering a thrice-multiplied workload that included my steady gigs in addition to sporadic new commitments I couldn't afford to refuse.

Inevitably, I felt like I had strained my voice by demanding more from it than was within its range without pausing to refuel. I felt burnt out, like I had exhausted all the poetic potential energy that I depend upon to nurture my writing.

A month ago, as soon as I was able to clear my plate, I decided to take a cue from the winter landscape around me and let myself lie fallow. I wanted to inhabit the emotive state implicit in lying low, retreating. I wanted to be like the trees that used the time span of autumn to shed themselves of excessive leaves in order to conserve themselves by sustaining that which is truly vital.

It isn't that I hadn't made previous attempts at stillness. They were, however, all doomed, because I lacked the discipline that can only be evolved through self-love. I set myself up for creative failure by putting too much pressure on myself to constantly perform under unrealistic deadlines.

I catered to the capitalist conditioning that idolises busy-ness as inherently virtuous. I even rewarded myself for actively pursuing work over other commitments, sacrificing time that could have been spent frivolously in order to fondle my anxieties and states of self-doubt.

In the last few weeks, I have been building my archive. It is the kind of work I have normally only done for other people and that I never cared to do for my own practice. To do justice to the endeavour, I saved up some money and hired someone to help me with this task, because it felt too daunting to be performed alone.

Every day I watch the master spreadsheet swell in size as more links are being continually added. I spend every second day trying to remember stories I wrote ages ago. The self-commissioned project is helping me restore all the many versions of my selfhood, all the multiplicity I embodied in different contexts and environments. It's an exercise in maintaining an inventory of my creative practice. It is happening parallel to my taking stock of the research and writing I have already done as part of the process of writing the sequel to A Handbook for My Lover.

Before me on the shelf in front of my desk sits, at all times, a collection of twenty journals that contain a significant portion of my writing in the form of notes, fragments, excerpts from books I've read, and enormous reading lists. They evidence my continuing engagement with the world around me.

I have been foraging through them to rediscover the various trails they contain to the many lines of thought I'm wrestling with, from the ideological conception of feeding to female jouissance, to my ongoing obsession with the secret discourses of housewives. Rummaging through segments, I find myself returning to certain scenes of thought and re-confronting them from the precipice of forgetting. As I re-take the notes I made years ago, I re-arrange them in my current journal and uncover new meanings. It's an exhilarating undertaking. I like to notice my recently cultivated disregard for thoughts by others that must have impressed me at the time at which I first recorded them.

A good example is this quote by Henry David Thoreau that must have left a past impression - Write while the heat is in you... The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. I re-wrote this in my current journal and at the bottom I wrote 'Rubbish'.

I have spent the past two years actively practising delay, not so much as a tactic for collecting thought but as a way of absorbing words. It has something to do with allowing a phrase or even a sentence to breathe and evolve before it is recorded. Instead of writing from a source of heat, I have been allowing my thoughts to live within my being without feeling insecure that I will forget them.

This shift in terms of temporality has had a direct consequence in terms of the targetted audience of my creative acts. Writing is becoming increasingly a by-product of intense living. When the words finally assume form, it is because they spill over onto the page. Writing becomes a manifestation of my intellectual and emotional engagement with my self and its multifarious relations with the world around it. I'm writing from stillness, not heat. I want to transform, rather than inflame my reader's mind.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper