A pen(ny) for my thoughts

The writing I do that is intimate and personal is closer to inscription. The words ooze out of my body, and I must attune myself to their silent frequencies so that I can tap into them and collect the nectar

My recent trip to Turin amplified my ongoing reflections on the materiality of paper and its relevance in terms of artistic practice. It had to do with all the papyrus manuscripts and scraps I saw. Despite my incredulous typing speed, my practice as a writer is premised on long-hand note-taking and mark-making. It is how I differentiate the various registers through which I transcribe my insights. All forms of commissioned writing are performed directly on a word document on my screen. Having years of practice behind me means I have learned to circumvent the need for framing my structure on paper. I can easily access the flow of word and thought as it spills over from subconscious to conscious mind. But the writing I do that is intimate and personal is closer to inscription. It emerges from a space of deep embodiment. The words need to ooze out of my body through sweat, blood, tears, or breath; and I must attune myself to their silent frequencies so that I can tap into them when they spill and collect and distil the nectar. This is a slow process and is wholly dependent on ink and paper. The cursive nature of my handwriting impels the flow.

Full-time mothering coupled with a full-time job has disrupted this process. It has been months since I found the time to sit with my ink pen and my journal and commit my thoughts to paper. This means that I must live with whole sentences trapped inside my being, aching to be rendered into material form. “This is it,” I thought the other day, this is how female subjectivity gets invisibilised and erased from canonical discourse. I won’t pretend that this inevitable development hadn’t confirmed my worst fear about motherhood, that it’s all-enveloping nature would eat at my writing time; that I would be hustling between earning a livelihood and caretaking to the extent that I would never find the right moment to perform mark-making, to arrange these verbal notations into some form or other that could endure over time.

Then I tell myself that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I have, after all, not missed a single column deadline ever since our child was born ten months ago. That is something. I’ve even managed my monthly columns for another publication that are premised on art criticism. But this voice inside me tells me that while all of that is important, those are other registers. What I miss is transcribing the thoughts that literally flow through the recesses of my body, swimming through my bloodstream, percolating through my pores, oozing from the inner depths of what I imagine to be my soul. Some of these sentences continue to live inside me, but many have floated away after I tweaked them in my head, and some haven’t even had the opportunity to surface, they are buried and are eagerly waiting to be excavated.

In some ways I am in fact experiencing what I always imagined I wanted to nurture—a life of the mind. In the absence of an audience, or given that I am unable to cater to an audience, I am the sole recipient of this non-writing, or these insights that I articulate to no one other than myself. There’s a startling intimacy to this experience of living entirely in one’s head. I’ll admit, it makes me feel so interesting as a person, I am able to appreciate the eccentricities of my own thoughts. But I miss the feeling of being ‘in flow’, when my ink pen desires a mobility that my fingers struggle to supply, when I enter that sacred headspace in which my body feels like a channel or a medium, and I begin to sweat from the psychological labour of it all.

I met an artist friend last week after several months. She is herself a mother to a child who is now almost three. I asked her how she was doing. She said she had been painting a lot these days, with the kind of absorption she had never before managed. I asked her if it was because she felt like her time suddenly belonged to her more than ever before. She confirmed that was precisely it. After having sacrificed so much time to the intricacies of maternal caregiving, now, as her child was becoming more autonomous and was content to be in daycare, she was experiencing her time differently than before. 

It felt, to me, like a form of promise. I look to people like her and so many other mothers who, after such an all-consuming interruption, find in themselves the grace to return to the labour of creating art. I don’t even want to get into the fallacious question of whether women can ‘have it all’. Rather, I am interested in what it means to be able ‘to have’ whatever one ‘has’ when one is able to ‘have it’ once again. For years I told myself that to be a writer, one had ‘to write’. Now I tell myself that I am still a writer, even if I haven’t written. For being a writer involves embodying a state of consciousness. It cannot be reduced to a verb.

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

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