Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

I am sitting at my desk surrounded by books: three of them are propped open. Ten others have sticky flags marking points I need to get to. Another twenty are making me feel guilty that I haven’t read them yet. I have about 40 relevant tabs open in Firefox right now (stuff from JSTOR, Google Scholar, Copac). Most of these will lead me to open other tabs, if only to search for stuff in the library. I already know that I need to consult materials from special collections and journal storage this week.

I also have NeoOffice documents open (current draft, bibliography, earlier draft, relevant notes). Hard copy versions of early drafts with marginal notes from my supervisor are in a plastic case in a desk drawer so that I can consult them as necessary.

Writing a thesis is the fine art of making something shiny from a chaos of material. If you don’t get a high from being slightly entirely overwhelmed by information and ideas, grad school will make you miserable. Even if you do, you sometimes just have to step back from it all and have a non-ironic cookie washed down with a few shots of whiskey.

In 2009, I . . .

• spent New Year’s Day with Martyn.
• published my first book of poetry.
• presented at a few academic conferences and attended a few others with Martyn.
• started as one of the founding editors of Gender Across Borders.
• moved to Belfast.
• started a doctoral thesis on Joyce.
• got engaged.
• finally got some formal training in using Photoshop.
• spent Xmas with Martyn for the first time (and managed to make dinner without setting off the fire alarm).

I guess I’ve had a busy year.

Winter Solstice came early for me this year. One hour early to be precise. And it helped me to better understand the meaning of the day.

By the time I got out of bed on this shortest of days, the outside light was growing dim through the clouds that only the night before had brought snow but since had turned to releasers of rain. I tried to turn on my lights. Nothing happened. I tried to change the bulb. No good. I called for repairs and waited. I lit candles as the streetlights came on.

About an hour before the official moment of the solstice, the electrician arrived. When the lights came on, it was as if my room in all its glorious mess had been restored to me.

Winter Solstice is about the return of the light, but that’s not the whole story either of the day or of what happened during the time I just discussed. Why was I only getting out of bed in the afternoon? I was suffering from terrible menstrual cramps. When those ease up as they have (mostly) by now, I get to return to the world. While I was waiting for the electrician, I had an argument with my partner, one based in misunderstandings. We’ve resolved it now and returned to our normal state of mutual support. I nearly said of love, but that wouldn’t be quite accurate. Love during an argument, like the sun in the winter, never quite goes away.

Winter solstice isn’t about the light returning, though it is nice to have the sun out after four. The holiday is, rather, about our moving closer to the source of life, the sun. It’s about returning to the source of our strengths which is also, indirectly, the source of our weaknesses.  It’s about finding the closeness for which we yearn.

(None of which is to say that the movement away doesn’t have a purpose too but, for now, I’ll let those of you celebrating summer solstice think about that.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• the Shortest Day (averygrandpressigny.blogspot.com)
• Winter Solstice celebration on Sunday (fremontuniverse.com)
• Happy Winter! (tammyheff.wordpress.com)
• At Exactly 9:47am Monday, The B-Town Blog Wishes You Happy Winter Solstice! (b-townblog.com)
• Holiday photo tips (thestar.com)
• Prep For the Holidays with DIY Magic [DIY] (lifehacker.com)

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life looking at trees and have followed, with my eyes, how the branches split into twigs and taper into leaves from quite a young age. This sort of close observation should be a prerequisite for drawing something whether in a realistic style or in one that requires primarily an understanding of the spirit and the idea of the tree rather than its actual physical details. In kindergarten, however, it proved to be a source of frustration in part because my fine motor skills were insufficient to allow me to draw what I saw and in part because when we had to draw trees as part of an in-class activity we were only given enough time to make lollipop-shaped deciduous trees or vaguely zigzag evergreens. Once when the teacher saw me growing frustrated (and falling several steps behind the rest of the class in the process), she told me to just draw the trees the way everyone else did.

I don’t mean to pick on her individually. I won’t even disclose her name (especially since it may have been the classroom assistant rather than the teacher). She probably believed she was doing the right thing; the problem, after all, is structural. Schools too often do not have as their goal the development of creativity and individuals’ ideas, abilities and vision but, rather, the creation of workers who can produce to schedule, who meet standards and only go beyond them in accepted ways and only when there is sufficient time to allow for it. There is no allowance for students to progress at their own pace, even when allowing extra time would mean that they would create something unique.

The worst teachers accept this. The best teachers struggle against it but are limited by class size, the demands of parents and administrators, and similar factors.

In the end, this incident became the most vividly remembered of several which together convinced me that I couldn’t really draw or create much of anything with my hands, except to the extent that camerawork counts.

That may be for the best in my case. I’m probably better at writing than I could ever be at sketching or painting. But I wonder how many genuine talents are suppressed in similar ways.

Some of the discussion around the long-overdue arrest of Roman Polanski I take very personally indeed. The man who raped me was an artist—a poet, not famous, not great, not even as well published as I am, but an artist nonetheless, so when I hear people suggesting that an artist’s work can somehow expiate the crimes he has committed against another human being, I have to consider it from that angle. Let’s say the man who raped me wrote a collection of poetry so remarkable that even I felt the need to learn from it in order to improve my poetics. This would have to be a truly astounding work because I’m not all that skilled at compartmentalization. Based on my knowledge of his work with its rhetoric-pretending-to-be-important, it is highly unlikely that he could ever produce anything like that. Still, if he did: would it change anything he did to me? Would it make up for any of it? For the trauma? For the pain? For the loss of my sense of autonomy?

Of course not. Nothing that man could ever do would change the reality of what he did. To suggest that a cruelty committed against an individual can be canceled out through the some more generalized set of good works is to engage in a sort of moral bookkeeping that is fundamentally inhumane.

But what effect then does committing such crimes have on the value of an individual’s work? It’s very easy to paint a line between the life and the work and to say that one should not impact the other, but if you do that, then you construct a second identity for an artist in which s/he is a pure avatar of ideas. The problem with that (besides all the general issues with constructs) is that when an artist goes to create, they still have all of the rest of who they are hanging about them. Experiences, beliefs, attitudes: those don’t change just because someone has put on their art-making galoshes today. To actively avoid applying knowledge of those factors to the evaluation and understanding of a work of art may make certain cases simpler or at least more comfortable, but it is as much an error as ignoring any other aspect of context would be.

When the man who raped me uses a word like “sex”, it has tremendously different meanings from when the man who loves me uses it. I’m not sure that should only be the case when I read or hear it. I don’t believe that interpretations from my position should be waved aside as biased (as if any human were ever purely objective) or invalid in a broader sense.

But it’s messy, right?

That’s part of how you know it’s valid. A legitimate consideration of art as a human endeavor should be messy because humans are messy. Artists are messy. Audiences are messy. The creative process is messy. To try to present a clean and simple picture of any of that is a disservice not only to art but also to the experience of being human and all the horrible and wonder things that entails.