25.10.00 : in writing

Wednesday 25th October

In response to Sue's email, asking where am I when I am writing this email?, here's some thoughts.
I think that question has different answers depending on who I am writing to. When I am writing emails like this one, to all of you or to someone to whom I am familiar and writing something very like a letter, then I am in the text, in the task of writing more than anywhere else. Sometimes I lift of out of the writing and find myself in the projected space of 'you' reading. In fact i think I probably osscilate between those two spaces primarily. I am rarely aware of the medium I am using except in terms of a background awareness of my body, pains in my fingers, some discomfort perhaps from sitting, or the dull hum of the computer. I'm much more in the technology when I'm reading emails. Or even more if in some kind of chat space.
Mostly I am in what I am trying to say. In that strange space of writing and reading that is so immersive, so endlessly maleable and yet so hard to get right. Part of that space is also the space of decision making, which I think is very similar to the space of any 'creative' activity, any act of making. Those spaces where you haven't yet made a mark, settled on a word or a line or whatever, but you're thinking about it, or you're not thinking about it, but you're in the suspension of that kind of active waiting, active searching, before the decision happens.

Writing seems thickly full of those spaces, they are like the medium of paint before the pigment is added. So I guess when I'm writing, even these emails, I'm in the space of making, of writing itself, before it's done. Before it's settled and sent. And writing all this leads me back to one of the reasons I started this project in the first place, because I always have had that sense of this making/writing as a rich place to inhabit. Often a difficult place, demanding and reticent, but also often richly creative.

It's nice to find that again, to remember why I'm here, where I am, wherever that is, in this writing.

cheers all,

Brigid