Making Room
Writing is a strange preoccupation, almost as mysterious as dreaming. Little to distract from the inner pageant of unruly thought beyond the sound of passing traffic, colour of paint on wall, heat radiating from laptop. You’re not really in the room at all. The physical body is occupying the space carved out by the walls, but the mind is a Cold War Russian gymnast on his first world tour post Perestroika.
One hundred and twenty-two cars pass by the window, grindingly changing gears as they turn the corner and accelerate up the hill. The still hot day erupts into a violent summer storm, but, pursuing a thought through a labyrinth of abstraction to its end point, you notice nothing, awakening from the spell oblivious to any change that may have occurred in the physical world around you. The only evidence of four hours having passed is the presence of a new block of hieroglyphics on the screen and a sudden, intense feeling of hunger.
In the quiet tomb-like storeroom in the basement of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, I find six paintings, which remind me of how time feels when I’m writing. The state of solitude, inwardness and chosen isolation is familiar. The rooms depicted are familiar rooms – not grand, but simple, functional rooms furnished to accommodate thoughtfulness. The atmosphere is of quiet retreat and pensiveness. The singular subject of each painting has removed him/herself from the violent contradictions of the world to meditate on it.
But here in the present diffusion, more than isolation, is the prerogative – the ability to divide ourselves up like pixels, to be in more than one place at a time. To trade in futures, sms as we drive, talk on cell phone as we cook, make love online across continents, listen to music as we cross the street, respond to hundreds of emails daily, checking in to field urgent personal traffic as we board airplanes or drink coffee in wireless access fair-trade coffee shops… All this information is impossible to consume. We cannot digest it.
The past pulls, but nostalgia is not a productive sentiment. It is impossible to be nostalgic about the colonial era without blithely eradicating conscience. Rudyard Kipling – depicted here by Sir Philip Burne-Jones caught in a moment of pensiveness as he looks up from the page – was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and to date, its youngest recipient. The author Henry James described him as being ‘the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) I have ever known’.
Further down the line, in the 20th century, George Orwell denounced him as a ‘prophet of British imperialism’. So today his image, like those of Freida Lock and Terence McCaw, inhabits the basement.
Retrieve them from subterranea for an instant. They knew something that we don’t know about the value of sitting still and thinking. Not waiting in a queue or for the kettle to boil.
Look again at Terence McCaw’s painting of his friend and fellow painter Freida Lock busy at her easel. With a splash of yellow to denote her scarf and a touch of auburn in her hair, she is presented as intent and absorbed in what she is doing.
Lose yourself for a moment in Maud Sumner’s Portrait of the Artist, probably painted in the studio she maintained in the Lewis & Marks Building in downtown Johannesburg in 1936. The only other figure in the painting is her doll/muse, Louise, the sculptural alter-ego that animated the conversations that raged on the inside of her own head.
Contained solitariness also underpins Ruth Everard Haden’s L’Art d’Aujourd’hui, a portrait of her mother, Bertha Everard. Quietly absorbed in reading a contemporary art magazine L’Art d’Aujourd’hui, a tulip stem arching gracefully behind her harmoniously echoes the curve of her head.
Beneath each painter’s decision to depict a singular, solitary, contented figure is a desire to communicate the subject’s willed intent to be mindfully absent. In 1928 Virginia Woolf asked the question: ‘What is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation?’ Nearly a century later, we’re still most likely to find the answer in an empty room. Alexandra Dodd
February 2010
Selected extracts from
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One’s Own
But you may say… what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain…
And to answer that question, I had to think myself out of the room back into the past to set before my eyes… rooms not very far distant from these; but different…
… and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one [moment] was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other…
Here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it – the change was there…
One has only to read, to look, to listen, to remember. But why say ‘blame’? Why if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?
Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion, I ask myself…
… these two pictures, disjointed, disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were forever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy.
It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts, which are not within their control. They too… had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some way as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great. True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs – the instinct for possession which drives them to desire other people’s fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives.
Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground… these webs are not spun in mid air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
What is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation?
