Showing posts with label shower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shower. Show all posts

Saturday, January 15, 2011

THE SILENCE OF CREATION

Standing in the shower a couple of days ago I started to think about creation - not the Creation but simply making something that wasn't there before - like this, I suppose. First it was a thought...then words typed on a keyboard...inserted into software...digital drawing added.... uploaded to the internet...and finally: a Blog Post. Not worthy of the fancy name creation yet fitting the description of something which didn't exist before I caused it to exist.

Our articulated thoughts - however repetitious, witty, profound, perceptive, polished, crude, cliché, original or derivative, are our products and we are floating in an ocean of our own and other people's products. The books on our shelves, the CDs, DVDs, downloads, pictures, posters and objects we cherish demonstrate our need to be fed by the creations of those minds we choose to consort with, as well as our own urge to be creators. We feel that creativity is a state to be attained, nurtured, promoted, prized and rewarded. When we are not being creative we feel guilty, worthless, ordinary. We worship at the altar of the Great Creatives and aspire to be in their pantheon, or to knock them out of it, or to serve them.

But what if it all vanished suddenly? Not a single book on our shelves, nothing on our walls, blank pages in notebooks where there were poems, stories, sketches, ideas. Nothing on television, nothing on the internet, nothing in the cinema, theatre, club, gallery, museum, concert hall. Whoosh! All gone. Silence. 

So, standing in the shower, this is what I was thinking. Creation, as I experience it, comes out of nothingness. Silence. The absence of creations. 

 
MORE

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

HEADLESS BISHOPS AT BREAKFAST



The tables and chairs in the breakfast room at my hotel are wearing skirts, long golden yellow brocaded skirts. It looks like a gathering of headless bishops, an ecclesiastical convention imagined by the Surrealists. Surveying the scene from above is the always open eye of a television, pouring out old Disney cartoons dubbed in French, which makes the quacking and barking and squealing even more hysterical than in the native version. Plastic flowers and candles adorn the skirted tables. Breakfast is good: crusty baguette, croissant, butter, jam, orange juice, coffee.

Taking a shower is a daunting tour de force: if you make the fatal mistake of turning the hot tap on first, boiling water sprays you and the room from cracks in the long black rubber hose attached to the bath. Today the cold water tap fell off. There are no hooks to hang anything. Maybe the French have not yet discovered hooks. But I saw some of those suction ones in the Super U yesterday and if I were staying longer I'd buy a sackful and stick them everywhere.

I love this hotel. The friendly Moroccans who appear to be running it are philosophical about Things That Don't Work As They Should (c'est la vie) and will fix them almost as soon as possible.

My sister is definitely better. Yesterday we went for a walk in the streets around the clinic and today we'll do a longer walk. Mood has improved along with la santé. Please may it continue to be so.