The Cut

I’m in North Queensland again, land of fat clouds and Bob Katter, working away at a book. I had forgotten how painful writing can be. Inspiration is always beautiful - something sweet and perfect flows through me, and washes me as it goes - but writing is a chore. At first I just doodle: I see a whole chapter all at once, and try to jot it down in a hurry. It feels excellent at the time, but inevitably I make mistakes. I overpitch or underpitch the feeling, I use too many words or use the wrong ones. I get obsessed with a phrase and try to fit it in at any cost. The purity of my vision gets fuddled by all sorts of hang-ups and personal quirks. But I carry on, in a happy daze, and leave a mess for myself to clean up.

Inevitably, if I’m honest and want to make something of what I’ve written, I have to go over it. Some parts are always good, and it’s a joy to reread them. Some parts I look at, and say, “That’s wrong.” Then it’s like, “Oh, God.” And I have to sit for an hour and stare at my own silly words.

I think the ache of it is that I see what I’ve written, and at the same time I sense what I should write. Then I have to fit both those things inside my head at once. My brain has to stretch to accommodate two things that each take up 100% of my brainspace. At first I see only what already is, then 10% of what should be jams its way in - I feel my frontal lobe tearing at the edges - then comes an implosion, and 10% of the old stuff gets washed out. It goes on and on like this, sometimes for days. I remember I spent a whole month in 2021 writing six paragraphs in School Boy X. It was abstract, emotional stuff, but I knew what I wanted written. I spent a month staring fixedly at the space in front of me, waiting for the words to appear in the periphery.

There’s a wonderful video on Youtube of Pablo Picasso painting. He starts drawing a fish, which becomes a chicken, which divulges a face, which becomes a figure which is somehow all three at once and more than all of them. It’s quite an eerie painting in the end: it’s like it contains more than it shows you. The footage of Picasso’s face as he paints is fascinating. His eyes are dark and wide, as though he’s in a trance. That trance looks awfully similar to how the final painting feels.

A man once saw Picasso doodling on a napkin at a cafe in Paris. The man went over when Picasso was finished, and asked if he could buy the drawing. Picasso said yes, and set the price at 40,000 Francs.
”40,000 Francs?” said the man. “But it took you thirty seconds!”
Picasso shook his head. “No,” he said. “That took me forty years.”

Ultimately, the work of an artist is this: to widen yourself so that things greater than you can flow through. Births always involve stretching. New things don’t fit down old channels. The artist has to be torn open. It hurts.

Yesterday I worked on a conversation between three characters which is basically a three-way confession of the same thing. All the characters have roughly the same problem; each plays it out from a different angle. I have, in life as much as writing, an impulse towards simplicity. I hate when things take up more room than they need. I spent yesterday, on the one hand, trying to differentiate the different characters’ experiences; on the other hand, I tried to cut down the volume of their speech . It’s a process of looking away, then looking back suddenly, and seeing if I can’t notice something out of place. It’s a process of concentrating but not focussing: I must look at what’s in front of me, but not so fixedly that I cannot recognise what ought to be there instead. It’s a slow process - I expect this particular conversation will take me a week. And it’s difficult. It’s frustrating. I can’t escape that. I find I have to let the frustration cut into me. I have to struggle to grasp a problem that I can’t quite fit inside my head. I have to itch and ache, give up, decide to become an English teacher, and go for an angry run. Then, almost inevitably, at some point while I’m jogging, or as I’m going to bed, the answer just appears. I’ve been doing this for long enough to know, even as I renounce all my dreams of ever finishing the book, to take a notepad with me when I run.

Frustration is vital to my creative process, and so is space. I have to be cut, and I have to give myself the room to heal. That means, in one way or another, silence. New things do not appear in a bustling mind. Thich Nhat Hanh said that “silence is essential. We need silence just as much as we need air, just as much as plants need light. If our minds are crowded with words and thoughts, there is no space for us.” This is true of everyone, but perhaps more tangibly true of people trying to create.

I am blessed in this rainy place to have a lot of silence. There is the silence of the rain itself, the silence of the waveless sea, the silence of the singing birds and the forest. Silence isn’t a lack of sound; silence is the space around sounds, containing them. Some places feel as wide as eternity; some places are awfully cramped.

But perhaps it’s not the place that matters. In Sydney over Christmas I had some wonderful times. Many days I just went walking: around the harbour, through the city, to a beach. I felt very silent then, though the city was loud, for there was nothing pushing in on me. I find that screens crowd me: the closer they are to my face, the less space I feel I have. I saw a study once that showed that scrolling through your phone had the same effect on your brain as sitting in front of a poker machine in a club. It induced the same mixture of mild frustration and the hope of something big happening to relieve it. Phones are a serious addiction. I often wonder what happens if you spend your childhood on a phone. The world, instead of expanding, must slowly close in, year after year, until you feel trapped and feeble. There’s no breadth when you stare at a screen, and breadth is an easy feeling to forget. Many people seem completely addicted. They look for the solution inside the problem. I know some people who can’t even watch TV without simultaneously looking at their phone. I’m certainly not immune to the temptation. It’s an ugly feeling, but it sucks me in. I just have to pray that eventually I’ll remember how good it feels to be out in the space. It always takes courage to stop, and put something down. I have to let my emotional wake wash over me; I have to endure the mounting angst. Quickly it climaxes, then subsides. I remember what it’s like to breathe deeply. The silence washes over, and I can rest again. In that rest, the answers always appear, as well as the patience to endure the wait. In art, it’s all a matter of stopping, and letting the answer be shown. The skill is learning to be empty.

Emotive Aerial Reef Series I
Kim Rayner
www.instagram.com/kimrayner_artist