The creative process – the worst part is the beginning. The Sitting Down. Ask anyone. Go on. The lengths to which a body will go to avoid the Sitting Down are extraordinary. It’s as if it’s a trap. An act of commitment, an “I do” in front of the priest, a cul-de-sac, no man’s land. “I promise to be faithful to what I’m writing and not allow my attention to wander to anyone or anything else, however exciting or seductive”. But that vow, sadly, just serves to invoke excitement and seduction from every corner. Phonecalls, emails, surfing the net. Newspapers. Sex. Shopping. Coffee. Food. Stimulation. Anything but Sitting Down to write.

In the end, after a day of complete success in avoiding Sitting Down, I give up. It’s exhausting, the battle. I have dinner outside, in my little patch of courtyard. I open a bottle of red wine. Cheap Shiraz. I pour some into one of my remaining good wine glasses; the cats demolished two earlier in the day. I wish they would act their age, they’re seven years old for chrissake. Oh. They’re not kids, they’re cats. Bugger. Bugger.
Bugger.
The kids of the estate, who have been happy little monsters all day, their banging and shouting reverberating in the flat, have all gone in to watch The Simpsons, and it’s blissfully silent. The weather is close and the sky is low, purple. Soon enough, it crackles with thunder and lightning, and the paving stones are spattered with huge drops of rain. The guitar player from across the way hears the storm and comes out to stand in it. Always with Elvis dyed-black hair in a quiff, he has a startling buzzcut on the back and sides, now revealing his grey, almost white, temples. We smile at each other. Once, years ago, he knocked on my door and asked if I was alright. He said he’d had a dream and something bad had happened to me. I said I was fine, but that I was touched he asked. The truth is that he and I never know what to say to each other – we’re from completely different worlds. We don’t have anything in common, but a view of each other’s front doors. Another truth is that I had been darkly depressed when he had the dream. Maybe that’s something else we have in common. Depressed people often cannot bear to talk to each other. Only mere batsqueaks of greetings are possible; anything more and the feedback loop of despair threatens to overwhelm. I’ve seen what happens when he’s had a few, and he shoves his girlfriend out of his flat, late at night, I’ve heard the hate. Smile and wave, keep one’s distance.
The downpour lasts two minutes. The air is so humid it’s like a greenhouse. I look up, and see a grey Victorian sky. I have to play ‘Come Back To Camden’ by Morrissey. Earphones, loud, private. (I live behind Camden Town Hall. He wrote that song for me. No one else.) It’s heart-breakingly beautiful.
A couple from the block next door come in to ours, and start calling for a cat. I’ve seen the note on the estate noticeboard, it went missing last night. I assured them that I hadn’t seen a tiger cat “like the one in the Bacardi ad”, and that I’d be certain to let them know if I saw one. Soon after, a woman on her way up to see her friend on the top floor, to get her weekly stash, stops by and fills me in with the details about the cat – there is hell to pay, apparently. (Gossip is so satisfying when you aren’t the subject of it). The owner was away for one night and her neighbours, this couple, were supposed to look after it. Had I heard the shouting earlier? Indeed I had. I thought it was a fight between working girls on crack, so vicious was the tone. Sadly, I live in a neighbourhood where I can make that comparison.
Take my cats. They’re not human, I’ve discovered.
Next door, I hear my neighbour calmly dictating to his computer. Words come out slowly, drifting through the window, too slow to make sense of. He must be tapping something after each word, confirming the suggestions that pop up. He’s wheelchair-bound, MS claiming his body to a degree I can’t bear to think about. But his mind is crystal-sharp. He’s a journalist by trade. He has loyal, witty friends, and his carers are invariably very pretty young men, which no doubt cheers him up. He’s younger than me, taller (if he could stand up), more handsome. I am a bad neighbour to him. I smile and stop for a chat when I see him, but I can’t do more. I know why. He never stops smiling. It breaks my heart. A smile can be a Keep Out sign, too.
I finish and print out a fan letter to an old acting buddy, who’s in a play I saw the other night, that will be hitting the Dublin Theatre Festival in September, called Shining City. A must see. I’ve never seen a play so beautifully capturing the process that people go through when they come see a counsellor. But as playwright Conor McPherson says, it’s not about therapy, it’s about how men talk to each other.
Or not.
I think those who have no pretensions to creativity are blessed. There’s a wonderful maverick Jungian writer, by the splendid name of Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, who bemoans the current notion that we should all be creative beings. Pointing out that there are very few really creative people on the planet – by which he means people who have created something completely new – he questions the modern self-help pop psychology creed that we all have creativity to unleash, if only we learned how to avoid the modern sin of dysfunction. It’s a version of buying indulgences – but, instead of a promise of a blissful hereafter, if we do the work now with our guru/therapist/counsellor/rebirther, we too will be truly original, and that bestseller/commission/Hollywood deal is ours for the taking. His response to all that is, more or less, “get real”.
Perhaps the only creativity that is possible for any of us, is to be present as things unfold, to notice the newness of things. It’s the hardest damn thing.
I go to bed and don’t sleep well. I hear cats calling. I realise that one of them is one of mine, and I get up to let her in. Alarms go off through the night. It’s how I imagine New York is in the heat of summer, the mugginess, the bad tempers, the discontent.
Later on, and I don’t think I this was a dream, I hear a young cat calling, a door opening, and a cry of joy, as the prodigal is welcomed home.