Cool Emptiness

Melbourne's winter makes our house feel cluttered, too heavy with papers, books, and incomplete projects. 

I know it isn't that bad. Yet I know that I am not a juggler. I cannot do everything, let alone do it very well. 

Objectively, I've invested my self into too many things. And when that happens, it's easy to find 

myself not knowing what to do next.

The difficulty with investing in things is that I feel attached to them. In the things I see something I would like to do, an ambition as yet unrealised.

This calls for a certain combination of honesty and brutality: How important is it to do this sewing? Does this fabric need saving, or can someone at the op shop find a use for it? Why am I still holding on to these books? 

This is why I've spent the last week  vanquishing possibilities. Piling up and sorting through various sewing, writing, reading projects I planned. Sifting the realistic and important from the trivial and insignificant.  

Off to the op shop went all the fabrics that I didn't love.

Ditto the things I was never going to wear.

Ditto the theory books that weren't primary texts. (I had to remind myself that I do know enough now not to need them.)

Out into the recycling went all the old drafts that I'd been keeping just in case.

Out went the notes of academic papers I'd write. As I shredded them by hand, I felt the weighty emotions lift that go hand in hand with such long projects.

In to a pile went a small assortment of sewing projects. (Some of which are now complete.)

On to my desk went the small selection of books I'm reading and writing about.

Into a single drawer went my very helpful notebooks, where I can now find them easily.

And my desk: now I can sit at it and write again. I feel on top of things, rather than swimming amidst them.

Where did this impulse -  to clean, sort and vanquish possibilities - come from? 

I'm sure that it's been brewing in my psyche for some time. A sort of periodic need that comes because I don't have the habit and time to do it regularly enough.

But the most recent spur was literary. I'm reading Joan Lindsay's memoir, Life Without Clocks. Joan was an Australian painter and writer, who was married to painter Daryl Lindsay. 

In the Depression, Daryl and Joan had to rent out their idyllic and antique-filled farmhouse in Baxter. They moved to a cheap and basic cottage in Bacchus Marsh, where the rent was cheap and the area suited for painting.

Living on camp beds, in a house furnished with only two crates for sitting on, Joan discovered that the house was perfectly suited for a writer and a painter:

'It was not only a house without time - it would have been the same if it had been crammed with striking clocks. It was a house so adequately and uniquely filled with its own emptiness that nobody... seem to notice that it was never furnished... emptiness was not a negative statement but a positive affirmation of truth and beauty like the holes in a Henry Moore sculpture... Twenty years later in a Florentine monastery the memory of the empty cottage in the Marsh came suddenly back and I understood, almost as if I had painted those exquisite frescoes with my own hand, how a masterpiece can be conceived in the cool emptiness of a whitewashed cell.' - Joan Lindsay, 1962, Life Without Clocks.

My room isn't a whitewashed cell, although it does feel as cool as I type away from the heater. But it does feel clear and clean. The sort of place I want to sit down and work away in on one of the projects easily ready to hand.