Franz
Kafka once said that in order to write, he needed a solitude like death. I,
too, have a deep need to be submerged in a dim room, quiet, with the closed
door. The conditions must unfortunately be ideal in that I will have no excuse
not to write. And yet, this rarely happens, and I don’t have a desk. My desk
became an altar for my late father years ago and I haven’t had the heart to
clear it since.
My
desk is lately a kitchen table or my own lap. I’d be lying if I said I had a
writing routine, but I’m always thinking about the idea of having a writing
routine. I’ve never been a morning person. The only time I was a morning person
was last November, when I attended my first artist residency in Finland. I
spent one month on a small, remote land, surrounded by birch forests, lakes,
and swans. The days grew increasingly darker and because for the first time in
my life I had nowhere I needed to be, and nothing I needed to do, except focus
on my own work, I began to wake early.
The
sun wouldn’t rise until after 9:00 a.m., and at about 6:00 a.m., I’d walk
downstairs to the kitchen with its walls painted like a swirling milky way, close
the door, turn on a light, and boil water. I’d scoop yogurt into a bowl, sprinkle
granola on top, and drink maté at the table by the window while watching the
smoke billow from the chimney of the house across the street. Sometimes another
resident, an even earlier riser, would also be in the kitchen, and we’d speak
to one another softly about the weather, or our work, or how we were feeling.
Sometimes I’d wake up immediately ready to work and bring my breakfast back to
my room. We were all given studios to use, but I only worked in the studio for
one day during my stay when unexpectedly, one morning, a man appeared in front
of my window. I was relieved to learn he was cleaning the gutters.
Immersion
connects us back to ourselves. I find I produce in intensive spurts, spread out
over a vast field. Months could pass without my writing anything but maybe
dreams. I find if I try to write or make art every day, I begin to resent it,
or worse, I feel there is nothing left to say. I’m a firm believer in
incubation. An idea, for me, must marinade across different thought processes; it
must stick. That is to say I don’t cherish any one idea. I look at each idea
skeptically. I will interrogate the idea until it is busting at the seams. And
then I know I’m ready to write.
In
the clutches of capitalism, we’re always confronted with the prioritization of
productivity over individualistic interests, so I almost never relax. When I
work, I’m almost wholly devoted to the task at hand, and when I’m distracted at
work, I’m distracted by trivial things. It’s taken me almost 30 years of living
to realize that I need, if only 10 short minutes, to do completely nothing
every day. If I were more confident in my consistency, I might call this
meditation. Water is also essential to my faculty of thinking. I’ve had some of
my best ideas while in the bath or shower, or while washing the dishes. There’s
an incredible amount of insight to be find in these transitory moments within
ourselves, and it can be difficult to allow these lapses that might guise
themselves as something else: boredom, lethargy, guilt, vulnerability. But the
work touches this all closely, I think.
I’ve
always believed that the work doesn’t need us. To make art takes us outside of
the body. I tend to follow what comes and try to avoid plans. A lot of my work
has been unplanned in this way—with my first full-length, (where the light can’t reach), I found myself doing divinatory
translations of Henri Michaux’s asemic drawings, channeling and montaging
narrative fragments, and writing what I can only really describe as
ghost-poems. Expansive, big-lung poems in negative space, like an erasure but written
in reverse. While in Finland, I finished the draft to my second full-length, A Diviner’s Notebook, where I found
myself writing about and through my deceased, psychic great-great Aunt, who I’ve
never even met. I also dove deeper into my own divinatory practice as a tarot
reader, which over the years, has entwined itself with my writing practice.
Tarot reveals to us our own doing.
Crystals
are generative instruments for writing and can be powerful healers. I think
it’s important that we provide ourselves with whatever support we may need when
we create. I was not always this way and had a longstanding theory about the
urgency that comes from writing on an empty stomach. I’ve since learned the
benefits of a comfortable space, a hot cup of tea. I personally take a lot of
breaks if I’m feeling stuck. I stretch or walk. Get on the floor with my cat
and listen to the birds. Stepping outside of the writing, as well as the
liminal thinking stages of the writing, are absolutely essential to the
writing. Reading as many books as I can is equally important, not because I
feel this obligation to be well-read but because I just need to get out of my
own head sometimes.
Whenever
I read a good poem, or paragraph, or book, I’m reminded of why I write at all.
It’s a kind of touching of the soul-memory. The writing can course like blood,
it can soothe, or it can cut and sting in a way that tears your world apart,
but we do, I think, return to the body. I don’t shame myself for not writing,
or not reading, but this I’ve also had to learn. Maybe one day I will have a
steady writing practice. I almost hope I don’t.
Hannah Kezema is an artist
who works across mediums. She is the author of the chapbook, three (2017, Tea
and Tattered Pages), and her work appears or is forthcoming from Black Sun Lit, Full Stop, Spiral Orb, Emergency Index, Gesture, and other places. She was the 2018 Arteles Resident of the
Enter Text program in Haukijärvi, Finland, where she worked on her manuscript, A Diviner’s Notebook, which investigates ancestral absences, divinatory praxis, and
female occult figures. Along with Angel Dominguez, she co-founded the
performance art collaborative DREAM TIGERS in 2014, which experiments with
time, process, and hybrid modes.
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